It’s hard to believe that the world lost the great Ronnie James Dio. Of the many tributes to mark the occasion, the most unique is the new lockdown video of “Monsters & Heroes” from the Appice brothers. I had the chance to interview both Vinny and Carmine separately to talk about his track, Ronnie himself, and their amazing careers. There was a minor audio problem early in Carmine’s call but it cleared up quickly.
Press the PLAY icons below to hear the MisplacedStraws Conversations with Vinny and Carmine Appice:
Vinny
Carmine
On how “Monsters & Heroes” was created – Vinny – Watching the Internet and even on TV and seeing all these videos people are doing that I thought that’s pretty cool, that’s a good idea to do this and how can we do it? And then I thought Well Ronnie’s anniversary was coming up 10 years and we have a song called “Monsters and Heroes” that’s about Ronnie so that’s even better. So I told Carmine, I said “Why don’t we do one of those virus videos and do it with “Monsters & Heroes” and release it on Ronnie’s anniversary?” 1:08
Carmine – (Originally) we did it with King Kobra but we never we always intended not to put it on a King Kobra album because we had done the album so we gave it to Wendy Dio. We gave it to her for the Ronnie Dio Cancer Fund. They had it for about five years and all the money that was made from the downloads or whatever went to the cancer fund and then I got the song back.3:08
The band that’s in that video, that’s the band we use live. It’s a kick-ass band. Luckily the guitar player, Artie Dillon, really knows his video and he knows his audio and he’s got the tools to put the video together. 1:49
“Monsters & Heroes”
Paul (Shortino) came in one day and said, “I want to change it to a song about Ronnie.”. He says. “Heroes, dragons, and rainbows in the dark”. And I said, “Well, that’s a cool idea.” So then he wrote the whole song, changed all the lyrics to that. And then we recorded it when it came out. What a great song. It’s a great song dedicated to Ronnie. 5:21
Vinny –
On how he first joined Black Sabbath – Well they were on tour and Bill Ward left the tour and they were scheduled to play in Denver and they had to cancel and postpone that gig and then they came to L A for four days looking for a drummer. So somehow I think somebody at Warner Brothers gave them my number and they checked me out. They called me and said “Hey wanna come down to me Tony Iommi? We’re looking for a drummer and we heard your stuff, so the first thing would be come down meet Tony.” So I said “Sure, man that’s great”. So I went down and met Tony. This was in California, in Hollywood, I was living close there. So I went to Hollywood and met Tony. We hit it off really well and he invited me down the next day to go to the rehearsal. When I went down to the rehearsal that’s when I met Ronnie. I met Ronnie, Geezer Butler, and Geoff Nicholls. 3:52
On choosing Dio over Black Sabbath – It was a hard choice because they’re all friends, they’re all good friends. I love playing with Tony, Geezer, and Ronnie as well. I just thought it would be easier to do it here in California with Ronnie (rather than in England with Sabbath) it would be exciting, a new band, we can start it from the beginning. 6:05
On how Dio was formed – Ronnie decided (he) wanted to have an international flavor in the band. All the bands he’s been with, Rainbow and Sabbath, were from Europe so he wanted to keep that tradition. So he contacted Jimmy Bain, who lived in London, and he asked him about guitar players. Jimmy recommended Vivian Campbell because Vivian’s band Sweet Savage open for Jimmy’s band somewhere. 7:10
“Holy Diver”
On reuniting with Black Sabbath for Dehumanizer – They were together, Ronnie and Tony, Geezer, and Cozy Powell on drums. The reason why Cozy was there is because he’s been playing with Tony in Sabbath before that. It was natural to bring Cozy in at that point. But it wasn’t going well. Ronnie wasn’t getting along with Cozy and it was going slow, spending a lot of money. They had a good record deal, but they were really spending a lot of money. And at one point Cozy was horseback riding and he fell off the horse and hurt himself, he broke his pelvis so he could play anymore, he had to heal. So now they were like “what do we do, Hey let’s call Vinny”. 9:37
On the formation of Heaven & Hell – Well Heaven and Hell actually was started with Bill Ward. Bill was playing with Tony at the time so it was again natural to do Heaven & Hell with Bill. The way it started was the record company wanted to release The Dio Years record which was all Sabbath songs with Dio on them, none of the old stuff. The record company thought it would be really cool if they wrote a couple of songs, that would promote the record, people would buy it more, that kind of thing. So they started doing that with Bill on drums and it wasn’t going that well, it was taking a long time from what I heard and eventually, again spending too much money, taking too much time and eventually came to “Let’s call Vinny”. 13:16
On how Last In Line came together – It actually just started innocently enough with a phone call from Viv. He said, “Hey, I spoke to Jimmy we’re up for a jam, you want to jam?” I haven’t really stayed that much in touch with Viv, here in there over the years. And he said uh they were up for a jam. I said “Yeah let’s do it would be fun”. So we went in and played all the old Dio stuff and we decided to do it again the next week and that’s when Andy Freeman was in town. He’s a friend of mine I played with them a long time ago on a George Lynch tour and I was amazed how he can sing. He was singing on the George Lynch tour like 15 dates in a row and not blowing out. I called him I said “Hey why don’t you come down? We’re not far from where you are in in the Valley here in California and sing a couple songs with us?” So he came down and he knew all the songs and he blew everybody away. It’s incredible the way he sings. It was so great that we decided why don’t we do some dates? 15:47
