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“It Hasn’t Been a Very Happy World for a While.”

Heaven & Hell Unleash The Devil You Know

We can all take away whatever magic we personally drew from Ronnie’s last years with us. For some, it will be a penultimate live show, the last experience hearing and seeing in the flesh Heaven & Hell, as the band with the fresh name and fresh coat of paint surprised us all by getting out on the tiles so much, connecting with so many fans and indeed bands that grew up on the Sabs and who are now part of the history of heavy metal themselves.

But to my mind, I think the most important thing Tony, Geezer, Vinny, and Ronnie got done is one last massive studio album, The Devil You Know being that sledge of a statement, emerging in 2009 on this writer’s birthday, April 28.

“It’s actually a surprise,” begins Geezer, holding court on August 13, 2008, backstage at the Molson Amphitheater, Toronto, in advance of the band’s set on the Metal Masters tour, which also included Testament, Motörhead, and Judas Priest. “Because, as I probably told you before, this was only going to be a one-off tour. Well, it was originally going to be just Radio City, put out a DVD of that particular lineup. But that had such an incredible response, we ended up doing the whole world tour. And at the end of it, everyone was getting on really well, so we thought, ‘Well, while it’s going well, let’s take the next step and try writing a new album.’ And we sat down together for about six weeks and came out with six brand-new songs. So we’re doing this tour, and then we’re going to go back in and finish writing, and then record the album.”

The classy, restrained triumph that would be Ronnie James Dio’s last studio album perhaps goes a little overboard graphically speaking.

So put in perspective, here we were eight months before the launch of The Devil You Know, and the guys had already gotten well along. “Yeah, this is in the last few months,” notes Geez, who says he can’t say much about the songs. “Not a lot at the moment, no, because we don’t know which ones are going to end up on the album. But you’ll know that it’s us. There are no great big surprises on there, just good stuff, good heavy stuff. Six done, and we’re hoping to do another four or five.”

But Geezer considers these new songs demos at this point. “Yeah, well, Tony’s got his studio in England and Ronnie has a studio in L.A. We’ve been backward and forward between both studios, and what we’re doing is, we’re going to get like eleven songs written, and then go through them with a fine-tooth comb kind of thing, and get them really tight.”

Asked whether there was a producer picked, Butler figures, “No, we don’t need to. We’re working with a really good engineer at the moment, who’s been working with us—Mike Exeter. He did Tony’s last solo album and worked with us on the three new songs on the ‘best of’ album. He engineered the three new songs, and the good thing about him is he’s really fast, which is what we need.”

Meanwhile, it was business as usual, with very few changes to the set list versus the ’07 jaunt. “On this tour? Yeah, because it’s such as short set that were doing, we’re only doing seventy-five minutes. And originally, we put ‘Ear in the Wall’ and ‘Time Machine’ in the set, but the first night we ran over on time, so we couldn’t go on and do ‘Neon Knights.’ So now we had to drop ‘Ear in the Wall’ so we can put ‘Neon Knights’ back in. So there’s only ‘Time Machine,’ really, that is a change from the last tour.”

“Once again were calling this Heaven & Hell and not Black Sabbath,” noted Ronnie on the set list philosophy, back in ’07. “And we’re defining a kind of line in the road, which is better for us. We certainly have enough material to do. I think the Ozzy thing has been done. All you had to do was to go to every Ozzfest, and you got those, and that’s the guy who sang them. I did them in the original days because we only had one album. We only had Heaven and Hell, and we couldn’t fill all the time considerations with just that album. And at that time, it was still Black Sabbath; it was Black Sabbath with a different singer. And it made sense to do the things that Sabbath had been known for. We didn’t do a full slate of Ozzy songs, but we did enough to fill the time slots and we did the ones we thought were important, like ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man.’ But this time we have more than enough material and more than enough, perhaps, vision not to do those.

“There’s a song off of Dehumanizer called ‘I’ that I like a lot,” furthers Ronnie, asked to think deep catalogue. “I like that album just generally. If it was up to me, I would do most of it. But no, once again, my own band has kept all this music alive for a long time, and we will continually go in and do a different Sabbath song. I have that luxury, so I’ve done kind of most of them. There’s not really anything that I’m going to petition for. It’s more of a case of a sitting down and figuring out what we want to do.”

