Rainbow in the Dark: The Autobiography

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

Rainbow in the Dark:

The Autobiography

© 2021 by Niji Entertainment Group Inc.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-974-3

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-975-0

Cover design by Jeff Chenault / eleven07.com

Cover photo by Neil Zlozower/Atlasicons

Interior design and composition, Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Permuted Press, LLC

New York • Nashville

permutedpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For Wendy

and all my wonderful friends

and fans.

Contents

Preface by Wendy Dio

Prelude

Chapter One: Rock ’n’ Roll Children

Chapter Two: Stand Up and Shout

Chapter Three: Vegas Kings

Chapter Four: Uncle Johnny

Chapter Five: Spider’s Revenge

Chapter Six: Electric Elves

Chapter Seven: Purple Daze

Chapter Eight: LA 59

Chapter Nine: Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow

Chapter Ten: Starstruck

Chapter Eleven: Wendy’s Song

Chapter Twelve: Kill the King

Chapter Thirteen: Called by the Toll of the Bell

Chapter Fourteen: West of Wonder

Chapter Fifteen: A Rainbow in the Dark

Chapter Sixteen: We Rock

Chapter Seventeen: Hungry for Heaven

Photo Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Preface

by Wendy Dio

When Ronnie first began writing this book his intention was that it would have no end. The cancer that would eventually overcome him had not yet struck, and as far as he was concerned, the future was still full of promise.

That was the Ronnie James Dio I first fell in love with and later married—an unstoppable force of nature for whom all things were possible, even when fate appeared to conspire against him. You might say, especially when fate appeared to conspire against him.

As you will discover from reading his extraordinary story, Ronnie was a born fighter. Tell him something could not be done; he would move heaven and earth to prove that it could. Once Ronnie set his sights on something, he rarely, if ever, missed the target. So it was with his autobiography. Even after he became ill in 2009, he was determined to leave behind a written record. As with his lyrics, everything was handwritten. He never used a computer. He had beautiful handwriting and would write out his memories, then pass me the pages, which I would have my assistant type up.

Ronnie was always a voracious reader and a born storyteller. He could make you laugh until tears ran down your face. And he could make you jump and cry with some of the stories of the desperately hard times he lived through to finally make his dream come true.

If Ronnie’s rich and imaginative lyrics were his poetry, this book became his personal valediction, written from the heart, playing no favors, just telling it, because that was always Ronnie’s way—his code.

Ronnie had gone deep as far as the Rainbow years before his encroaching illness forced him to slow the pace. At that point, he began writing notes and planning out how the rest of the book would go. I was able to help him sketch out his thoughts and memories almost up to the present. Whenever we discussed it, Ronnie was insistent that the story he ultimately wanted to tell was one of hope triumphing over despair, how joy and positivity, magic and light, will always overcome the dark. Never be afraid of the night—dawn is always on the horizon.

After Ronnie’s death in 2010, the plan was to publish his memoirs as soon as possible. It didn’t happen then because, at that moment, with my heart broken, I just couldn’t face working on something so deeply personal to him. I always planned to help bring it to its rightful conclusion one day. It was the least Ronnie deserved. His story simply had to be heard.

Ronnie was a great believer that the right time for something will always make itself obvious if you can just be patient for the universe to reveal its truths to you.

Ronnie and I first met Mick Wall in 1980 when he was the UK publicist for Black Sabbath, working to promote the Heaven and Hell album, the one Ronnie considered his best with the band. Mick was only twenty, and he later laughingly told me how scared he was of Ronnie at the time, but it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the two. By the time Ronnie’s post-Sabbath band Dio had exploded onto the scene, Mick was a familiar face. He’d gone on to become a legendary music writer and presenter of some great TV and radio shows, including a memorable at-home-with-the-stars-style TV documentary where he hung out at our house, playing pool with Ronnie, drinking beer with us at Ronnie’s English-pub-style home bar, and wandering around looking at suits of armor and Ronnie’s vast collection of antique and gothic artifacts.

In the mid-’90s, Mick returned to being Ronnie’s PR in London. And in 1998 he became the creative editorial force behind the launch and subsequent huge success of Classic Rock magazine. It was while receiving the Metal Guru award at the 2006 Classic Rock awards in London that Ronnie renewed his friendship with Mick.

