Dio: The Unholy Scriptures

Music writer Popoff (Anthem) presents an intimate if rambling oral history of the heavy metal band Dio centered on its eponymous late front man. Drawing from extensive interviews with Dio (born Ronald James Padavona), his wife, and band members, the author recounts how Dio and drummer Vinny Appice left Black Sabbath to form the band in 1982 Los Angeles. He then cycles through their oeuvre, from the edgy 1983 debut album Holy Diver, featuring “a priest wrapped in chains and drowning” on its sleeve and a dark, doomy sound that the band carried forward through nine more albums, culminating with 2004’s Master of the Moon, before Dio died of stomach cancer in 2010. What emerges is an admiring portrait of the enigmatic front man as a workaholic “perfectionist” who sought creative control, sparking tensions with band members (and causing frequent lineup turnover); who courted controversy; and who mixed his gruff heavy metal style with lyrics about magic, dragons, and mythical figures, which Dio saw as providing a sort of “escape from reality” to “the lost souls of the world.” Popoff stitches together lengthy quotes from interviews spanning decades, which alternate from funny to frustratingly tangential. The result is a mixed bag best suited for devoted fans. Photos. (June)