How about “Slipping Away” or “Country Girl?” “We’ve done ‘Slipping Away’ and ‘Country Girl’ before, so it’s not that we haven’t touched upon those. But yeah, they are all choices. But I don’t want to impress myself upon them and say…I mean, there are some songs that I think we should absolutely do, and I will impress myself upon those. But there are others where I may go, ‘Should we do this one?’ ‘No, let’s not.’ ‘Fine.’ And I’ll go with that. But we’ll make our decisions, talk about what we want to do and what’s feasible. Once again, we’re just approaching it as how much fun it’s going to be to play those songs again, in their entirety, and with the same people who played them, and to present ourselves on the stage this way again. And I’m sure, that’s just how Tony and Geez and Vinny feel too. We’ve always been proud of the songs we had done together, and we’ve always been proud of the fact that when we played them, people really liked them.”

“On the last tour, when we started off in Canada, I got bronchitis,” says Geezer, asked about his health this time out. “And I just couldn’t get rid of it for the full length of it. Eventually, we got to Australia and it turned into pneumonia, and I just couldn’t get rid of it at all. So I was on all kinds of antibiotics and everything. But you know, hopefully I won’t get that this time.”

Amusingly, before this all started, back in January ’07, Geezer told me his main problem was “I’ve got really fat, but that’s about it. Because I haven’t done anything for a year [laughs]. I’m just about to, tomorrow, go up to Monmouth Mountain, to go skiing and get myself fit. That’s about it. I go for walks and stuff. I don’t do anything heavy, in case I hurt any fingers or anything.” Skiing had been only a recently adopted hobby for Butler, Geezer classing himself as “terrible,” adding, “I’m always frightened, like I said, of breaking anything, especially before a tour. So I keep it really simple. I hope I won’t be talking to you from the hospital next time [laughs].”

“He always goes on; he always says something,” laughs Tony about Geezer and his “moaning.” “I think you have to sort of get yourself sorted, otherwise you collapse [laughs]. Especially at our age, to get out and do it, you’ve got to keep yourself in some kind of shape. I like to try to get myself sorted certainly a month before I go out, or six weeks. I think, ‘Well, I’ve got to get out and play and pay more attention to everything.’ I don’t get a personal trainer. I’ve got a mate of mine who is a personal trainer, but he came over once, and said, ‘Oh, why don’t you come over?’ And I said ‘No, I don’t need all that.’ I mean, I’ve done it for so long over the years; I don’t need to be doing stuff like that. That’s what I did before I’d got into music. So I sort of know what I need from my body to keep in shape. I was into a lot of weight lifting and everything before I’d got into music. Because I was going to do…I used to do karate like five times a week. I used to love all that sort of stuff. I did boxing, because that’s what I thought I was going to be doing. I didn’t expect to be in a band. I thought I was going to do something that had do with physical contact—contact sports.”

“I ran, and I was a baseball player,” adds Ronnie, same subject. “You know, I just walk every morning, three or four miles, get my lungs in action. And other than that, no, I don’t do anything. I don’t exercise. My voice…I don’t warm up, ever. I’ve just been able to do it at this level, over time. A lot of it is a matter of technique. I’ve got a strong voice and I know how to use it. Some days…I hope it’s not going to go soon.”

“Ronnie has always amazed me anyway, with what he does,” chimes in Tony, on Ronnie’s ability to sing so accurately, passionately, and powerfully at his age. “How he can go on and sing like that…and he doesn’t warm up or anything. He just walks on and sings. Absolutely great at that. So everything amazes me with this band, all around, really. We can say that about each other. How are we still doing it at this age? But you do it because you enjoy it, and with Ronnie, he enjoys it, it’s part of his life, he loves to go out and do it. He’s a pure professional. He doesn’t want to cancel shows or anything. He wants to go to do it. It’d have to be pretty rough for him to cancel the show.”

