‘Holy Diver’: Ronnie James Dio’s wild tale of an alien Christ
If you ever doubt that Ronnie James Dio is one of the greatest voices in heavy metal, just remember that he replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, and people weren’t upset. On the contrary, fans were delighted and continue to debate over whether he or Osbourne was the best to take to the mic. To start fronting a band that changed the face of music and then take over from one of the most famous singers on the planet without being met with scorn shows just how talented Dio was.
Despite his success in multiple bands, he wasn’t quite as successful as a solo artist. His career never took off the same way it did when he was part of a collective; however, his album Holy Diver is revered as a classic by many heavy metal lovers. It’s easy to see why, as throughout the record, Dio’s vocals are grungy and kickass, while the whole thing is packed with jaw-dropping riffs and killer guitar solos.
One of the standout songs from the album is the titular track, ‘Holy Diver’. The song has dark connotations, as it seems to talk about the devil and the concept of evil within humanity. The gloomy lyrics match the hard-rocking instrumentation of the song, and Dio said he had to blend fact and fiction to achieve such a tone.
“If you’re gonna write a gothic song, you’re probably not gonna write it about how your love affair broke up,” he said. “So, your subject matter becomes a little bit more narrowed, and certainly evil is a great subject—evil is dark, evil is something that we know about but don’t understand why it happens, and we don’t really ever meet up with the devil.”
Although stylistically completely different but connected in mindset, his approach to writing is similar to Kate Bush’s. Bush said that she never wrote from a personal point of view but rather took fictional or mystical elements and processed them through a personal lens.
“Whenever I base something on a book or a film, I don’t take a direct copy,” she explained, “I don’t steal it. I’ll put it through my personal experiences, and in some cases, it becomes a very strange mixture of complete fiction and very, very personal fears within me.”
Dio employed this approach when he wrote the track ‘Holy Diver’. He took the story of Christ and the strange selfishness surrounding humanity and told it as if it were set on another planet. While that dark and gloomy theme is present, the song isn’t about the devil, as many assume, and the “Holy Diver” in question is supposed to represent Christ if he existed on another planet and tried to come to Earth.
“So, the same thing happened on this other far-distant planet, and all the people on this planet are calling him the Holy Diver because he’s about to go to another world to do what he did to the first: absolve them from their sins by having himself killed,” explained Dio, “And the people are saying to him, ‘Don’t go,’ with innuendos of tigers and stripes and hearts and being eaten. It was meant to show just how selfish humanity is, that this one form of humanity on this one world said, ‘No, don’t go down there and save anybody else. Stay here, we need you, you are ours.’”
