“So different, so unusual”: Ronnie James Dio named his two favourite Black Sabbath songs
Although Black Sabbath emerged from Birmingham’s industrial smog, over just a few short years, the band dominated the world and became a global property. After forming in 1968, the first stable lineup, consisting of Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne, cast a dark spell on the colourful rock music of the psychedelic era, setting a macabre tone apt for the demise of flower power.
In their revolutionary eponymous debut album, Black Sabbath built upon the heavy rock stylings of Led Zeppelin and The Who, using satanic themes to forge the heavy metal genre. Subsequently, the band released a series of dark, listering masterpieces from Paranoid to Sabotage, consolidating their status all the while as the masters of darkness with crucifixes, dark leather jackets and plenty of hair.
During the Sabotage sessions, Sabbath began to encounter some legal issues with their former management, hence the album’s name. Although the album was a success, relations within the band had started to falter heading into the band’s last two albums before Ozzy Osbourne’s initial departure. Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die! are regarded as two of the band’s weakest records, exhibiting signs of creative lethargy and internal conflict. Due to Osbourne’s obstinacy, drummer Ward even handled some of the vocal duties during this chapter.
When Osbourne finally left the band in 1979, Black Sabbath welcomed the American singer Ronnie James Dio, famed for his previous work with Elf and Rainbow. As a longtime Sabbath fan, he respected Osbourne’s empty chair, offering his faithful, snarling vocals to live renditions of old material and the band’s new material in the studio. Dio was praised for his role in revitalising Sabbath in the 1980 album Heaven & Hell, and immediately won over the band’s fans on both sides of the Atlantic.
Jack Black, the comedy actor and musician famed for his work as an ardent metal head in Tenacious D, is a longtime Sabbath fan and even he admits to favouring Dio over Osbourne as the greatest metal singer of all time. “They replaced Ozzy with who turned out to be my favourite heavy metal singer of all time: Ronnie James Dio,” he told Planet Rock in 2017. “The fact that he joined forces with the greatest heavy metal band of all time was a great source of national pride for me personally.”
Although Dio remained Sabbath’s lead vocalist for one further album before his first exit from the lineup, Heaven & Hell was his most significant contribution, not least for the album’s towering eponymous seven-minute epic. In a 2009 interview with Blabbermouth, the singer highlights it as one of his all-time favourite metal songs and the best from Sabbath’s post-Osbourne years.
The music for the song was arranged mainly by Iommi, with Dio showing his talent in the lyrical department. Observing the fact that he picked one of his own songs as a favourite, he commented, “Just because I had something to do with it doesn’t sway me; I still think it’s a great song.” Dio explained that it was a “song for its generation” which offered a way out for the band after Osbourne’s dpeparture. “It captured another generation of people who had forgotten about that early Sabbath, and suddenly Black Sabbath becomes their band again,” he added. “I think it was an unusual time and just a great song.”
Elsewhere in his selections, Dio remembered the music that made him fall in love with Black Sabbath during his years with Elf. Like many of us, he had a soft spot for Paranoid and its classic opener, ‘War Pigs’. “It was another one of those songs where you didn’t expect it to go where it went,” Dio noted. “I just thought it was so well written and so well performed — so different, so unusual.”
Dio admired Osbourne’s vocal offerings to the track but had more to say for Butler’s lyrics, which framed the status quo in possibly the first-ever heavy metal protest anthem. “They stand up because that was a protest about people who were creating war, and they��ve never heard that before,” he said of the lyrics. “That’s a strange title, isn’t it? You just put that together, and it’s so clever. Musically, it was just written so well.”