“I only eat once a day; sometimes I don’t eat at all,” continues Ronnie, the irony of these statements tragically rife now, considering his death from stomach cancer shortly thereafter. “Very bad with that. It’s certainly not anything I recommend to anyone. But I get into my routine and I’m just…I’m not hungry, I don’t want to eat, for no reason, and I just eat a meal in the evening and that’s it. You know, I should have a better diet but I don’t. You know, it’s silly to stuff yourself. Silly also to not eat all day long, but it’s also silly to stuff yourself with a giant meal, especially if you’re going to bed in a couple hours. I just make sure I have something, because at that point you get hungry. I just make sure I have something in my stomach, because I have work to do. I think a lot of it is just my natural metabolism, probably. So I would think yeah, I would think my caloric content is down quite a bit. But I probably make up for the lack of calories by eating a high-calorie meal [laughs]. I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t eat vegetables. I don’t believe in vegetables. Fish or meat and that’s it. Or potatoes or something like that. So I get enough of what I need, plus, again, a lot of it is being a little bit cautious about what you put in your body, and walking all the time.

“Only that we’ve written them, really, and they’re great,” is the way Ronnie introduced the prospect of new material, same day, same place as my chat with Geezer, namely Toronto, August 2008. “And the writing process has been wonderful—very pleasant, extremely productive. And we did it at my house, which made me a lot happier because I could be home. No, it was great; the songs were great. I think it’s a gateway to what’s going to be a hell of an album, a really, really good album. Truthfully, I don’t remember what I wrote. It’s been a while since we’ve done it, and I remember a couple of the titles, of course, but I don’t want to give titles away. Lyrically, now, I say it’s better to wait till it’s finished. There may be something wonderful in there, but I like to be a little bit more secretive about it. It’s better to have people salivate for it, so salivate, guys.

“It will be released, I would assume, in the first part of the year, probably March,” figured Ronnie, estimating a little earlier than the actual issue date, as it would transpire. “Because we’re going to South America in March, and the tour will encompass all of the places we haven’t been, and a lot of the places we have been. We’ve toured America quite extensively over the period of these releases that have been more compilations than anything else. So I think it’s time for us to stay away from North America a little and let people desire it a little bit more. So we’ll do South America, as I said, probably Russia; we’ve been to Japan and Australia, and I think we’ll go to the Middle East this year. And of course a lot of festivals in Europe—Wacken festival, Sweden Rock, those kinds of things. So there are a lot of places to play; it’ll be a long tour.”

Fast-forward seven months, and the release of The Devil You Know was most assuredly at hand, which is why I was able to get Tony on the phone for a little celebration of said event, Iommi beginning the proceedings by breaking down some of the complicated logistics around making the record.

“I think in my studio, we put together the basic ‘Breaking into Heaven’ track—that was the first one. But mainly, at my studio, this time, I just put a lot of stuff down on CD, a lot of ideas, and went off to L.A. with quite a bit of stuff, really. And the idea was, we all thought we would do a CD—Ronnie would do one and Geezer would do one—of their ideas. So we met up at Ronnie’s house, his studio, and just went through the CDs of what we’ve got to work on, and we picked out a particular riff we wanted to work on. Or I might’ve done half the song, and it just needed some more parts, and then we would start building them up, really, one track at a time. And we were at Ronnie’s house for about six weeks, I think, so we wrote some new parts, and we’d probably done about six tracks then, at that point.”

Asked what we might hear on an ideas CD from Geezer, Tony says, “It’s just bits of riffs, really. Geezer tends to go in and play riffs, and it might be just twenty minutes of playing. He would play guitar on the pieces he would present. Ronnie would do the same. He would play guitar, put some riffs down. But Ronnie, on a couple of them, he put some ideas for the vocal as well so you could see where it was going. And then you narrow it down to pick a couple of riffs. ‘Oh, that’s a good one; we’ll use that.’ That’s how he tends to do it. With mine, I tend to work it out more, and pick out ones where I knew it was quite suitable. Whereas Geezer would play quite a few things. And he had quite a few good riffs on it, and Ronnie did as well. It was pretty healthy, to have so much stuff that we could go through and use.”

Despite various ailments, Heaven & Hell embarked on a rigorous tour schedule—the world was fortunate to experience so many magical Ronnie James Dio performances before his untimely demise from stomach cancer on May 16, 2010.

