Appreciation: Portsmouth must honor late Ronnie James Dio

I live in Philadelphia where the Betsy Ross House — in which Ross, who probably didn't sew the first American flag, may not have actually lived — is considered a national landmark, yet my former home of Portsmouth boasts not so much as a plaque trumpeting it as the irrefutable birthplace of Ronnie James Dio, the Black Sabbath/Rainbow/Dio frontman who not only penned such timeless anthems as "Rainbow in the Dark" and "Neon Knights," but also popularized the iconic "devil's horns" as heavy metaldom's official salute.

Dio's death Sunday at 67, from stomach cancer, offers a perfect opportunity to rectify the embarrassing oversight. I note Cortland, N.Y., where Dio — then Ronald James Padavona — attended high school, christened Dio Way in 1988, and ask: Does the Port City really want to be shown up by some upstate town?

What's to celebrate? Well, fearless panache, for starters. Approaching the professionally perilous task of replacing Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, for example, Dio favored a sinister gesture his Italian grandmother employed to ward off the malocchio, or "evil eye," over his predecessor's incessant peace sign flashing, a wise darkward tonal shift after Ozzy-led lightweight snoozers "Technical Ecstasy" (1976) and "Never Say Die!" (1978).

"You're hungry for heaven, but you need a little hell," Dio sang years later, and a little hell was precisely what he brought to his Sabbath debut, "Heaven and Hell" (1980), one of the greatest records in the Sabbath oeuvre, which is to say, one of the greatest heavy metal records, period.

It's difficult to overstate how unlikely Sabbath's resurrection or how epic failure could have been in the shadow of Ozzy's gargantuan solo career. I treasure a Dio-era Sabbath T-shirt my wife gave me, but while explaining the garment's fraught provenance, I watched her eyes glaze over as if I was lecturing on pre-Teutonic monarchial Prussia — the transcendent end result has obscured the tribulations; immense success transformed contemporaneous controversies into ancient history, insider baseball. When Sabbath again imploded in 1983, landmark solo albums proved Dio was no unwitting bystander in that remarkable revival.

Last year, the reunited Dio-era Sabbath lineup released a new studio album, which, in testament to Dio's continued cultural relevance 40 years into his recording career, landed in the Billboard top 10. Appropriately titled "The Devil You Know," the record closes with a doom-laden slow-burner, "Breaking into Heaven." Naturally, we denizens of the metal militia hope Saint Peter and Co. now tremble at the sight of a diminutive singer, horns held high, riding a rainbow in the dark toward the Pearly Gates. Here in a temporal world, however, it is perhaps not the title refrain that most resonates, but rather the verse-capping line: "You can go on forever where the next day's still tonight."

True, a vital, inventive musician shuffled off this mortal coil. Nevertheless, so long as black-shirted, devil horn-throwing metal fans float around on this speck of accumulated dust, "Holy Diver" or "Die Young" blaring, waiting on the sun to explode, today will always be the last night of Ronnie James Dio's earthly tour.

Shawn Macomber, a former Portsmouth Herald reporter, writes for America's extreme music monthly, Decibel. His top three Black Sabbath records are, in order, "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," "Master of Reality," and "Heaven and Hell."