Before the release of Holy Diver, Ronnie James Dio was merely the greatest hired gun in the history of rock’n’roll. In 1974, Deep Purple’s Roger Glover drafted the diminutive American, born Ronald Padavona, to sing on his bongwater-soaked rock opera, The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. Dio’s performance so impressed former Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore that he hired him to front his new neoclassical hard-rock band Rainbow. Dio made three albums with Blackmore, but left Rainbow in 1979 to join Black Sabbath, taking on the daunting task of replacing the newly solo Ozzy Osbourne for the band’s Heaven and Hell. Dio’s second album with Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, was another masterpiece, but Dio was growing tired of standing in the shadows of his more visible bandmates. (His debut with Rainbow was literally called Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.) When Sabbath showed him the door, it was a blessing in disguise. The midnight sea was calling.
There was no question what the 40-year-old singer would call his new band. Dio formally launched in the fall of 1982, with the eponymous rocker on the microphone and fellow Sabbath expat Vinny Appice behind the drumkit. After a brief dalliance with future Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee, the band’s lineup solidified: Dio, Appice, former Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain, and guitarist Vivian Campbell, from the Belfast band Sweet Savage. Their first album, Holy Diver, came out the following spring. The supporting players were crucial, but they were just that: supporting players. At last, there was a recorded document of Ronnie James Dio as a true bandleader. On a new four-disc, super-deluxe reissue, his leap into auteurism sounds as visionary as ever.
Holy Diver opens with “Stand Up and Shout,”—or, more accurately, it opens with the main riff to “Stand Up and Shout,” one of the most iconic and ubiquitous runs of notes in metal history. That simple, blues-based power-chord progression is an object of totemic power, passed from metal guitarist to metal guitarist like a talisman. It just screams heavy metal. Variations on the riff showed up on Riot’s “Swords and Tequila” in 1981, Accept’s “Flash Rockin’ Man” in 1982, Mercyful Fate’s “Curse of the Pharaohs” in 1983, and Iron Maiden’s “2 Minutes to Midnight” in 1984. The urgent, double-time version that Vivian Campbell plays on “Stand Up and Shout” lands right in the middle of that timeline, and while its similarity to those other riffs is almost certainly coincidental, it’s fitting that it announces the arrival of Dio. First on Holy Diver, and then on the nine additional Dio albums he would make before dying of stomach cancer in 2010, the singer would bend the sound and aesthetic of classic heavy metal to his will.