Dio’s Lore I: RJD as mage and shepherd of the ephebes
First in a three-part digression
I guess I was about four when I first heard the voice.
In our street there weren’t many kids. Most of the residents were retired, or academics, or diplomats. But one year Charlie and his mum, Janie, arrived from somewhere in America. They rented a house about 100 metres from us, on the other side of the park around which our street was built.
Charlie needed friends and so did I. I remember that he had a complete set of Jaws toys (I’d never seen anything like it) and that he was a bit whiny and demanding—maybe it was a cultural thing. But he lived nearby and we played together fine, so we were friends.
Janie had what you might call Laurel Canyon vibes: tasselled suede jacket, undulating honey-coloured hair, extremely tight jeans; conspicuously single, very pretty, kind, mellow, in control but always a bit distracted.
Janie said she was a student. She seemed sort of intellectual. She had a lot of left-wing books, but they were all new and unthumbed. She seemed sort of artistic. There was a guitar in the corner of the room, but she never played it. Everything in their house was like that—like an exhibition of ‘student radical’ artifacts from the year 1978, as curated by somebody with just a little too much ‘expertise’ and not enough experience. Charlie ate a lot of ‘baloney sandwiches’. I didn’t like em; thought they tasted fake.
My dad liked Janie though; he liked anybody who was interested in Marxism. He lent her some books. After six months or so, she and Charlie left hurriedly for no reason. We never found out where they went. She never returned dad’s books. A few years later dad found out from the father of another friend of mine that Janie was CIA—Laurel Canyon, see. This fella was a spook too. But dad knew that.
Every weekday at 4.25 pm, between the end of Doctor Who and the beginning of The Kenny Everett Video Show, or The Goodies, or The Famous Five—it varied—the national TV broadcaster had to fill a five-minute programming gap. Most things on TV were from England. The rest of the world left us alone. They had their spies and their bases, but we weren’t important yet. We remained culturally British by default. There were some republicans around then, who wanted to get rid of the queen. We didn’t think too much about it. Dad reckoned it was a distraction; the real issues lay elsewhere.
He was always out looking for the working class and trying to sell em papers. There weren’t many of them, and by and large they didn’t care much for revolution. But Dad was never interested in revolution for its own sake. He loathed ‘New Marxism’—turd worldism, feminism, ‘gay liberation’, the whole thing—so he kept up his Quixotic search for the working class until the events of 1989 left the New Marxists as the only game in town; and we all know what’s happened since.
Anyhow, one weekday Mum said I could go over to Charlie’s to watch TV. It was approaching twilight, it was cold and it was gusty. Already pink-cheeked and with tow-head tousled by the wind, I squinted across the park towards Charlie’s loungeroom. His TV faced the house’s bay window, and through it I could make out the blue ‘time tunnel’ that signalled the start of Doctor Who. I ran so I wouldn’t miss anything.
I suppose Charlie and I must have watched Doctor Who when I got there; I can’t remember. But what I do remember is that on this weekday the five-minute programming gap was filled with a song:
Here, then, was the voice. It seemed strange, coming out of a frog. Was this Kermit? I scorned group singing at preschool (‘Come on, JOIN IN!’—hated it), but this was the kind of singing I liked. It was the voice of an American man: stentorian but supple, careless but controlled, joyful but slightly menacing. The owner of such a voice must have been something to behold. I thought maybe he looked like a cowboy.
Ronnie the mage
About 10 years later I bought a vinyl copy of Dio’s Holy Diver. It was on the album’s inner sleeve that I first saw pictures of Ronnie James Dio and gradually realised that his was the voice I had heard in Charlie’s loungeroom. Ronnie (henceforth RJD) looked nothing like I had imagined. He was, as it turned out, an ugly middle-aged dago dwarf. He stood 5 feet, two inches and was born in 1942 to a family of Sicilian origins in upstate New York.
This is the inner sleeve.
I wasn’t disappointed by RJD’s unheroic physiognomy. On the contrary: in combination with the music on Holy Diver, his appearance made perfect sense. RJD was not cast in the lone gunslinger mould. In fact, he wasn’t a warrior type at all. He was a mage.
