Rainbow in the Dark by Ronnie James Dio

Author:Ronnie James Dio [Niji Entertainment Group Inc.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642939750
Publisher: Permuted Platinum
Published: 2021-05-29T14:27:39+00:00

TEN

Starstruck

By now the band had a name. Rainbow. Named after, yes, the Rainbow.

When it came to writing with Ritchie, the rules were simple: he wrote all the music. I wrote all the words and most of the melodies. The kind of songs I wrote with Ritchie for that first album all had a more Renaissance-style aspect to them. In Elf we had been a good-time band, only venturing beyond that on our last album. Now was the chance for me to really push myself. Ritchie and I had discussed it late into the night on many occasions; we wanted Rainbow to be a kind of summit musical meeting between heavy rock and heavy classical themes. What I wrote wasn’t poetry, but it was written to say something more than “baby, I love you.” It had to; the music Ritchie and I were now writing demanded it.

As a lifelong devourer of books, I attempted to bring some of my favorite themes to the lyrics. I was always a dreamer type of kid. I immersed myself into fantasy situations by reading science fiction and things that would let my imagination run somewhere. I think there’s a tremendous kinship between science fiction and the mythological era, and I applied all of that to these new lyrics I was writing to go with Ritchie’s music—which was vastly superior to anything he’d done in Deep Purple since their Gillan-Glover heyday. Unhindered by the demands of the younger, hipper Coverdale and Hughes to drive the music toward a more of-the-moment rock-funk fusion, Ritchie let loose. It was awe-inspiring working with him like that. It taught me so much.

We wrote and rehearsed until it was time to begin the recording. The studio booked was Musicland in Munich, where Purple had done a few albums and which Zeppelin, Queen, and the Stones all considered good enough to work in. It was located in the basement of the Arabella House Hotel, which was also where we stayed during the process. Ritchie loved everything German—even Babs, his wife, was German—and seemed to come alive in this Teutonic environment. Giorgio Moroder, who was honing the career of Donna Summer at the time, owned Musicland, but rock was still god then, especially in Germany.

When we weren’t in the studio, we frequented two clubs in town: Tiffany’s, which had a logo that looked eerily like “Ritchie,” and the Sugar Shake. I met some wonderful people there who remain friends to this day. When whatever place we were last at closed, we’d simply move the party to the studio and carry on.

The festivities were fun, but we also worked as hard as we played. We hadn’t written enough songs for the album, so we wrote as we recorded. Ritchie came in with a riff that I knew would be the cornerstone of all our efforts. It would be named “Man on the Silver Mountain,” and I was right. Certainly because it had the same attitude as “Smoke on the Water,” it immediately connected Ritchie’s past with our future.

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