During a conversation with UG’s David Slavković, original Dio drummer Vinny Appice looked back on meeting Ronnie James Dio when he joined Black Sabbath in 1980 and how he performed Ozzy Osbourne songs on stage.
On Dio’s favorite song from the time and did he have a favorite from the Ozzy Osbourne era, he said:
“You know, I don’t think he had a favorite during the Ozzy era because Ronnie, really, that wasn’t his thing, to sing Ozzy songs. He was known from Rainbow and who he is, and he just felt he’s singing somebody else’s songs.
“But even though he did an amazing job. But one of the songs he loved was from ‘Mob Rules,’ it’s like ‘Falling Off the Edge of the World,’ ‘Over and Over’ – he loved those.
“And then on the [1992’s] ‘Dehumanizer’ album, he loved the song ‘I.’ We used to listen to it live-tape after each show, and he was like ‘Wow, this is great! It’s so heavy!’ He loved that song.”
On his first gig with Black Sabbath, he said:
“Yeah, so what happened was they really liked the way I played, but they only had four days to rehearse. And it was, like, we worked a little bit and then they all went to the pub to have a drink. And I stayed back with the keyboard player, Geoff, and we worked on the songs.
“So it was kind of a rush, like, ‘Wow, we’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve gotta learn 15 songs in three days!’ And we played the first show, it was an outdoor show in Hawaii at Aloha Stadium. We didn’t rehearse that much because we kept going to the pub. [Laughs]
“And then the last day, everybody’s getting a little nervous, like, ‘Uh-oh, we only got one more day, we better stay here and not go to the pub.’ So, that’s the way it was. And what I did was I wrote like a notebook, a cheat-sheet kind of thing with all the parts and what’s gonna happen in the songs.
“I could write it out somewhat, but not a chart, just different things like ‘stop’ and ‘tempo slows down’ and ‘guitar starts,’ all this stuff to help me through it. So I had a book to help me. And that was the first show, there were 30,000 people there.
“And then it started to rain halfway through and my book got wet, it got all messed up and I couldn’t read it anymore so I had to wing it. But we did okay, the endings are a bit long, but we did good.”