Like most heavy metal albums of the 1980s, the front cover of Holy Diver is cheaply transgressive. It’s also a rare example of not-completely-ridiculous heavy metal bathos. Set in an elemental, immemorial, pre-civilised landscape, it depicts a scene of Luciferian reprisal wreaked upon present-day civilisation and moral authority. In its disproportions of figures, setting and objects (that chain wtf) it features ostensibly amateurish but somehow utterly classic violations of the laws of artistic perspective. Then there are its enigmatic semiotics—some intentional, others…(maybe not) intentional.1
RJD: shepherd of the ephebes
I was fascinated and a little disturbed by the flagrant amorality of the images on front cover and inner sleeve of Holy Diver, almost as much as I was enthralled by the sounds they accompanied. It seemed to me that I was being borne, half-willingly, across some kind of threshold—away from the wholesomeness and certitudes of childhood and into the unfamiliar world of the ephebe. For I was by then myself an ephebe: a Sensitive Young Man confronted by the first uneasy onset of manhood.
Characteristic of the ephebe’s psyche—this was true at least of me and many of my friends, maybe not of you—is a yearning for the security of childhood. It’s not true that nostalgia is the sole preserve of the old. In fact, as I have observed in my own kids, it affects even very young children.
In the ephebe, this precocious yearning coexists with a sense of exhilaration—moderated by a nagging feeling of guilt—at the sudden tearing away from childhood that occurs around the age of 14. Simultaneously, the ephebe is assailed by the realisation that the sources of tutelage and reassurance on which he has hitherto depended can no longer respond satisfactorily to the challenges he’s newly obliged to confront.
The abruptness of this series of changes can be psychologically trying. In traditional societies it was eased and sanctified by formal initiation into manhood; no such social mechanism is available to the modern ephebe. In the absence of formal rituals to protect his psyche from collapse in the chaos of childhood’s end, he’s left to find his own sources of consolation for the loss of the old and of guidance towards the new. Somebody must assist his passing out of childhood and into the strange and ambivalent world of early manhood.
This, I realise now, is the essence of Dio: in the distressing encounter between the still childlike mind and the first inklings of manhood, RJD acts as a guide—a shepherd of the ephebes. With great perceptive and creative power he transposes the enchanted archetypes of childhood into a fey and novel imaginary of his own device. This is Dio’s Lore, and it is unique in the world of heavy metal.
Dio’s Lore
Contrary to received opinion, RJD was not a simple retailer of ‘medieval’ swords-and-sorcery pastiche. With a few exceptions, the lyrics he wrote for Dio (the band) were fantastic and atemporal. They drew on the figurative language present in the West European mind but, except in passing, they were not rooted in the Middle Ages—or indeed in any particular time.
Neither did RJD concern himself with stories of war, paeans to the devil or tales of the unrestrained expression of sexual appetite (could he have been the first rock n roll INCEL?). He had drawn on some of these motifs in his previous bands Rainbow and Black Sabbath. But where such themes occurred in the output of his own band they were used in the service of Dio’s Lore and his self-anointed persona as shepherd of the ephebes.2
Most of the best Dio songs, and the artwork adorning the band’s albums, are evocations of dreams. Imagery in itself is everything. Top-down textual coherence, where discernable, is largely fortuitous and probably unintended. Morality is deliberately equivocal.
Let us now examine in detail two especially illustrative instances of Dio’s Lore.
‘Don’t Talk to Strangers’
This is the side 1 ending ‘cut’ on Holy Diver—perhaps the best example of RJD’s patented ‘evil dream song’ and undoubtedly one of his most expressive vocal performances.
Here, accustomed authorities can no longer properly address the ambiguities of life. Those you trust and love might, at a stroke, even become deceivers and malefactors. It’s a vivid evocation of the confusion and doubt which afflict the ephebic psyche.
In the gentle but disquieting minor-key intro, pay attention to RJD’s slightly androgynous use of falsetto, as if singing a darkened childhood lullaby. The entry of the menacing riff and RJD’s booming full-howl tenor signals the intrusion of the real world and the ominous archetype of the stranger.
Observe how the identity and ‘voice’ of the protagonists is confused, and that the moral centre is obscure. Whose advice should you heed—the androgynous (mother’s?) voice in the intro, which seems to return, this time full-voiced (as father?), in the middle eight—or the stranger's voice, in the verses?
There is no clear counsel. Should you talk to strangers? Is it really better that you don’t find the key that opens up your soul? Should you bother going to heaven? Is it worth the long and difficult trip? (and does it have an incredible range of restaurants?) Should you dream of women? Will they bring you down? Was RJD the first INCEL?
