Dio’s Lore III: the shadow of ephebophilia and several postscripts
relax bro it's just escapism bro
Ronnie James Dio: not sexY, not sexIST
Earlier in this already tediously long disquisition on a subject nobody cares about except me, I commented on the total absence of sex in Dio’s Lore. This is not Whitesnake or Motley Crue or Accadacca or Def Leppard. Dio’s Lore is deliberately asexual.
It seems to me that there is something vaguely creepy about this lack of interest in the carnal. At any rate, given what I have said previously, I doubt it can be attributed to RJD’s steadfast Christian morality (we forget to our cost what the Counter-Reformation knew: lapsed Catholics are the absolute worst).
Now sure—I admit that the respective lores of Iron Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and the rest are asexual too. Their themes were carnage and death and suicide and The Devil and whatever (plz see part II).
You might put Dio’s Lore in the same broad class, with the distinction that it’s just too otherworldly to accommodate the…delights of corporeality. You might even think it commendable that RJD disdained the temptation to pander to the febrile sexuality of his audience. Maybe one or both of these is sufficient to explain the resolute unraunch of Dio’s Lore—but then again maybe not.
What is this shit?
So far I haven’t been much concerned with recounting RJD’s career, since that kind of thing can easily be found elsewhere: he was a member of three bands of the highest merit—Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio—with whom he recorded ‘classics’ such as Rising, Heaven and Hell (overrated; Mob Rules is the better album) and Holy Diver and blah blah blah
However, let us very briefly consider RJD’s personal life, to the extent that it’s known. He was married twice, first in 1963 to a paesana named Loretta Berardi and then in 1978 to an Englishwoman called Wendy Walters. Under the name Wendy Dio, she became his manager and legally took over his estate on his death in 2010. Neither marriage produced children. This is about all that is publicly available in the way of proxy information about his sex life.
While there are all kinds of stories about the lascivious doings of Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer and the rest with groupies, no such thing about RJD has ever come out. Why was a full-grown, albeit middle-aged man in a heavy metal band in the 1980s apparently unconcerned with sex?
By the time he made it in music, he might just have been too old to bother. Maybe he just wasn’t that into rooting; he was, after all, a mage, not a warlord. It could be that his PR is still airtight, nearly 15 years after his death (it does seem to have been pretty solid in his day). He may have been completely devoted to his second wife—except that they had separated ‘many years’ before RJD died, after which, in 2012, Wendy Dio married *her boyfriend of 20 years*, ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Omar Gimenez!!!!!!!!!
All the same, I can’t help but wonder. Recall once more these lines:
We bring you beautiful
We teach you sin
…
They say you're beautiful
And they'll always let you in
But doors are never open
To the child without a trace of sin
Sail away
We teach you (a child) *sin*? Beautiful, *sinful* children?
Huh…
Here are some others, from a much weaker but still decent and sort of funny song on Dio’s 1984 album The Last in Line.
The children shared the wonder
Of the leather and the lace
But one child went away
And one child stayed to play
For one night in the city
Children in *leather and lace*?
Huh…
More, from side 1, track 1 of Dream Evil (1987)
Do you like the dark?
Do you like the way it moves?
Do you come alive when neon kills the sun?
Are you hypnotised?
Part of the illusion
Oh see how they run
It's the mystery
Poetry and passion
Innocence and fashion
Revolution, evolution ways
Night people
…
Are you hypnotised?
Innocence and fashion
Promises and passion
Evolution, revolution ways
And everybody stays
Hey, dream child
You got electric eyes
Night people
Hypnotised? Dream child? Electric eyes?
Finally there are these lines, from a (good!) filler track, called Invisible, from 1983.
He was just eighteen and in between
a lady and a man
He’s daddy's girl in momma's world
That was when he ran
You know the word confused has been abused
But that's just what he was
And then a spark inside the dark
The answer came to call
I mean…what is this shit?
…
‘Evidence’
But looking now at this collection of ‘evidence’ (OF WHAT?) on the page…well I don’t know. It’s nothing much is it? All the same: combined with RJD’s lack of overt interest in sex and his unusual matrimonial history, it occasions suspicion in me.
Suspicion of what though? OK I will stop being coy. The question is this: Was RJD’s interest in the ephebes more than merely…artistic/commercial?
It’s easy to imagine that heavy metal would attract musicians who are sexually attracted to teenagers, since they form by far the majority of its audience. If you’ve bothered to get this far you’re probably a HEAVY METAL MUTHA, so I don’t have to tell you that there is a huge number of 80s heavy metal songs (and stories) that detail musicians’ sexual escapades with teenage girls.
Conversely, nothing much has ever come out about 80s heavy metal homos (hi Rob Halford u r stunning and brave!). To me, though, it stands to reason that there must have been heaps of em; there must have been a lot of cover-ups. I suspect a number of my favourite bands (or individuals in them) might have been motivated by ephebophilia. Frankly, I prefer not to know. But in RJD’s case—because of the ‘evidence’ I have submitted and because the music has stuck with me more than that of, say, Judas Priest—I’m forced to think about it.
