Ronnie James Dio on his favourite grunge song of all time: “They just write so differently”
There is not a lot that’s grunge about Ronnie James Dio.
While any form of alternative rock should be a home for the diminutive icon of heavy metal, grunge’s particular mix of shiftless nihilism and counter-culture obscurity stands in stark contrast to everything Dio stood for as a solo act and as the frontman for Rainbow, Black Sabbath and their spin-off act Heaven and Hell. Here was a guy who embodied everything larger than life about alternative music, confronted with a period of time that saw that attitude as everything wrong with modern music.
Grunge, after all, was the underground hardcore punk scene of the 1980s going mainstream. Or if not going mainstream, then at least seeing the seeds they sowed grow into a harvest more bountiful than anything they provided. That said, Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins did have something resembling a radio hit in the form of ‘Liar’. If that isn’t the sound of a subgenre going right to the very top of the mainstream and having all boats rise with it, then I don’t know what is.
There was a lot it had in common with heavy metal. The celebration of non-conformity. The pleasure that it took in freaking out the squares. The sheer volume of it all. Yet the problem with going mainstream is that you can no longer call yourself counter-culture anymore. By the height of hair metal in the 1980s, the only real difference between the glam metal minnows and the capital-P pop songs of the time was slightly more distortion on the guitars.
Then you get a man like Ronnie James Dio, who had more metal in a single raise of the devil horns than a thousand fairweather Poison soundalikes. While his sheer passion and commitment to everything delightfully silly about heavy metal should have set him at odds with everything to do with grunge, something strange happened instead. Just as Lemmy was the one hard rocker whom the punks could stand, Dio was the one metaller who got a pass from the grunge kids.
What grunge song did Dio love?
Perhaps a part of this was down to Dio having a lot more time for grunge and alternative rock than many of his heavy metal peers, which checks out in a strange way. The man had to replace the actual Ozzy Osbourne in the actual Black Sabbath. He’d faced the scorn of heavy metal purists despite possibly being a person hewn from heavy metal itself. If there was anyone who wasn’t going to stand for that level of gatekeeping being passed down, it was him.
Thus, when famed metal blog Rhapsody sat down with Dio to talk through his five favourite songs, an unexpected choice came up. Of course, the usual suspects were all there. Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’. Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’. Judas Priest‘s ‘Nostradamus’. Not only a Black Sabbath song from the Ozzy era, but from his own, too, the cheeky so and so. Chief among them, though, was grunge legend Soundgarden’s absolute banger ‘Spoonman’.
Of the song, Dio said, “I think Chris Cornell is such a great singer, and those guys write so well and always write well.” Which could be some vague lip service if he didn’t double down on the whole appeal of Soundgarden in the same paragraph. He added, “I just think it’s a great song and it’s such an unusual song from that album. They just write so differently, yet they retain the influences from the hard-rock guys and the heavy-metal people from before.”
Which was the truth of the matter, wasn’t it? For all we like to talk about grunge being the point where hardcore punk bands went mainstream, the vast majority of the musicians who made up those bands had grown up on pure, uncut 1970s hard rock. Many of those grunge legends went on to make music directly inspired by it, like Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Yet, of all of them, only Soundgarden did it well enough to earn the respect of Ronnie James Dio himself. If that doesn’t make you metal, who knows what does?