When a few years ago Mick inquired whether I was ready to start thinking about getting Ronnie’s memoir off the ground, it was the beginning of a long conversation over many months and, eventually, years. Having had time since Ronnie’s passing to finally put together a proper archive of his interviews over the course of his career, from thousands of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio appearances, and a ton of other stuff where he was being interviewed at length, first for videos we released, or later added as extras for various CDs and DVDs, sifting through and cataloguing a lifetime of incredible photos, stories and other personal mementoes, and, of course, his original notes and unfinished manuscript, we started our journey of finishing the book you now hold in your hands.

Holding the folders containing all the original handwritten pages, all the scrupulous notes and scattered thoughts, all the old computer printouts, was a powerful reminder of how important it was to make this book happen the way Ronnie had always planned it. I knew I would need help. Mick was the obvious choice. He had known Ronnie for thirty years and was clearly the best writer and editor I could get to work on the book. He didn’t let us down, doing honor to Ronnie’s incomparable story, first of all, then to the fans and me.

Mick was able to reconstruct the original draft of Ronnie’s words and help flesh them out, where appropriate, by adding some of Ronnie’s words from other sources, including his own cavernous archive, which holds many long and deep conversations with Ronnie over the many years they knew each other.

As anybody that ever spoke to him will testify, Ronnie liked to talk. Try shutting him up! Opinions on every subject under the sun! What didn’t he know about? At the same time, Ronnie loved just hanging out with the fans, listening to what they had to say. From long before he became famous right up to his dying day, three legendary rock bands and over 150 million albums sold behind him, Ronnie would talk to people all day and all night, and still go out and sing better than any other rock singer you’ve ever heard.

Whenever Ronnie and I talked about where the book should end, he was adamant that this first memoir should end in 1986, on the very night Dio headlined Madison Square Garden. Ronnie was just a few weeks shy of his forty-fourth birthday that magical June night. He had headlined the Garden twice before with Sabbath, but this was his first headlining show there under his own name—a momentous occasion for the boy from Upstate New York who had dreamed of seeing his name in lights at the city’s most famous arena since he was a teenager. It became the crowning glory of Ronnie’s career. Literally and figuratively his dream come true. I was with him that night, as his wife, his manager, but most of all as his biggest fan. I knew what this show meant to him. He had finally climbed to the top of the highest mountain, against all odds, entirely on his own terms. As he put it that night, If my life ended tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter. This is as good as it gets for me.

Of course, Ronnie still had many years ahead of him in which he continued to make some of the greatest albums in the proud Dio catalogue. He also got back with the Heaven and Hell lineup of Sabbath, not once but twice, recording two more fantastic albums together, including the magnificent The Devil You Know, released just a year before Ronnie died, and his final Top 10 hit in America. After that, though, is another story.

He never stopped giving everything he had to his loyal and beloved fans, on stage and off. These were years of struggle sometimes, but as you’ll see, Ronnie never shied away from hard work and always emerged victorious. In the end, the only thing he could not defeat was mortality.

There is clearly a book to be written one day about that final quarter-century of Ronnie’s life. Certainly there is enough material in the bulging archive for us to one day shape into a superlative book along those lines, but this is not that book. This is a book about what Ronnie saw as the first half of my life, in his own words, in his own inimitable style, and in keeping with the spirit of how he wanted to be remembered. Upbeat, never say die, absolutely undeniable.

That is the Ronnie James Dio you will get to know in ways not even I thought possible when he began writing it. Or, as he put it in one of his most memorable songs:

The world is full of Kings and Queens

Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams…

And they’ll tell you black is really white

The moon is just the sun at night

And when you walk in golden halls

You get to keep the gold that falls

It’s Heaven and Hell.

Prelude

Friday, June 20, 1986.

Early evening, backstage in my dressing room, in that hallowed space between soundcheck and show time, where if you’re lucky and no one bothers you, you can actually sit and think. An almost impossible thing to do at any other time on tour.

It’s one of those melting city-summer evenings out there, the kind you only find in New York City. You can’t slow down New York City, but this heat comes close. Even the cars seem to honk a little less noisily: all of Seventh Avenue sweating it out.

But it’s Friday night and everybody wants some of whatever’s going on this weekend. This particular evening, that includes my band, Dio, and me. We are headlining Madison Square Garden, and the show is a 20,000-capacity sellout.

There are people out there, made even more nuts by the heat, literally fighting to get in. This is some achievement for us. Dio has been a big arena band pretty much from the moment we released our first album, Holy Diver—but this is the Garden, and this is a whole new level of reality.

I’m a New York guy. Even after living and working in LA for so many years, which I love, I am and will always remain a New York guy. I have been dreaming of headlining Madison Square Garden for as long as I’ve known it existed.

