Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1

by Carnell, Thom

  Now, is the deal with DC that they can do anything, just not touch The Endless?

  No, the deal is much more ambiguous than that because, really, there is no real in the sense of anything that is enforceable. DC owns The Sandman. They own all the characters. They own everything I created during The Sandman period. Absolutely everything. They own it, and they can do whatever they like with it. All I said is that if they didn’t stop The Sandman at the time when I stopped it, then I would never do anything for them again. It was the only power that I had. And that is where things stand. Right now, Karen [Berger] is out there and she is protecting everything fairly well. She doesn’t want stuff being done with these characters. If somebody says, “Oh, can we do a little parody? Can we stick a Sandman parody in for a page in an Ambush Bug Special?” I’ll say, “Yeah, whatever.” I got an email the other day from Grant Morrison saying that he wants to use the Sandman in Justice League. I said, “Let me know what you want to do and I’m sure it will be fine.” In terms of real control and do I have any, no, absolutely not. It’s one reason why I’m tending to do other things. I like to do things I do have control over. On the other hand, DC is far more ethical than other parties.

  The reason why I brought that up was that I was curious because, in essence, the same sort of agreement was going on between Frank Miller, Marvel, and the Elektra character.

  Yes, exactly. Marvel turned around and did the Elektra comic.

  Which, by the way, I hear they are canceling.

  Well, good, now that they’ve alienated Frank to the point where he’ll never work for them again. I prefer, given the choice between the way things are with The Dreaming, the occasional Sandman Presents, whatever and, I hear this year, they’re going to be doing a Sandman companion book which will be a history and interviews and so on and so forth, I think that’s all great. I would much rather they did that than they brought out a new comic or whatever. Having said that, I’m also pragmatic. If ever The Sandman movie gets made, this thing will be out of my hands completely and there will be very little I can do except stand on the sidelines and hope that it isn’t too awful.

  Ronnie James Dio

  Interview Conducted by Catía

  In 1998, as we were pulling together Issue 14, Mayhem Records gave us the opportunity to interview Ronnie James Dio, one of my all time favorite singers. After being a fan since Dio joined Black Sabbath, I didn’t even give Thom the opportunity to do it – I had to interview him myself.

  I wasn’t disappointed. Rising above my geeky fangirl instinct to scream at the top of my lungs, “You are SO awesome!” I was able to pull off my third interview for Carpe Noctem without a hitch. Dio turned out to be a genuinely nice guy, and that’s how I’ll always remember him.

  ~ * ~

  … a Rainbow in the Dark – Issue 14

  ~ * ~

  Is it true that you did your first recording session at the age of ten?

  Yes, it is. My first band I had was when I was about seven and we played for a couple of years, learning and playing. We had dreams of making a record because that was the big thing, of course. So, we went to a place in a city about forty miles from where we lived. We didn’t drive, obviously, but we went to a place where the guy doubled as a photographer and he had a little two-track studio near his dark room somewhere. We went there and recorded two songs and that was it, really. It was one of those things with equipment that was just coming out. They had tape recorders before that, but it was in a very primitive stage.

  So, you were the vocalist?

  We did one instrumental and somebody else sang. I wasn’t singing at that time.

  What were you playing?

  I was playing trumpet at that time.

  When did you decide that you wanted to start singing?

  I never wanted to sing. I only wanted to play. I became the bass player eventually and I played bass for almost all of my musical life after I put that horn down – within rock and roll, anyway. I was more than content to be a bass player. I had no dreams or visions of myself as a singer. Although I had done a few things in school and church, things like that where you get pressed into service, things you don’t want to do anyway.

  …when it’s not cool to sing.