So here is my ‘cope’…
My cope
A couple of months ago, Morgoth wrote a piece centred on the (alleged) depravity of Jimmy Saville. Ephebophilia (and only vaguely suspected at that), though it’s repugnant to me, has nothing on the things of which Saville is accused. The real theme of Morgoth’s article, though, is the Right’s longing for re-enchantment of the world and the dangers presented by those who might seek, or appear to seek, its actualisation.
As I have no doubt already made abundantly clear, Dio’s Lore is devoted almost entirely to a kind of re-enchantment. I am not trying to vindicate Jimmy Saville. I am not defending ephebophiles, nonces, coprophags or necrophiliacs. But maybe the will to re-enchant the world, at least in the realm of the arts—again very broadly defined—comes disproportionately from deviants and defectives.
It’s not hard to imagine that marginal types would want to transform norms, insofar as they still obtain, in a direction that would make their own behaviour seem acceptable. Indeed we don’t have to imagine anything in this connexion; the project is already all too far advanced.
At the extreme end of the scale, the pseudo-Faustian Tr00n ideology—perhaps the ultimate expression of the triumph of the id—with its objective of transcending and overturning both the natural order and ‘heteronormative Western ways of knowing’—could be interpreted as a kind of nightmarish ‘re-enchantment’.
Walt Bismarck, with whom I disagree on almost everything, is right in one respect: conservatives generally do not produce good art, even of the pop-cultural type. One reason, as Bismarck says, is that they are usually low in the personality trait of ‘openness’. Another may be that their personalities are in general too well integrated. Perhaps some fragmentation of the self is necessary to spur true creativity.
It could be the case that, at the psychological level, much great art emerges from the artist’s attempts to reconstitute his own fractured personality. Most of the great right-wing artists of the 20th century were not conservatives. They were revolutionaries. Many were also psychologically unstable: Pound, Cioran, Eminescu, Mishima, Lovecraft, Nietzsche—all madmen who (arguably I guess how should I know?) sought self-reintegration through art (Mishima and Nietzsche, revealingly, also by a rigorous program of physical discipline, the best and only way to fight melancholy).
What I am saying here is scarcely more interesting than a recapitulation of the cliché that artists are exceptional people. I mean this in the sense that they are exceptions from the norm—for better and for worse. I think it’s necessary, in some cases, to take the good with the bad, and to separate the artist from the art. Provided they are not outright evil, and that their art has value, we can at least admit their works as worthy of appreciation and admire their strength in directing the tragic striving for personal re-integration outwards, to the benefit of mankind.
Ronnie James Dio was no Great Artist. He was just a Rock singer. In spite of what I’ve written, I really don’t believe that Dio’s Lore—regardless of its pandering to the id and its disorientating Luciferian amorality—was a thinly disguised grooming operation. But you know…as I said…I can’t help but wonder. Perhaps RJD’s oft repeated admonition should be heeded:
Am I…gay?
On the other hand, I could be—and I have to trust that I am—completely wrong. Maybe there is no reason even to suspect a subtext of satanic ephebophilia in Dio’s Lore. Consider the Current Year drive to homosexualise art, ancient and modern. In Bronze Age Mindset BAP talks zis:
misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time
…
because we can’t conceive of such intense love between friends without some carnal or material benefit in play.
Homosexualising art is indeed a device of disenchantment, reducing manly frenschaft and loyalty-unto-death to base appetitive desires. Maybe I’m falling into the same mode of thought. Maybe there is no great heavy metal homo cover-up. Maybe I, too, am seeing depravity where it is not. Maybe in fact…*I* AM GAY!
(I’m not, even though I mention me missus all the time)
Postscript
By the end of the 1980s Dio albums were sequenced by formula: nine trax, fast opener, title song, some mid-paced filler, another fast one and so on (it worked great by the way). RJD’s lyrics were already formulaic by the second Dio album (also fine by me).
Asked about his lyrics in interviews, RJD tended to resort to the ‘everyone will have their own interpretation’ cliché beloved of rock musicians, who in many cases have no idea what they are trying to say (as an amateur rock composer I can attest to this fact, and on occasion RJD as much as admitted it of himself).
Sometimes he got really silly about it though. More than once he trotted out some variation on this absurd attempt to justify (WHY?) the front cover of Holy Diver:
The drowning priest...the first thing it did was it made people say, 'You've got a devil drowning a priest on your album cover and I'm really disgusted.' Which gives me the chance to say, 'Well, that's not really what it is. You don't know whether the person dressed in the priest outfit isn't the devil, or the one you think is the devil isn't God.