“It was very much different from the way we’d done it before,” seconds Ronnie. “We’ve always gone into a rehearsal studio, turned on all the amps, and pounded it out. I think we found we needed to try a different way this time. We had a bit more of a long-distance relationship in the beginning of it all, so this time we went into the studio, my studio, a recording studio, a demo studio, and we just did it face-to-face, just the three of us, only just using the amplification through the recording system, so we didn’t blow our brains out. And it was just wonderful. We were able to do it so well face-to-face, but of course, before that, yes, we put together some ideas when we were away, to get into the writing process together, and that really helped so much. Tony had about fifteen things, Geez had about twelve or thirteen, and I had the same, and we just listened to everything and decided on what we liked best. ‘That will work.’ ‘Yeah, I like that.’ So we just decided to work on the things we liked from all the presentations that each person had. And that’s the way we did it.

“On my demos, I played everything on it, with the addition of the drum machine,” says Ronnie, also asked who tended to do what to their personal demos. “So yeah, I played everything, just like Geezer did, and obviously Tony did as well. Geezer played guitar on his. I think there was even one solo somewhere. It’s not going to be used. I mean, he’s not Tony. It’s like my bass parts—we’re not going to use them, because I’m not Geezer. And none of them are drummers. But we could do things with drum machines, and obviously we have a good sense of rhythm. So we would put really simple things out so there was a backbeat there, and on mine, I like to mess with fills and everything. But they’re pretty bare-boned. But again, you need a basis. And sometimes the ideas you have in there, they’re stuck in there for the wrong reasons. But everybody plays enough just to get by.”

Then it was off to the fabled Rockfield in Wales, to cut the tracks in a proper, full-service old school environment.

“Right, well,” says Tony, “we had done six weeks at Ronnie’s, writing, and then we had a break, and then went on the Metal Masters tour with Priest for a month. Then after that, we’d done another six weeks writing at Ronnie’s, and then we went into a rehearsal room and played them all live, and made sure we got them all pretty well how we wanted them. And then we came over to England, to Rockfield studios in Wales, to record. Because we wanted to basically have it all prepared and walk in the studio and play them and tape it.

You see, the good thing about Rockfield, really, for us, it’s out of the way, we can all live together, we can all stay there—you’ve got all of the accommodation and everything. So you don’t get bothered as such. You don’t get a lot of people dropping by, because it’s very quiet there. And that’s what we wanted. We wanted to get somewhere where we could concentrate on what we were doing. If we’d done it in L.A., we would’ve been all over the place. But it’s nice to go someplace were you can’t do a lot, and get doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Still, bloody hangers on…the guys couldn’t get away from one Robert Plant! “Yeah, Planty dropped by,” laughs Tony. “He came over one day. Just talking about general things, what he’s up to and that.”

“Yeah, he came by, but I was at the grocery store,” adds Ronnie. “His son was recording there. His son was doing something for two or three days, during the time we were there, so Robert had come down to see his son, and he stopped in the studio. Like I say, I wasn’t there, but I think Geez and Tony saw him. In fact, Vinny and I were both gone.

“This was the second time,” continues Ronnie, asked about fun times in Wales. “We’d done Dehumanizer there. You know, the only thing that really happened that was extremely funny was Vinny had a habit of drying—well, a good habit—drying his hair off every time when we were recording, because he sweats so much. So we…he came up to me and said, ‘My hair dryer is broken,’ and I said, ‘Okay, you can use mine,’ went and got my hair dyer, and in the meantime, Tony’s tech says, ‘Let me look at his hair dryer and see if I can fix it.’ So he went and looked. It was a wire disconnected. He reconnected it and we poured a bottle of—whatever the container is called—of talcum powder, in the back of the hair dryer, and went into the studio. So we went out and did the track, and we’d forgotten all about what we had done. We finished the track and we were excited about it, and finally Vinny came in and looked like Casper, the Friendly Ghost. Talcum powder just went everywhere all over him. You’ve got to do something to relieve the tension. In the old days we probably would’ve set each other on fire or killed each other or something. But we’ve grown up so much, and we just enjoy each other’s company, and we enjoy taking the mickey out of each other.”