  It wasn’t the beginning and end of my life. ‘Oh, this is it. This is what I want to do.’ I just did it because I had to, because I was a kid who was told what to do. So, all the other people in the band I was in sang, or at least attempted to, until the realization came that nobody was very good. Then, it was my turn and they said, ‘All right, now you’re going to sing.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to sing. I want to just play.’ And they said, ‘No, you gotta sing.’ So, I did and it was very easy for me and it was a very natural thing to do. Again, because I started when I was five years old as a trumpet player, I learned very quickly that the same principals apply to singing as do to playing the horn. As long as you breathe right, and sing from your diaphragm, chances are you’re not going to blow your voice away. Again, I applied those techniques and it was just very easy for me. So, I became a singer, but I remained the bass player for a long, long time and sang and played. Which was something that held me more in good stead than anything, because it’s a very difficult role for a singer in a rock and roll band especially because you’re usually shouted down. You can’t be heard over the din of drums, basses, and guitars if that’s what they choose to do. You’re excluded because they don’t think of a singer as a musician. ‘He’s just the singer…’ It’s hard to get connected with the rest of the people in the band unless you are a musician and you can talk in those musical terms. Again, it’s held me in good stead to be able to have that knowledge. And all of that stems from being a player in a band first as opposed to just being a vocalist.

  That surprises me because you’re in the top three of my all-time favorite male vocalists. I think you have an awesome voice and you really know how to use it.

  Singing is very much mental as well. You must first decide whether you’ve got any talent. I was lucky enough to have some passed on through the genes of my parents, obviously. My dad had a great voice. It’s not a rock voice, but just a shower voice. I’m of Italian extraction so we had a lot of opera in our house. I was very aware of what vocalists could do, but not until I was pressed into service did I apply my mental capacity to what has to be done with a singer. We’re talking about a very physical thing here. When we’re on the road, and the guitar player has a cold, he can still play. If the drummer has a cold, he can still play. But, if the singer has a cold, it’s going to affect his ability to perform properly and that becomes a real mental problem. So, it’s a very difficult role for the vocalist to hold, especially within a hard rock band, if that singer has any thoughts of wanting to be good. There are singers out there who couldn’t care less if they have a cold or pneumonia or had their throat cut because they probably don’t sound any better. But, again, it’s a very mental process and I was able to take that standard and apply it to the vocal thing and it was just real easy for me.

  Who are some of the vocalists that you think live up to that?

  Paul Rodgers. Rod Stewart in his early days before he told us about how sexy he became. Rod was one of my heroes early on. He was a rock singer. He had great texture, a great voice. I think Geoff Tate from Queensryche. I think Chris Cornell is absolutely great. Soundgarden is one of my favorite bands. A band I thought was going to make a cross-over from metal to a little more modern, but, unfortunately, they broke up, too. Those are some of the people. There are others.

  Do you ever get a chance to listen to any black metal or the stuff that’s coming out of Sweden now?

  No, I haven’t looked into it. I haven’t heard it. I’d have to have the opportunity to listen to it first before I made a judgment on it. I don’t want to say anything about something I haven’t heard. What’s it like?

  It’s really dark and very fast.

  Like speed metal?

  Yea, but it’s gone one darke
r, very rebellious like punk was when it first came out. We sometimes refer to the vocals as ‘cookie monster.’

  [laughs] I know them very well and there’s one good reason why I probably won’t listen to it. I don’t have an awful lot of time with people who can’t sing, especially being a singer, I know what it takes to have a good voice, to have to deal with having a good voice. I looked into that cookie monster stuff and I have no time for it. That’s not a voice to me. It’s something I can do without. I mentioned Soundgarden, that, to me, had all the tradition of Zeppelin and Purple, but yet, it crossed the line. It did things in a much more modern way. It was listening to what young people were doing and taking that and absorbing it into a system. The other stuff, I don’t find it new. I don’t find cookie monster voices new. I don’t find playing as fast as you can very exciting. Things have to be textured. That’s what makes an album to me very listenable. The fact that you have three fast songs and then you get have a different perspective on the music because now there’s either a big heavy piece of music that’s slower. When it comes to this one form of music, I don’t think it crosses enough barriers. Again, I’d have to listen to it before I make a judgment so I’m not going to say I blanketly hate it. If it’s what I think it is, I’m not going to like it very much.

  I think that’s true about any style of music. You have some good stuff and a lot of really horrible stuff. You can probably pick something good in anything.