Sitting here this fine Friday evening, shielded from the dust and heat by turbo-charged air-conditioning, contemplating how very far I have come in my musical journey, and yet how close to this place I have always been. Remembering with a shudder those chilly Monday mornings I would drive the 250 miles to the City, aiming to infiltrate the Brill Building on Broadway, where Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote Will You Love Me Tomorrow. Hoping for a break, any kind of a break. And where, somehow, in 1960, at the already-old-before-my-time age of seventeen, I was allowed to record a Tin Pan Alley ballad-by-numbers called An Angel Is Missing. That was as Ronnie Dio and the Red Caps. It was not a hit. But it didn’t stop me then, and it doesn’t stop me now.

Call me an old romantic, but I have never sung for money. It’s true I have always been happy, or merely relieved, to have been paid for my work. But that isn’t what drives me, what got me through the times I thought I was done for, what inspired me to write my best songs, to always try to sing in my best voice, or to be a real friend to my fans, not just another picture in a magazine.

Sitting here now, looking back, reveling in the fact that it only took me a quarter of a century to finally get here, I can cheerfully tell you that whatever happens for the rest of my life, I will always be able to say I once headlined my own show at Madison Square Garden. That I did once, finally, achieve my goals, and give thanks to the gods for making the dreams more real than the nightmares.

To be in one world-famous band is a rare victory most musicians can’t hope to achieve. To somehow find yourself in two world-famous bands is almost being greedy. But to find yourself being a success for a third time, especially when it’s with your own band this time—well, I consider myself extremely fortunate.

Reading this book, I hope you will be able to find answers to all of the questions I know many have long wished to ask me. Whatever your judgement after reading it, I accept it. The Good. The Bad. The Beautiful. It was all me, everything.

But know this: If I die tomorrow, you will be my witness that I do so having lived my life to the full.

When I was a teenager, I used to walk by the Garden practically every week, looking up at whatever big name was on its billboard in lights, and making a pledge to myself.

One day I’m going to play there.

Wendy told me we could have played the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey for twice as much money as we’re getting tonight, because the Garden is a union hall. But I told her: I have to have Madison. It’s been my dream forever.

When Wendy and I stepped out of the limo today, we looked up and there it was: Dio in lights, Madison Square Garden, New York. We were so excited. I wanted Wendy to take a picture. But we had forgotten the camera. I didn’t care. Nobody would ever have been able to take a picture that truly captured the significance of that moment for me. I still gave her shit for it, though. Obviously.

Right, I’ve got to go and get ready. I hear them calling my name.

one

Rock 'n' Roll Children

This was a special Saturday for me. The first day of summer vacation and a baseball game to play with the neighborhood kids. That would have been enough to keep me happy on its own, but it also transpired that this would be a special day for me in another, most unexpected way. This would be the day my lifelong journey in music began.

As I sat down with my mother and father to eat breakfast that morning, I sensed something in the air, some invisible tension tweaking my psychic antennae that usually signaled the arrival of some as-yet-unknown problem. Then my father laid it out for me. Which musical instrument would I choose to be taught to play so that I might become a better-rounded individual?

Huh?

I had not seen this coming. I was six years old. Up to that point, I had absolutely no musical aspirations at all. If you couldn’t throw it, catch it, or hit it, then it had no use to me. Which musical instrument would I choose to learn to play? None, I said. Why would I want to do that?

My father Pat—a tough no-nonsense Italian-American who brooked no argument, least of all from his only son—quickly and decisively reversed my veto and asked the question again. To which, of course, there was a different, more affirmative answer. Stalling for time, I asked which instruments I could choose from.

My mother Anna came to the rescue. Listening to the radio and deciding which sound I liked best would provide the answer to which instrument I should learn to play. The old Philco Baby Grand radio was revved up, and the golden tones of Harry James’s trumpet filled the small kitchen. I’d like to say that at that moment my soul was uplifted, the windows of my mind raised to let the joyous sounds reverberate. I really would like to say that, but damn, I had a game to play.

That’s the one, I blurted out as I grabbed my baseball glove to go. To my horror, my father stood in my way and announced we would be going instead to McNeil Music, one of the two music stores in town, to obtain one Harry James-style trumpet for yours truly. How I hated that man at that moment.

My dad and I piled into the car—I guess this was a man thing—and as he backed out of the driveway, my heart was sinking lower with every turn of the wheels. What about the game? I thought. That was the day the games ended, and the real thing began.