“While we’re playing, he can be writing lyrics down,” continues Tony, asked about Ronnie’s lyrical modus operandi. “Whenever we rehearse or whatever it is, you can see him jotting stuff down. And when we were at his house, he actually would disappear for half an hour and then come back, have a listen, go again, and he’s just writing ideas, making notes, and when we’d come back the next day, or to work on the song again, he would have an idea of what he’s going to say. And so he would sort of stay up until, I don’t know, two or three o’clock in the morning writing lyrics. But it was a real band effort. He shared what he was going to do with everybody, and, ‘Do you like it?’ like we do with everything when we write the music. Everybody has to like what we do. Otherwise if somebody doesn’t like a particular riff or doesn’t like a part, we don’t do it.

“There’s no rainbows,” laughs Tony, asked about the differences he’s seen in Ronnie’s lyrics since the old days. “But no, I actually like the lyrics he’s done on here. There are some tongue-in-cheek ones, so I think, yes, good, what he’s done.”

O’er to Vinny, I asked Tony whether Vin was still the guy who keeps track of Tony’s riffs, juggling his countless cassettes, sifting the good from the merely mortal. “Yeah, well, he doesn’t have that job now. We fired him,” laughs Tony. “No, Vinny was…I actually took my engineer over with me that works here at my studio, and he came over, and he actually had done the engineering on this album. So we had him there. So Vinny was redundant on that side of it, so we could actually have Mike do a rough thing on the computer. He would take it all down, and it worked out that way, really.”

I inquired of Ronnie whether he felt that there was a vibe within the ten new Devil You Know songs that was different to that of the three tracks the guys did for The Dio Years. “Oh, well, that was really the stimulus for it all,” figures Ronnie. “I think once we embarked upon doing an entirely new album, we completely forgot about those things. Those were something we had done, once again, and proved to be very pleasurable for us to do, and eye-opening, and how well we can do this again? Once we started to do the album, I think we completely totally forgot about that, because we are now embarking on another ten songs we have to write, and really, what do they have to do with the other ones? Nothing. But their importance was that they got the ball rolling.”

And what about The Devil You Know as a title? “That was Geezer’s title. I don’t think we were really that concerned about it, to tell you the truth. So we usually let Geezer do things like that, because he’s got a great way with words. And when it was presented, I just went, ‘Fine, great.’ You could call it Mayonnaise as far as I was concerned. To me what was important was what was inside of it. It just didn’t matter, you know, the title. And I was happy Geez did it. Obviously that’s important to him too. So it was just a title that we used. It wasn’t Mayonnaise; it was better than that, a better title than Mayonnaise.”

“Yes, Geezer came up with The Devil You Know,” confirms Tony. “And there are some others he came up with, some funny ones, but that one really appealed to me straightaway, and the same with Ronnie. We said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s good.’ Can’t remember any others, and if I could, I wouldn’t tell you, because it’s Geezer’s typical humor [laughs].”

And with that title went some incredibly wicked cover art reminiscent of the H. R. Giger abomination reprised for Celtic Frost’s To Mega Therion. Says Dio, “We just presented it to the guy who had done the cover for The Dio Years—I can never remember his name. Great guy, Japanese guy. And I think he farmed this one out to…the guy who did the artwork I think was Finnish or Norwegian, Per Haagensen, I think his name was. And so we had let the record company do it. We said basically, ‘We’d like to try this guy again; he did a great job,’ and we submitted it to him and then what you see is what was approved.”

Indeed, Masaki Koike at Phyx Design is credited with art direction and design and Per Øyvind Haagensen with the cover illustration.

“Yep, I think it was somebody who worked for him. He was busy; I mean, he’d won a Grammy for his art, so I think he perhaps did that. But I know how really involved in it he was. He was really excited about the things he does for us, and when we did the last photo session, he came down and said it was so good to see us. And he said he hadn’t done the artwork yet and he couldn’t wait to get to it. So I’m sure with his overseeing it, it was going to be something we would really liked.”