  I think the saving grace is that there will be one or two good things that might come out of it and perhaps influence music in a way, but I think if it’s all blanketly the same, I don’t think it will do anything but make a little scratch in the glass and go away. Especially coming from Sweden, those people are nuts.

  They’re killing each other over there over band rivalries and when you have that kind of stuff happening people will say, ‘Rock and roll or metal is satanic and evil.’ What do you think about fundamentalists and alarmists who dismiss what you’re doing as falling into that?

  Well, you never listen. Either fortunately or unfortunately, we had a song on the Pat Boone album and I met Pat and loved him. I think he’s one of the greatest people I’ve ever met. I mean, the guy’s a legend for a start and anybody who doesn’t look at a guy who was as big as Elvis Presley when Elvis Presley was Elvis Presley is a bit foolish. He’s just a great man and, for me, it was very fortunate that I met him. As far as the music goes, here’s a guy who could have been the poster boy for the fundamentalist establishment, yet here’s a guy who loves metal. He loves it. He finds it not to be stupid and good musically. He finds the things that I said are not evil and here’s the ultimate Christian for God’s sake. He has no problem with it. But, then again, let’s have a look at what they did to him when he came out with his Pat Boone and his metal mood kind of thing. His own religion almost crucified him. They threw him off of his Christian broadcasting system. It’s just that people don’t sit down and listen to what’s going on like Pat Boone did. They just blanketly say, ‘Ah, there’s a minor chord there and this guy sounds like the Cookie Monster, there must be evil in that.’ I tend not to listen to those people. I have no time for them. They’re not people I would invite to a party or go to a party with because we obviously have different views. I’m an open-minded person and very honest. That’s their problem; they just never open their hearts and their minds and their souls to what could be. They just say, ‘No, this is wrong. Children shouldn’t listen to it. That’s the end of it.’

  We get a lot of that around here. Do you still get that kind of reaction? Is that something where you’ve been lucky that you haven’t been touched by that too much?

  Before that happened. You need to maintain a hell of a lot of success to still be looked at that way. The kind of music that we, and others like us, made has gone away for five or six years as far as the attention of the broadcast media. If people aren’t hearing what you’re doing, or if you’re not in the public eye, then you tend to go away and nobody cares about it. So, we haven’t had any problems with that. In the old days, of course, we had to be certified child safe and all that kind of stuff. They wanted to put labels on our records, but, luckily, our record company said that was crap. We’ve had problems in the past. Any time you have success, especially in a dark way, you’re going to be lumped into that category, especially when you’re in Black Sabbath. When you’re in that band, it doesn’t matter what you do, you could have sung Amazing Grace and people will think you’re a Satanist. For all of those reasons, I’m in that category, but it doesn’t bother me because I know what I am and the fans that listen to the music I’ve made all these years know what the messages are. They know there are not any evil messages intended. Before I was in Sabbath, Sabbath material with Ozzy was generally a warning about evil. It was like, ‘There is evil in the world and it’s probably something we should be aware of.’ It wasn’t a matter of ‘Let’s praise Satan. The Devil is the guy’ and all of that. It was never that. People read into it what they want. Especially when you have a name like Black Sabbath, people want to read that into it. ‘This is an evil bunch of guys.’ In defense of some of those people, we, as musicians, have never really gone on the board and said, ‘We’re not evil. This is all crap. What’s wrong with you people?’ We often act stupid and it was a marketing ploy of its own, really, not something that we invented. But, hey, we all just grabbed the rope that was hanging off the back of the truck and got dragged along with it. So, it’s our fault as well, but, I think, that if people listen to the inherent message in the songs, they’ll realize that I, and some other people who have been accused of this like Judas Priest, are not evil people.

  Do you think that people like that would ever really have listened if you would have come out and said, ‘This is not what we’re about?’