I was overwhelmed by the music store. So many strange-looking shapes to see and sounds to hear. For some odd reason, I felt comfortable there. The McNeil brothers, Danny and John, who were a complete contrast to one another, greeted us. Danny, small and bald, and John, big, tall, and a sporting a well-thatched roof. Danny, the most effervescent and outspoken one, took control of the situation and led us to the brass section. There, he seemed to kneel behind the counter in short prayer, and then with a flourish, introduced me to what would be my closest companion for the next twelve years, an Olds Ambassador trumpet. It was beautiful, gleaming, brass and silver, lying on a bed of burgundy velvet. I would have bet that even old Harry James had never had anything like this.

Next we were taken to a basement area that seemed to have a medical feel to it and—bang!—back came the butterflies. No need to worry, though, for it turned out to be the practice rooms, where my indoctrination into the musical community would now commence.

My dad and I were introduced to a bookish-looking man with a friendly smile. This was Sam Signorelli, who became my first teacher. He took his job seriously and was very concerned that the trumpet might be wrong for me. He examined my mouth, my teeth, my embouchure (lips, to the non-horn-blowing). I half-expected him to tell me to drop ’em then turn my head and cough.

Apparently I passed the examination because Mr. Signorelli handed me the trumpet and showed me how to hold it. He then instructed me how to tighten my lips and exhale as a dry run without the trumpet, after which came the moment of truth. I blew into that thing and an astounding tone worked its way slowly through all the valves and out into the day. My father beamed; Mr. Signorelli’s mouth fell open. And I put a period on the shortest career in baseball.

I progressed rapidly and became the target of quite a bit of attention.

Where does all that power come from?

He’s so tiny.

Why, the trumpet is bigger than he is!

Statements I learned to live with all through my days performing as a trumpeter.

My dad believed that practice makes perfect. In fact, I think he holds the patent on that phrase. So with that rule firmly in place and my father watching closely, I began doing four hours each day of practice on the trumpet. Four hours. Every day. A command never to be broken, not even on a Sunday, which, my father made clear, was not a day of rest.

I really hated that thing. The sounds of my horn became background music to the shouts and laughter of the neighborhood children playing outside. But slowly, as my abilities on the trumpet increased, so did my self-confidence, giving me a musical identity, like a superpower, that I began to enjoy. Although I couldn’t have known it then, my increasing ability on, and knowledge of, the trumpet actually helped me a great deal later as a singer, partly to do with knowing how to breathe, partly to do with the fact that the trumpet has its own voice, its own way of phrasing. I realize now that if it hadn’t been for all the years learning the trumpet, I would have been a different singer.

My father spent almost all of that daily practice time with me. He was so much more dedicated to this project than I was. I thought he knew and understood more about it than I would ever be able to learn. That went on for the first few years. But eventually his attendance dropped off as the music and technique required became more and more difficult. My father’s early guidance was priceless, however, because as lazy as I was with anything I didn’t like, his absolute insistence that I succeed set a course for all my future endeavors as a musician. Hard work, discipline, pride in being the best you can be, all these qualities were instilled in me by my father during those seemingly endless years practicing and learning and practicing some more that damn trumpet.

At least I didn’t have to deal with this the way my dad had to when he was a kid. His father, not long off the boat from Italy, had one day brought home a banjo, a violin, and a clarinet. He called my father and his two brothers, John and Peter, into the front room, randomly handed them each an instrument, and ordered them to play it. My dad had the good grace to spring for lessons.

My paternal grandfather, Tony Padovano, was a hard, stubborn, and powerful little man. (I’m told the family name was changed to Padavona after his children began school and found the spelling somehow easier to deal with, but I’ve never really understood that.) My grandfather Tony’s feats of strength were legendary. He ran a steel mill, which he and a whole generation of Italian immigrants labored at. Tony came wrapped in all the stereotypes of the transplanted Southern European of the time. He took no shit from anyone and parted with his affection only grudgingly, and my relationship with him was exactly like that. Pleasure not permitted, pain to be accepted.

Tony’s wife was Erminia, my paternal grandmother. She was, by everyone’s estimation a saint, but that estimation was too low. Erminia loved each of her children and their offspring equally. No one was slighted and everyone shared. English, both written and spoken, was a problem for her with others, but never for her and me. A piece of her amazing pizza and a bella cup of coffee (pronounced coff-ay) were always enough to dry a tear and make a smile appear. How she coped with her marital relationship was always a wonder to me. But bless her, she did.

I walked everywhere with my Gramma. Tony had a car but no driver’s license and only had it to impress his friends. So Gramma and me would walk to the markets,