Don't talk to strangers
Cause they're only there to do you harm
Don't write in starlight
Cause the words may come out real
Don't hide in doorways
You may find the key
That opens up your soul
Don't go to heaven
Cause it's really only hell
Don't smell the flowers
They're an evil drug
To make you lose your mind
Don't dream of women
Cause they'll only bring you down
Hey you, you know me
You've touched me, I'm real
I'm forever
The one that lets you look and see
And feel me
I'm danger, I'm the stranger
And I
I'm darkness, I'm anger, I'm pain
I am the master
The evil song you sing inside your brain
Drive you insane
Don't talk
Don't let them inside your mind
Run away, run away, go
No, no, no
Don’t let them in your mind
Protect your soul
Don't dance in darkness
You may stumble and you're sure to fall
Don't write in starlight
Cause the words may come out real
Don't talk to strangers
Cause they're only there
To make you sad
Don't dream of women
Cause they'll only bring you down
Run, run, run, run away
‘All the Fools Sailed Away’
This too is a dreamlike piece3, but it’s much statelier than the one above. Parping horn-like keyboards lend it the atmosphere of a regal procession. The children’s choir suggests the sung liturgy, a device often used in 1980s rock when reaching for significance.
The lyrics might be interpreted as an encomium to the gifts of the muses, tempered with a warning. Yet, as in ‘Don’t Talk…’, the protagonists are confused and the moral thread is hard to grasp.
Who are the ‘fools’? Who are ‘we’? Are the gift-bringers (are they the ‘fools’, the ‘we’, or both?) benevolent or malign? Should our desire be to retain our ‘diamonds’, or should their ‘steel’ be preferred? Should the ‘beautiful’ be accepted along with the ‘sin’? Are these oppositions separable? Can we even choose?
Here once again is a representation of the dilemmas of the ephebe—and here once again they’re unresolved.
There's perfect harmony
In the rising and the falling of the sea
And as we sail along
I never fail to be astounded by the things we'll do
For promises and a song
We are the innocent, we are the damned
We were caught in the middle of the madness
Hunted by the lion and the lamb
We bring you fantasy, we bring you pain
It's your one great chance for a miracle
Or we will disappear never to be seen again
And all the fools sailed away
All the fools sailed away, sailed away
We bring you beautiful, we teach you sin
We can give you a piece of the universe
Or we will disappear never to return again
And all the fools sailed away
All the fools sailed away
All the fools sailed away
They sailed away, sailed away
And as we drift along
I never fail to be astounded by the things we'll do
For promises and a song
We are the innocent, we cut, we bleed
We're your one great chance for a miracle
And a miracle is something you need
They'll take your diamonds, and then give you steel
You'll be caught in the middle of the madness
Just lost like them, part of all the pain they feel.
And all the fools sailed away
All the fools sailed away
All the fools sailed away
Leaving nothing, nothing more to say
All the fools sailed away
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
Now maybe you think I’m taking it all a bit too seriously. To you the above might seem like nonsense. Sub-mediocre pseudo-poetry! A comically bathetic grab-bag of high and low! I admit there are some unintentionally funny lines. Sure his voice isn’t for everyone. So maybe you’re right; laugh if you will.
But remember: this stuff wasn’t written for you, FEMOIDHOMONORMALFAG. It was written for the sensitive young men of the 1980s, and I can personally attest that it helped get us through man.
But did we *really* make it through?
Part II:
I mean the semiotics were enigmatic to me, at the time. In the 1970s RJD brought the Sicilian cornuto or anti ‘evil eye’ handsign to heavy metal. By the 1990s, the first generation of heavy metal irony bros were making fun of it. By the mid 2000s, even middle-aged normies saw it as their duty as ‘fun guys’ who ‘didn’t take themselves too seriously’ to tiresomely ‘raise the horns’ with ‘ironically’ distended tongue while ‘moshing’ to Enter Sandman or whatever when it came on the radio. Nobody ever did this in the 1980s, the last decade in which conventional Christian (sorry…JUDEO-CHRISTIAN) morality was taken seriously. The unfunny PSEUDO-Levantine-KHAZARIAN clown Jack Black must accept (HE MUST AKSEP!) part of the blame—though, as is generally the case, TURCO-Semitic mischief is not the whole explanation.
in my interpretation; I could be wrong
Dio’s ouevre is full of numbers like this. ‘Sacred Heart’, the song, is another good one (the eponymous 1985 LP is on the whole poor to middling). Eight of the nine traxxx on the oft-underrated 1987 album Dream Evil deal with precisely this theme. I will get to a couple of others later on.
Ever have any truck with Killing Joke? Jaz Coleman?