  I said that before. I’ve said, ‘This is not what I’m trying to say.’ I’m talking really about life and the fact is that there is an evil part of life, so get used to it and try to avoid it if you can. I have come out and said, ‘What am I being called evil for? That’s not what I am.’ But, people don’t listen to that. Their preconceived notion is ‘This is an evil person. This person was in Black Sabbath. On his Dio albums he has this monster drowning a priest. This has got to be the most evil guy on the face of the planet.’ After a while, you don’t protest anymore. You just say, ‘Oh, whatever. Who cares. Nothing these people say is going to change my world.’

  You mentioned earlier the media shifting their attention away from your type of music. From the eighties to the nineties you could sense a shift in the kind of music that was getting played on radio and this modern rock thing is so popular. How difficult was that for you not only financially but emotionally as well?

  Well, I’ve never really worried about money. I’m not a money person. I’m lucky in that I have people who deal with that for me. In the early days, I had people who dealt with that for me and took it all. Since 1983, since I’ve been managed by my wife, at least you know you can trust that person. At least until the divorce gets finalized… That’s a joke, by the way.

  [Laughs] I got that.

  I’ve been very fortunate to let someone else deal with my business things. So, as far as financial terms, I’ve never really cared about that. I can always go to a bar and play tonight and make enough money to eat. Lifestyle’s not important to me. It never was. I never went into this thinking I was going to be financially very well off, which turned out to be the truth. If you don’t worry about money and worry about finances, I guess, when you don’t have it, it’s never a problem. So, that’s not something that really bothers me. It was always the music. For me, it was always wanting to please people with the music that was made, wanting to please your peers, and have people say, ‘Wow, you’re really good and that band is great!’ That’s all I really cared about. So, that made it more difficult when the attention went away, but, I think, there are people who crawl into little holes after that happens and just go away and can’t
do anything else with it. Sometimes your ego gets so far ahead of the game that, once success starts to go away, I don’t think that the ego can deal with it any more. I’ve never had that problem because I don’t have that kind of an ego. I’ve always just realized what I am. I’m just a person who does one thing better than most, but everything else worse than most. I’m not a good plumber. I’m not a good electrician. I sing well. I can’t repair a roof. I sing well, that’s all. Once that goes away, so what? I’m still a person first. That’s what I have to look at. I’m a person who has been put on this earth, born, and every other day after that I’m racing towards death. That’s what happens. You’re born and the next thing that happens is that you die. You just get older and go away. I’m realizing that that’s what life is all about. It put my ego way into perspective. I’m no better than the person who comes to see us at a show. Just because I’m on the stage, up a little bit higher than he or she is… Once you can deal with that, not playing for a hundred thousand people any more doesn’t matter, not playing for twenty thousand people doesn’t matter. All that matters is the quality that you give the people who do come to see you whether there are ten or ten thousand. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been given a great gift and, I feel, it’s my job to give a little bit of it back and that’s the only thing that matters to me. The rest of the finances and my ego never enters the equation for me. It doesn’t last that long. We’re talking about the same kind of thing with athletics here. There is a great parallel between the two. It’s an entertainment situation. People can become bigger than life, more financially successful than almost anyone. Within both of these fields, it’s a young person’s game. Athletics is a young person’s game. Music is really a young person’s game. Rock and roll should be young people’s music made by young people. Of course we’ve grown up and we’ve been able to carry on and do it because we started when the process started, but still, it’s a rebellious form of music. The people you mentioned, the fact that the black metal coming from Sweden is a rebellious thing and that’s what rock music has always been. I’m the luckiest person on earth. I’ve had like three careers. Usually a career for a musician lasts anywhere from three to five years and that’s pushing it some. Me, I had a career with my first band, not the most successful one on earth, but successful enough to lead to the next point. Rainbow was very successful. Black Sabbath, obviously, successful. Dio, again, extremely successful. I’m pushing fifty years old for chrissake. So, it’s been a great life because I’ve dealt with it as life and not as anything else. I haven’t looked at me as being so special, only special because I can do that one thing that a lot of other people can’t do. I’m just a person and I’m going to lay there and my bones are going to rot just like anybody else. So, why should I go through this earth parading myself around saying how wonderful I am? It doesn’t work that way.