The Devil You Know opens with a slow bulldozer of a track (and there are quite a few of those on here!) that is about as doomy as Heaven & Hell could ever possibly get. Turns out that Ronnie can stake some degree of claim to the actual riff on this one.

Yes, ‘Atom and Evil,’ let’s see, I think that was probably it as far as full riffs that we decided to do. Other parts are vocal parts, melody parts, and a change here and there.” And given that Ronnie dove right into the music on this one, it’s actually one of the few demo tracks he ventured full lyrics for as well. “Yes, only on one—just on ‘Atom and Evil.’ You know, I didn’t want to start impressing on them all of the ideas I had right away, in case they needed to be changed, or a break needed to be changed or whatever. So I did that one because I worked on it for a while and I liked it and thought it would really work. And it was easy for a nice presentation like that, rather than just bits and pieces. So I did that, and once again, I wasn’t trying to impress my full psyche on them all, so when we started to write, so with all the ideas we hashed out, we were all happy with what we did together. ‘You do that, I do that, we’re still working on that.’”

Older and wiser, for the Heaven & Hell project, the Sabbath guys put past petty arguments in perspective and got on with the task at hand.

Immediately, one notices the crushing drum sound bestowed upon the record and, indeed, how everything fits so well in the mix. “Well, the band produced it, with Mike Exeter, the engineer,” offers Tony. “And Mike did the one bit of keyboards we’ve got, because he’s a keyboard player as well. And then after we recorded the album, we went to Wyn Davis in Los Angeles, and he’d done the mixing of it, and I think he probably touched the drums up a bit. But I mean, the sounds are mostly there, as we had done them.”

One also notices that Vinny’s drum performance, as with the earlier three new tracks, is quite restrained with respect to fills, something laid quite bare on slower tracks like “Atom and Evil,” “Follow the Tears,” and closer “Breaking into Heaven.”

Opines Iommi, “Yeah, he does sometimes get a bit fast with rolls and stuff like that, but maybe he didn’t want to do it this time. We might’ve come across…sometimes when we were actually putting a track down, he might’ve gone a bit over the top to try something, and he would decide himself, ‘Well, I’m going to keep it a bit more simple.’ And we’d record it again, and he would do it a bit more simple.”

“I think Vinny had learned early on, when he joined the band and we started to record things, that most of us didn’t like overbusy work,” adds Ronnie. “I certainly didn’t mind it in Dio. That was a different thing; we were creating something totally new and I just let him have his way, and it worked. But Tony and Geez come from a little bit of a different train of thought, and I think it’s the right train of thought, that the backbone of it all is Geezer and Tony. I mean, not to say Vinny isn’t brilliant too. But you know what I mean by that. So knowing what their wishes were, I think he honestly laid back a little bit and didn’t overplay. That’s an easy thing to do when you’re as good as Vinny, because there are a lot of holes, a lot of spaces, and the natural tendency is to fill them all the time. But no, I think this time he took it a bit easier.

“I think we write as products of the time we live in,” reflects Ronnie, prompted for an assessment of the worldview he presented lyrically on this sense-bludgeoner of an album. “And let’s face it, it hasn’t been a very happy world for a while. So when we were in the writing process, we were being affected by what was going around us socially. In my case, because I put words to things, there are some, I think, more pessimistic attitudes in this particular piece. And you must remember too that it seems to be—or at least let’s hope now—that we’ve got somebody that we have a connection with as a president, and somebody who has really kind of brought us all together, almost on a global scale. So at this point I probably would’ve written something a little bit more optimistic. But once again, this is at the time when we did that. And my view was the fat cats and the people who are controlling our lives continually made the wrong decisions and put us into this place. So a lot of this is my railing against…not necessarily government. I’m not a political person, but I’ve always felt that very few people control everything that happens in this world; people control the oil and all the CEOs, giant conglomerations, and so it’s that kind of thing I’m talking about.”

One of Ronnie’s favorite lyrics, and one that fits this train of thought, is “Eating the Cannibals,” Ronnie’s Swiftian tale set to an up-tempo and rock ’n’ rollsy track with a melodic twist.

