By Martin Popoff

The masterful voice of Ronnie James Dio (BLACK SABBATH, HEAVEN & HELL, RAINBOW, ELF) lives on, not only through the new double live Donington set recently issued directly from Ronnie’s management company/new label Niji Entertainment, but also through a new CD and DVD live pack called Neon Nights: 30 Years Of Heaven & Hell – Live In Europe, recorded at the band’s triumphant showdown at the legendary Wacken festival in Germany, 2009.

“Ronnie’s performance on there is absolutely brilliant,” beings drummer Vinny Appice, asked about an RJD seemingly freed up to embellish, riff, and impose more of his personality over a live recording than we’ve ever seen among the dozen or so featuring the man legend. “When I first heard this CD, and the DVD, when we were doing a little bit of the mixing, it was like wow, he sang his ass off on this thing! It’s just an amazing performance by Ronnie. And before the show, as with the other shows, he complained of having some stomach pains, you know, quite often. It’s just amazing that he would just tell you that and then go out and crank it out like that and sing the way he sang.”

So there were shows where he was definitely telling you he wasn’t feeling well?

“A lot of the shows, yeah. Actually, at that point of the tour, I threw my shoulder out from playing that big drum set. I had to get surgery, so I was in pain. Tony Iommi had tendonitis in his hand, so he was in pain, and Ronnie had stomach cancer brewing. And so while the intro tape was playing, me, Tony and Ronnie are standing there and we’re all complaining. I’m going, ‘My shoulder hurts,’ and Ronnie, ‘Man, my stomach,’ and Tony’s hand is hurting. So we would go through all that, and then, amazingly, we all went on and played the way we always played.”

And there’s no performance on here more transformed and extended than that of Ronnie’s signature track ‘Heaven And Hell’… “That’s something that developed over the whole tour,” explains Vin. “We jammed, and we elongated Tony’s solo, which led to more jamming, and then some of the parts developed. Some of the jamming parts that we touch on developed into actual parts that we wanted to keep. And then we kept those as reference points within the solo and actually played them every night. And then what happened was it got longer. That was a particularly good night. We were jamming, Tony felt good, and it got longer and longer and longer.”

Justifiably proud of the strange and trippy version of ‘Heaven And Hell’ enclosed, when asked about proud moments particularly from the drummer’s point of view, he figures, “Well, I used a giant, giant DW kit on the last tour, and that’s what’s on the video. And the nice part is that the camera work on this video, you know, there were a lot of flying cameras around the stage, and it really made the kit look 3-D and huge. It’s like a second story added to the stage, you know? (laughs). So I’m really happy about that.”

Directly to the playing, it’s been a long-standing subtext to the Heaven & Hell tale that to fit the mandate of the band, Vinny has had to keep conservative his prodigious chops. Amusingly and thankfully, that appears to be a procedure limited to the studio recordings, for Appice is heard full-flight, taking those chances and winning all those battles, all over Neon Nights.

“Sure, in the studio it’s always so much more confined,” reflects Appice. “You’re playing to the studio, you’re listening, and you can’t go too crazy with it, whereas live, as you play it on the tour, the song develops and develops and you start coming up with new parts and it develops into a bit more of an aggressive thing versus the studio version of it. Live, only once in a while, it’s like, ‘Man, there were some fills out there…’ Once in a while; and then I laugh and I say, ‘Hey, you want some more?!’ It’s all in good fun. But most the time Tony is just, ‘Vin, you played good,’ and he’s telling Ronnie, great. All in all, it was really a nice tour.”

How would you contrast the set-up, the situation, the execution of the Radio City Music Hall show and CD/DVD versus the Neon Nights set?

“Good question. The Radio City gig was only about 11 shows in from the beginning of the tour. So we weren’t really as tight as a band as we were with this one. So there it was more nerve-racking, and we didn’t get to do much of a soundcheck, because of the union laws that they have over at Radio City (laughs). You know, we would just start playing the song, and in the middle of it we had to stop because it was a union break. We couldn’t even get to the ending, which is what we needed to rehearse, that kind of stuff. So we just had to stop, which just left us hanging until we went on with it. So there was a lot more pressure. Whereas the Wacken set was recorded in 2009, a couple of years later. We had played so many shows already, that the band was tight - we didn’t even do a soundcheck. We just went out and played, and that show just kicked ass, and it was much tighter, with a lot less pressure, and the band was just free to play. It was just one of those shows where you just go out and you know it’s all going to work.”

In closing, Vinny and I talked about how long the trip had been, how much had happened since the first gig he ever played with the band, back at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii on a stormy night in 1981. “You know, before that show, we had about four or five rehearsals,” says Vin, “and the first time I came down and played with the guys, it’s ironic, because the first song we played was ‘Neon Knights,’ with Ronnie, and that’s the last song I ever played with Ronnie. That was the whole journey, right there.”