In the 90s and 2000s, as his music got worse and his appeal became more selective, RJD seemed to sense at last the cultural tide turning inexorably in favour of the subaltern. In some interviews from the 2000s he comes across as a bit of a tschandala moralist (indeed, as I have previously suggested, just beneath the sound and the fury most heavy metal ‘artists’ and fans cherish an anti-thymotic desire for Current Year social respectability).
Here is RJD talking about the lyrical matter of this tune.
I write songs for people, about how people feel about being lonely, for being picked on or for not being the greatest physical specimens on earth; things like that just happen. So this one for me describes people who persevere through all the stones and slings and arrows that are tossed at them. The last in line, that's usually where people like that are placed, the end of the line. But to me, just because you're at the end of the line, it doesn't mean that you can't succeed. And I usually find that the people who are willing to stay there at the end of the line will succeed, so it was just written about that, generally.
I am surprised—I could be wrong but don’t dare look into it—that RJD’s preoccupation with rainbows, his Ellis Island family origins, his hyper-manlethood and the verse of the song Invisible I quoted above have not resulted in his adoption as an ‘icon’ (hate that word) by heavy metal shitlibs.1 I mean I’ve got an inkling that maybe he has been recognised in the manner…but…ok enough let’s not dwell on it.
In 2001 RJD made a mystique-destroying appearance in a Tenacious D video (no link, no way). But still I remained enchanted; the day he died, I almost wept.
Post-postscript: eleven of the best Dio songs
To anybody interested in going further into the music of Dio (I know you’re not but if you are you should be ashamed of yourself at your age) I offer, in the spirit of tired unfunny Spinal Tap references and in no particular order of preference, this selection of 11 bangers. I exclude those linked elsewhere in this ‘series’, as well as the song Holy Diver, because everybody knows that one (YOU *DO* KNOW IT, DON’T YOU?)
Rock and Roll Children (come on it’s great)
Post-post-postscript: Dio albums ranked
Holy Diver (1983)
Dream Evil (1987)
The Last in Line (1984)
…
Sacred Heart (1985)
…
Lock up the Wolves (1990)
Strange Highways (1993)
…
…
…
the rest (don’t bother)
Post-post-post-postscript: promises and a song
I made this one up on the spot. I promised myself I would take no more than 10 minutes over it.
My brief was to deploy as many of RJD’s talismans as possible (dreams, light, run, dark, hide, fire, wheel, magic, soul, heart, sun, stars, night, day, eyes, rainbow, fly, forever, never, evil, liar, truth, stone, door, steel) and to structure it according to the relatively unconventional verse 1, verse 2, bridge, chorus, guitar solo, chorus, verse 3, chorus, adlibs-and-out arrangement heard to best advantage in this stomper.
I fitted in all of the talismanic words above. It took me nine minutes and 24 seconds; the missus timed me doing it (writing the lyrics I mean; I’d never last that long in johlkjglgsdfljbljk,vj,svd,fv). If you don’t believe me you can ring her and ask: (+40) 766 9886 668 687 87 7788 875 589.
Anyway it’s called Eyes of a Dream, THIS ONE. The heads will understand; the squares will not.
Verse 1 Look to the sky You’ll never ever learn to fly Until you see that the rainbow is you and I Verse 2 Run through the fire When you hide in the sun, you can laugh at the liar Harder than stone You’re ready to burn, but when will you learn? Bridge That the magic lasts forever And your soul sails on into never But there in your heart Right from the start Whispers of evil Say the truth is a lie Chorus 1 Eyes of a dream Stars are never what they seem When you dream of the eyes They’re staring at you through the crack in the sky But why? Guitar solo Chorus 2 Eyes of a dream Stars are never what they seem When you dream of the eyes They’re staring at you through the crack in the sky Verse 3 Quick! Turn back the wheel You can open the door but you can’t break the steel There’s always dark in the light But the day is never night Alright! Chorus 3 Eyes of a dream Stars are never what they seem Do you dream of the eyes? Do they stare at you through the crack in the sky? Adlibs Dream of the eyes Look up at the sky If we run on the rainbow soon we will fly You and I Eyes of a dream Not what they seem That’s when you scream There’s black in the white Day in the night In the eyes of a dream! Look out!
One day I may come up with a couple of crappy basic riffs and record it, singing in my Dio voice.
LOOK OUT!
The outright shitlib was always around on the margins of heavy metal ‘fandom’, but zhey commenced a program of intense tone-policing in the mid- to late-2000s; zheir ‘thought leaders’ included Axel Rosenburg and Vince Neilstein…so…you know…
As a Dio fan I hope you are not onto anything here, but, it's worth remembering that Vivian Campbell supposedly called him "the most vile man in the industry."
What about Rainbow demon... whats THAT all about then... hahaha.
There rides the rainbow demon
on his horse of crimson fire.
Black shadows are following closely
on the heels of his desire.
Rainbow demon - Pick up your heart and run.
Rainbow demon - Looks for his soul and is gone.