“‘Eating the Cannibals’ is a very simple idea,” says Ronnie, “that we’ve been devoured and eaten and gotten fat on the flesh and bones of the common man for such a long time. But I thought, ‘Well, I think I’m going to open up a restaurant and serve them, cook them, so the common man can get fat on them, or least get some meat on their bones.’ So that’s what it’s going to be: eating the cannibals. And that’s kind of a pervading idea through this album.”

Massive album closer “Breaking into Heaven” serves as a tidy bookend to opening track “Atom and Evil,” the two creating a sludge sandwich with much of the fireworks occurring between these two plates of steel, if I may horrible mix a few metaphors.

Says Dio, “‘Breaking into Heaven’ is also a very straight song, not so politically oriented, but it certainly could be, or could be socially oriented. Because it’s about the angels who were once thrown out of heaven, which I guess became Lucifer’s guys, wandering the earth for many millennia—in the song, anyway. And all this time they’re plotting to get back into heaven and have a war in heaven, sort of throw the angels and throw all the supposedly good people out, and take back what they’ve missed by having nothing on earth. And you know, that really speaks about the same thing as people who have been oppressed and terribly dissatisfied, and revolting against it. So there’s a couple examples of that.”

One of the more immediately accessible tracks, given its forward and hefty chug, is “Double the Pain,” keeper, perhaps, of the album’s most grinding groove.

“That song is actually about someone who really loves to whine and moan,” offers Ronnie, “someone who needs his pain. There are people like that who have to be beaten down before they are happy, and it’s a song about someone like that. So the very last line says, ‘Double the pain; I thought I saw him smile. Double the pain; let’s kick him for a while.’ So it’s all through the song, trying to define ways to make him suffer a little bit more, until finally in the very end, it still looks as if he’s a bit happy about something, so you wanna kick him again. So it’s about that. It’s about someone who enjoys pain.”

But the big song on the album, the main radio track as it were, would turn out to be “Bible Black,” its mournful and death-drenched lyrics taking on rich resonance given our loss of Ronnie.

“I like ‘Bible Black’ a lot, because it’s so Dioesque—it really is,” explains Dio. “A lot of what I’m saying inside the song goes to this mysterious place, and so it does have a little mystery and fantasy involved. And I like it just because of the story. Once again, it’s very difficult to write an entire idea in a song, because you don’t have enough time. And in this case, ‘Bible Black,’ I could write a book about it. But you don’t have the luxury of that, so, it’s just about a guy who…and I write about people, as you know. So this is about a guy who is pretty miserable, humdrum job, every day goes to his job, every night comes back home to his small room. And one day he goes back to his room and does the usual, sits down and reaches for a book, and this book is all bound in black leather, and upon reading it, the first page that he read said, ‘You have found the answer,’ the next page that he read said, ‘I wish that you were dead.’ And the warning comes out: ‘Put it down, you won’t come back, you’re reading from the Bible black.’

Tony and Ozzy both came to be known for their signature eyewear.

Photo by Brandon Marshall

“And that’s the song, to set it up, obviously, that this is what the guy was doing. And as the song goes on, they find him naked in the rain, didn’t know what happened, just had no idea what was going on. But one thing he did know, he said, ‘Let me go, I found religion, and the light has made me blind. Give me back…I must have the Bible black.’ So he’s addicted to this book, and the book takes him to these places that get him out of that life that he hates so much.”

All told, The Devil You Know lives up to expectations, which of course were high, tracks like “Neverwhere” and “Turning the Screw” helping to write the narrative that Heaven & Hell weren’t going to “overlove” us with the dirginess Tony and Ronnie seemed to have a tolerance for over most. Yet there’s a singularity of purpose and sound and lyrical vision to the composite of these tracks that places the album somewhere between Mob Rules, Dehumanizer, and every last Dio album from Strange Highways forward, save maybe for Killing the Dragon.

And, sadly, we all know the story from here. Heaven & Hell would, immediately, upon release of The Devil You Know, throw themselves into tour dates, rocking us regally from May through the end of summer, unknowingly performing their last concert ever on August 29, 2009, in Passaic, New Jersey. On November 29, it was announced to the world that Ronnie had been stricken with stomach cancer, the disease taking him on May 16 of the following year, a remarkable life of music eerily and succinctly complete.