“Starmaker”
On the next Last In Line record – We got half an album almost done. Obviously, slow down here for a couple of months and now is starting to kick up again and finish up the six songs we have and then we’ve got things in the can that want to work on for the next half of the album, So hopefully we got it out by next year. 18:44
On Dio being left out of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sucks anyway. It’s supposed to be rock and roll and there’s people in it that’s not rock and roll one bit. Just the way they do business, it took them that long to put Black Sabbath in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Black Sabbath started all this heavy stuff. Black Sabbath started the tuning down that affected everybody and everybody copied it. Here’s a band that started all this stuff and yet they weren’t in it? So I wasn’t expecting them to induct Ronnie and I, it’s like they should’ve but they didn’t. So I think they suck. I went there once it was a frigging joke. Ronnie should have been in there, even by himself. He’s been in all these major major bands and major albums and he’s not in that. He should have been in. 23:20
Carmine –
On how he brought Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart back together – Jeff & Rod were enemies at the time I joined with Rod. As a matter of fact, I brought them together again. We happened to be in the same hotel in Australia and I went to see Jeff and said, “Why don’t you come to the show?” He said “Rod wouldn’t want me there.”, I said, “Rod, Jeff’s in the hotel. Why don’t we have him come see us? He thinks you wouldn’t want him here ” So he came backstage and they got back together again. 8:18
On how Rod Stewart changed the pronunciation of his name – Everyone had a different pronunciation for my name. (Rod) said, “You’re like five different people. Why don’t you pick one way to say it? How do most people say it?” I said, “Most people say “A Peace”.” He said, “Why don’t we go with that?” I said fine. And then Ludwig (drums) did an ad that said “Everyone wants a piece of Appice” that was in all the rock magazines over the world and that was it. 10:10
On why King Kobra didn’t break big – Because when we signed with Capitol Records, we signed. with Spencer Proffer behind us. The guy used to do A&R and all the radio promotions. He was promoted to A&R and didn’t do radio promotions. And that whole period that we were with them they didn’t break any bands because they had they didn’t have this guy working radio promotions. Then a second album came out, we had a two-album deal, and it did okay, but it didn’t do what we wanted it to still. Then Capitol Records realized it was because of this guy. So they moved him back to radio. The next band they signed and released was Poison and they were horrible.11:00
“Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”
On whether there’s a future for Blue Murder – Forget it. It’s not going to happen. We almost had it together. He’d come up with some idea that he wanted (to call it) John Sykes & Blue Murder. He wanted to play all his new stuff, I said, “Dude, that’s Blue Murder, you need to do that yourself.” I thought he was doing that,. I met him last year at the Heavy Metal Hall of Fame in L.A. He said he and Tony (Franklin) were going to go out as a new band, Sykes, with a new drummer, a little black kid that wanted to meet me. I met him. He was supposed to have the new record deal (and) go out last year. I said, “Good when you’re done with all that and you get it out of your system then we can do Blue Murder.” That never happened. He had a problem with a record label the record never came out. Another John Sykes thing. It just never happened. So nothing happened. That’s the end of it. 12:40
On playing with Vinnie Vincent – The put it together, hired us, paid a deposit, and then Vinnie kept changing it. He’s an idiot. He was a troublemaker when I played with him in my band Carmine and The Rockers. He blew everything. We had a record deal, and because of him, he blew it. When the KISS guys got him in the band, they called me and asked me what happened, and what I should do? He’s a troublemaker. And guess what? He made big trouble for KISS.13:50
“Jelly Roll”
On gigs he wished he took – I should have taken the Rainbow gig and I should have taken the gig to do that big Whitesnake album, which they couldn’t do because I was doing King Cobra. I would like to have played with Jeff Beck on the Blow by Blow stuff because I turned him on to that. I was involved in that record. I played on five tracks. But he took me off because we couldn’t work out a deal. I got screwed out of writing. The song. “Scatterbrain” starts with a drum groove, that was me. That was my drum groove. The guy he brought in, copied me,, copied all the stuff I did. I was really pissed off. I was going to sue Jeff, but I thought it’d be better to have a friend than an enemy. 18:20
On what comes next – We’re mixing a new Cactus record right now. Our manager, who manages Pat Travers, Rick Derringer is working on a tour with Cactus, Rick Derringer, and Pat Travers…And then we got a new deal for Vanilla Fudge and (the record’s) going to be called Supreme Fudge. We’re going to do five Supremes songs, and three R&B and a couple of originals. So we’ve been working on that. 21:00
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1 Comment
Vinny carmine absolutely said it for years, dio is rnr…….elf elec. Elves dio rainbow sabbath hand h. Just wish frmr members like viv. Campbell would stop talkin shit……cant induct sabbath without dio….his so called best friend geezer is a fake. not like u brothers together we 3 spread his gospel everyday in the mans name AMEN