The greatest metal singer that Slash ever heard: “Favourite of all time”
Slash didn’t need to really have a singer with him onstage to entertain an audience.
He has always been at one with his instrument every time he straps on a guitar, and anyone who has been lucky enough to see him jam whenever he takes the stage with Guns N’ Roses knows how effortless he makes every single solo seem whenever he flies off the handle. But even though most of his solos could be sung back to him by the audience at this point, he knew that he wasn’t going to become the greatest rock star in the world without the right person next to him.
And as much as people like to talk about how much Axl Rose could be a jerk, Guns N’ Roses would have never become half of what they were without him. In his prime, Rose had the kind of range that anyone else would have killed for, and even if he eventually took a while to even grace the audience with his presence half the time he played, he was always willing to give everything he had when he finally did show up.
But the biggest stumbling block that Slash had was trying to find someone who could fill those shoes every time he played. Scott Weiland seemed to have the same kind of star power that Rose had when they put together Velvet Revolver, but it wasn’t until Myles Kennedy came along that he found someone who could do the job. Kennedy wasn’t going to take his position for granted, but it’s not like Slash wanted to limit himself to one vocalist.
His self-titled debut album is full of some of the greatest singers trying their hand at singing with him, and it’s always interesting to see how every single artist plays off of his riffs. Ozzy Osbourne sounded right at home on ‘Crucify the Dead’, and Lemmy attacked a song like ‘Doctor Alibi’ as if he wrote the whole thing himself, but the major absence was not getting to see what Ronnie James Dio could have done.
Dio was taken from the world way too soon, and while the rest of us weren’t going to hear another tale about medieval times come from his voice ever again, Slash always paid respect to what Dio did. Even after Osbourne left Black Sabbath, Dio was the kind of person who could take everything that Tony Iommi gave him and turn it into absolute magic on records like The Mob Rules.
Slash’s taste in metal was a little all over the place at times, but he felt that no other voice could do what Dio did that consistently over the years, saying, “Ronnie was awesome, one of my favourite singers of all time. It only seems like yesterday [that he passed away]. I never worked with him, but we both got our hands in the RockWalk in LA at the same time. And that was the first time we ever met. He was a true gentleman, one of the nicest, unassuming rock stars you’ll ever meet.”
Given what Dio was capable of, though, it was almost an anomaly that he had that voice buried underneath everything. It was strange enough that he was one of the biggest voices in the world for someone with such a small physique, but aside from being a phenomenal vocalist, Dio never took any of his fans for granted. He could have easily played the rockstar card all the time, but he wanted to relate to the audience with the same kind of sincerity that he would give the rest of his bandmates half the time.
And that’s probably why Slash was so taken with what Dio was all about. Slash never wanted to become one of the most lavish rock stars in the world, either, so whenever he got the chance to hang out with Dio, it was like all of the pretentious walls came down and they finally had the chance to be normal people who happened to have an abnormal job.
