By Martin Popoff

A very cool touring troupe is taking shape, smartly named DIO DISCIPLES, set to take the timeless songcraft of RONNIE JAMES DIO out on the road, first in Europe and then hopefully all over North America. Dio Disciples consists of none other than Rudy Sarzo, Ripper Owens, Simon Wright, Scott Warren, each part of the Dio camp in some manner, with Simon, Scott and Craig being longstanding Dio band members, Ripper being part and parcel of Wendy Dio’s management stable and Rudy Sarzo having toured with the great man during the Holy Diver Live era.

“We’re just in the basics of the plan of the moment,” explains drummer Simon Wright, introducing the concept. “We’re going to start out in Europe, which goes through June to the beginning of July, and then I think we’re going to take a bit of a break, and hopefully we’re going to start in September in America. There are no dates at the moment, but that is the plan. We thought long and hard about doing it, and we discussed a lot of what we were going to do, and it just became apparent we’ve got to do this. We can’t just walk away from this.”

What Simon means by this is of course Ronnie’s silver mountain of inspirational metal anthems and what those anthems do for the Dio band’s vast fanbase.

“They were always positive, weren’t they?” muses Simon, asked about the power behind Ronnie’s words. “He put a different slant on it. He would take it from a different angle. They were always positive. I mean you look at ‘Last In Line’: ‘We’re all the last in line.’ They are always positive lyrics taken from a different view, but they’re usually always about the underdog, or kicking somebody’s ass – ‘We Rock’ (laughs).”
“Well, I think some people got the wrong impression,” adds guitarist Craig Goldy. “But not everyone. Because I remember, his lyrics meant a lot to me. When I first met him, I told him how much his lyrics meant to me, when I found what he was actually saying. I would quote from his lyrics and I would say, ‘You’re singing this, but it sounds like it means this.’ And he would say, ‘Exactly!’ He would grab my arm and go, ‘Exactly - you understand!’ So from that point on, he would call me, and even when he was with Heaven And Hell, he would say, ‘Goldy, you’re going to love this!’ And he would recite me the lyrics to Heaven And Hell (laughs). And so I think people don’t understand that he often presents both side of the situation. It sounds like he’s trying to promote darkness, but that’s why he says, ‘We’re evil and divine.’ Or else he’ll say things like, even in the song called ‘Hungry For Heaven’, when he talks about the person who doesn’t deserve it and the person who does deserve it, who’s been tread upon, like the underdog. Both of those people can be hungry for heaven. People are hungry for it because they’re yearning and they’re starved for any kind of light because their life is darkness, and then there are other people who are living spoiled rotten and they’re hungry for heaven. They think they can get anything they want, whenever they can get it. And I think that’s where people misunderstand him; that’s where it would come from. Because he talks about both sides at once, and it’s very kind of all-inclusive.”

“We’re kind of solidifying it at the moment,” says Simon in closing, with respect to the set list we can expect from Dio Disciples. “Not taking too many chances at a moment. We are throwing in ‘Egypt’. ‘I Speed At Night’ is going to be in there as well. Like I said, we’re just trying to get things going, get on the road and stuff like that. We don’t want to throw too many curveballs at the moment. That will probably come as we keep going on the road, and obviously, it’s a great set at the moment. It’s well paced and it’s a lot of hits, ‘Holy Diver’, ‘Heaven And Hell’, ‘We Rock’, ‘Rainbow In The Dark’, obviously. They are songs that we have to do, because they were Ronnie’s hits. But we’re throwing in other ones as we slowly get going.”

Adds Craig on the same subject, “Most people would probably think that I would want to get as many things on there that I co-wrote with Ronnie, but that wasn’t the case. It was mainly just what do we think the fans would want? It just started off where Simon and I were sitting around thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to play a lot of the songs that we hadn’t played before? Ever. And then when time went on, it kind of metamorphosized, and we talked to the rest of the guys in the band, that it’s really for the fans. I would think they would probably more appreciate the songs that they really know well, that meant something in their lives. For me, ‘Stargazer’ was a big song in my life, before I ever even met the man. It was a huge part of my life, and so we just decided to play the songs we really knew that we should play. There are songs you want to play, but there are some you have to play too, and those were songs that we knew meant a lot to people in their lives.”

Stay tuned for Part II of BraveWords.com’s interview with Dio Disciples, as we chat with keyboardist Scott Warren and the man with the toughest job of all, Ripper Owens, thrust into the role of singer of the songs that made Ronnie the forever legend that he is.

(Top photo of Dio Disciples by Gene Kirkland)