Post #26 · 4:29am Jul 10th, 2019

OK, so I’m gonna talk about music again. I hope you guys don’t mind these kinds of posts; I know it’s not really relevant to the site, but to be honest I don’t have much else to talk about other than saying that I’m still working on the story. Motivation is spotty much of the time, mostly because it’s been pretty busy these past few weeks, but I’m still chipping away at it.

So I occasionally talk about dead guys. In this case, today—July 10th—happens to be the birthday of an individual who has pretty much gone down in history as one of the greatest rock/metal vocalists ever: Ronnie James Dio (Padavona).

For a long time, I’d considered Metallica’s James Hetfield as my favourite singer, mainly due to his distinctive grit matching so well with the distorted guitars and heavy beats of the genre, but once I started listening to 70's metal I discovered some of Dio’s older work with Black Sabbath and Rainbow (led by Ritchie Blackmore, former Deep Purple guitarist). Until then, I'd only known him from songs like ‘Holy Diver’ and ‘Rainbow in the Dark,' and I was completely blown away by this guy’s work.

He was just a little dude at 5’4”, but man, he could level mountains with his singing. The dude’s voice was pure energy. Anyway, I won’t sap over him too much—let’s get into it!

Stargazer
Rising (1976)

Pay attention to the lyrics in this one, it tells a pretty crazy story.

So basically, we have this wizard who’s enslaved a bunch of people by convincing them (and himself) that he could fly if they built this giant tower for him to ‘take off’ from. I think the implication might have been that he’d be able to take them to other worlds, but I’m not too sure on that. Anyway, they spend nearly a decade building this tower in the desert under harsh conditions, many of them dying in the process, and after all is said and done, what happens? The wizard goes to the top, jumps off and falls to his death. SPLAT! So now all the slaves are standing there, like: "Huh."

I love what they do with the guitar solo in this song. The entire band does this upward scale, signifying the wizard going up the steps, followed by some high guitar notes to represent the crowd cheering for him to jump; he falters, and then the downward slide signifies his fall. It’s a very clever foreshadow to the verse that immediately follows, wherein his death is described.

Once he’s dead, the lyrics change to past tense, like: “Where is your star?" becomes “Where was your star?” And one of the most profound lines, in my opinion, is:

Look at my flesh and bone
Now look, look, look, look
Look at his tower of stone!

“Look at this big piece of shit,” basically.

I imagine the slave (whose perspective the story is told through) looking down at his hands, thinking about all the time they’d spent building this tower, only for the wizard’s flight to end up being the most spectacularly epic fucking failure of all time, and so now they’re stuck with this worthless tower. They’ve lost all sense of purpose—even though they’re free of the wizard’s influence—and they have no idea what to do or where to go.

There’s a fantastic buildup end to the track with the choir and strings section joining in, and Dio does a great job emoting the anguish and frustration of these now aimless slaves through his singing. It’s actually a cliffhanger ending, believe it or not; the second half is a song called ‘A Light in the Black,’ which is about the slave finding his way, finding hope and finding a sense of purpose again. I haven’t dissected that song as much as this one, though—mostly because I like this one better. I’ve listened to ‘Stargazer’ countless times and it never gets old. Great song. And the album art is awesome too—as most were back then.

As far as subcontext, I’m not sure if there is a deeper meaning to the story. I’ve read a few theories, like it being a metaphor for Dio and Blackmore’s relationship in the band, but my personal takeaway is simply: beware of false prophets. (I’m not the best at interpreting deep meanings from things, so take it for what it’s worth).

Anyway, I don’t wanna ramble on for too long. I hope everyone is having a good summer, and hopefully we’ll be seeing more of ‘MLP EG Forever’ by the fall.

On second thought, you know what? I’m gonna dump some more songs here. I don’t usually like to do more than three, but you guys haven’t seen much of me lately, plus it’s REALLY hard to narrow it down to just a couple Dio tunes, so fuck it! We’re going all in!

Enjoy!

Temple of the King
Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow (1975)