“We didn’t even break the equipment down,” says Campbell, “we just rolled it over the parking lot to the studio.” The end result, as epitomised by the track Rainbow In The Dark, was “one of the proudest things I’ve ever done,” beamed Ronnie. It was a great atmosphere.” They would finish working on the songs and then record them often the same night. “We were smoking a lot of pot, friends would come down. “We used to go in there every night and we were having a great time,” Campbell recalls. Within weeks the new four-piece were in LA, working at the Sound City duplex in Van Nuys: a courtyard with a rehearsal room on one side and a recording studio on the other, where down the years many a now classic album would be recorded. To me, Dio was a big star, and it was weird just being in the same room as him.” “I was a big Rainbow fan and I’d played the shit out of the Heaven And Hell album. “I had two guys in mind,” Bain told me, “One was John Sykes, the other was Vivian.” With Sykes already committed to a regular pay check from Whitesnake, Dio gave Campbell a shot – and thus was born one of the quintessential 80s metal line-ups.Īs a starry-eyed 20-year-old, Campbell couldn’t believe his luck. It was Bain who suggested bringing in a complete unknown guitarist called Vivian Campbell. (Strange to relate, but Daisley would also join Ozzy’s band along with Lee.) (Lee would later make his name as the flash guitarist in Ozzy’s solo band.) Before Bain came in, there had been discussions with Australian former Rainbow bassist Bob Daisley. It was primarily for this reason that Ronnie passed on the chance to bring a young Jake E. “But I’d worked with so many great British musicians in Rainbow and Sabbath, I wanted to keep that blend of American and British rock style.” “It would have been easy for me to pick up a couple of hotshots from the Sunset Strip scene and just throw a band together,” he would later tell me. The construction of Rainbow In The Dark was further proof of the amount of deep thought that Ronnie Dio had put into the launch of his own band. “He was smart he would read a book a day.” “He was totally different from most rock singers I’d met,” recalls Ronnie’s wife and manager, Wendy Dio. His lyrics were also top shelf Dio: ‘ I cry out for magic, I feel it dancing in the night/It was cold, I lost my hold, to the shadows of the night…’ Of course, none of this would have achieved musical lift-off if it hadn’t been for Dio’s gift for melody – a talent he’d developed during his childhood years learning to play trumpet – and his lion’s roar of a voice. That “little keyboard motif” that Bain came up with was actually a vamp on the keyboard part for a song called Criminal Tendencies, which he’d originally written for his previous band, Wild Horses. And then during one of the breaks Jimmy went over to this little Yamaha keyboard we had set up, and came up with the little keyboard motif and that was it, we had the fucking song written in ten minutes.” “But we played it for Ronnie, and he almost immediately started singing the melody on top of it. That’s what he did on Rainbow In The Dark." And nine times out of ten Vinny would reverse that. Whenever I was writing something, in my head as I was playing I’d be thinking the snare goes here and the bass goes there. "There’s no one on the planet plays drums like Vinny Appice. We’d start playing it, and Vinny would give it his own unique flavour. “Jimmy and Vinny and I would just kick around riffs. Appice had been the drummer in Sabbath during the latter-days of Ronnie’s time in them. He was definitely the boss.”ĭio had first worked with Bain in Rainbow. “There was always a bit more tension in the room when Ronnie came in to rehearsal. But all the music in Rainbow In The Dark, was from a Sweet Savage song that I wrote when I was sixteen.”Ĭampbell recalled how the genesis of the Dio song came from a loose jam session he and bassist Jimmy Bain and drummer Vinny Appice had been having fun with when Ronnie arrived at the rehearsal studio one day. “I probably in the back of my mind didn’t think that Sweet Savage was gonna continue, because I was so much part of the band. Sweet Savage was the Belfast-based band Campbell had formed as a teenager before landing the gig, at age 20, with the fledgling Dio line-up.
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