Ed Ranks Ronnie James Dio-Fronted Bands

Ronnie James Dio was the best. He fronted some bands. Here they are, ranked.

Note that these are just bands that he fronted. He was a lead or supporting singer on a lot of other songs. However, lets not get into stuff like him being a singer on individual songs, such as on Roger Glover's The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, or his heavy metal alternative to shitty charity supergroups like Band Aid, called Hear 'n Aid (witty... sort of?).

5. Elf (AKA The Electric Elves, AKA Ronnie Dio and the Prophets, etc.)

Dio's first band as lead singer. He had previously been in The Vegas Kings, which transformed into Ronnie and the Rumblers, which then transformed into Ronnie and the Redcaps. Despite the initial "Ronnie and the..." names, Dio was not the lead singer of the band until it took the "Prophets" name. Eventually Ronnie Dio and the Prophets turned into The Electric Elves when it added a keyboard player, but didn't really release a full, real album until 1972, when they simply became Elf. Elf became a solid opening act for Deep Purple (hence Dio's aforementioned work with Roger Glover), but Dio wouldn't really hit his stride until he and Deep Purple gestalted into one entity, greater than the sum of its parts. But I'll talk about Rainbow later, my friends.


4. Heaven & Hell

I'm still not 100% sure that I can call Heaven & Hell a separate entity from Black Sabbath, but I guess I decided to. Really, this is just Black Sabbath. After Ozzy left Black Sabbath, Dio took over as the lead singer. I personally like RJD (not to be confused with RDJ) more than Ozzy, but it's not worth getting into any arguments over who was the best frontman of Sabbath. Most people will disagree with me. Whatever. Anyway, years and years and years later, Ozzy eventually rejoined Black Sabbath and went on tour with them. But just like all the confusion when Van Halen went on tour in later years with both Roth and Hagar variously taking turns as as lead singer, sometimes Black Sabbath toured with Dio in later years as lead singer instead. For legal reasons, and to avoid mass confusion, when Sabbath went on tour with Dio in the 2000s, they started calling themselves Heaven & Hell, after Sabbath's 9th studio album, which was the first to feature Dio.


3.  Black Sabbath

If Heaven & Hell and Black Sabbath are really the same band, then it makes sense that I should just rank the two right next together here at #3 and #4. After the tour for Sabbath's 1978 album Never Say Die!, Ozzy was fired and Ronnie James Dio eventually came on as the new lead singer. Ironically, one of the people most responsible for Ronnie taking over for Ozzy was a woman named Sharon Arden. She'd later become Sharon Osbourne. Dio-led versions of the band recorded the hit albums Heaven & Hell (1980) and Mob Rules (1981), and then a not-such-a-hit-album over a decade later, Dehumanizer (1992), following a number of lineup changes. Dio had left Sabbath in 1982 to start his own eponymous band, but would occasionally come back and tour with them again for time to time. He'd even release an album with them beyond Dehumanizer (named The Devil You Know, in 2010), but that was under the Heaven & Hell name. Black Sabbath might be a more famous and notable band than the #2 band below to most people, but it's certainly not higher ranked as a Ronnie James Dio-fronted band.


2. Rainbow

Deep Purple was an epic rock band, but it went through some tumultuous lineup changes over the years. Ritchie Blackmore, Deep Purple's lead guitarist, had some ideas and concepts that other band members weren't really liking (like adding more elements of classical music and singing about medieval shit), and so Blackmore decided to jam with Purple's opening act, Elf, and recorded some music with them instead. The result was eventually an album named Ritchie Blackmore's R-A-I-N-B-O-W (1975), with Dio on lead vocals, which is now seen as the first Rainbow album. Dio was obviiously all about incorporating all that epic medieval crap, and magic was born. The first album was so good that Blackmore left Deep Purple for good, and Rainbow would then go on a world tour and release the follow-up albums Rising (1976) and Long Live Rock 'n' Roll (1978). But after 1978, Blackmore wanted to take the band away from the "sword and sorcery" themes that Dio still loved to take the band in a more "commercial" direction. Thus Dio made the jump and departed for greener pastures in Black Sabbath.

1. Dio

Dio's best band is Dio, the heavy metal supergroup which he formed in 1982 after leaving Black Sabbath. Though RJD would eventually rejoin and team up with other old bands over the years, Dio still existed in one form or another until Dio's death in 2010. The first album, Holy Diver (1983), was the obvious best and featured the song with the same name, as well as the awesome "Rainbow in the Dark" (arguably an epic diss track against Ritchie Blackmore; there are many different rival explanations to what the song is about, but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out there might be  a connection between the facts that Dio left a band named Rainbow over creative difference and then released a song called "Rainbow in the Dark"). For the next decade, Dio would continue to release darker, heavier albums such as The Last in Line (1984), Sacred Heart (1985), Dream Evil (1987), and
Lock Up the Wolves (1990) while the rest of metal was going all hair band crazy. Dio would continue to release albums in the 90's and beyond, but by that time the grunge / alt rock revolution had happened and Dio was reduced to being one of those old metal bands with old metal fans, mainly touring for nostalgia purposes. Ah well, thus time kills us all.