Day After Day #255: The Last in Line

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

The Last in Line (1984)

While bands like Duran Duran were dominating the charts in the early '80s, there was another genre making inroads. Hard rock and metal was going through some changes. Veteran acts like Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, the Scorpions and Motorhead were doing well, but there was a new wave of bands on the rise: Motley Crue, Ratt, Def Leppard, Quiet Riot and Dokken were starting to blow up.

Meanwhile, another hard rock vet was striking out on his own. By 1982, Ronnie James Dio already been playing in bands for 25 years, starting in 1957 as a teenager. He formed the band Elf in 1967 and then joined Ritchie Blackmore's post-Deep Purple project Rainbow in 1975. 

Dio was tiny but had a powerful voice and made three albums with Rainbow before leaving to replace Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath. The Dio-led Sabbath made two successful albums, Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, before Dio and Tony Iommi butted heads one time too many and Dio and drummer Vinny Appice left the band.

Dio and Appice teamed up with hotshot Irish guitarist Vivian Campbell and bassist Jimmy Bain to form the band Dio in 1982. The band's 1983 debut album, Holy Diver, was a hit, thanks to "Rainbow in the Dark" and the title track. Adding Claude Schnell on keyboards, the band recorded the follow-up, The Last in Line, which was released in July 1984.

The lead single was the title track and it was a ripper. It starts quietly, with a slow build as Dio sets the scene for the first 50 seconds before the song just explodes.

"We're a ship without the storm/The cold without the warm/Light inside the darkness that it needs, yeah/We're a laugh without a tear/The hope without the fear/We are coming...home."

The band kicks in as Dio holds the note on "home" for what seems like an eternity. Then the real fun begins.

"We're off to the witch/We may never never never come home/But the magic that we'll feel is worth a lifetime/We're all born upon the cross/We're the throw before the toss/You can release yourself/But the only way is down/We don't come alone/We are fire, we are stone/We're the hand that writes and quickly moves away/We'll know for the first time/If we're evil or divine/We're the last in line/Yeah, we're the last in line."

Dio typically wrote about good and evil, devils and wizards and rainbows and such shit, but goddamn, the guy could sing. And he pretty much always had a killer band behind him. The Last in Line lineup was a powerhouse.

"Two eyes from the East/It's the angel or the beast/And the answer lies between the good and bad/We search for the truth/We could die upon the tooth/But the thrill of just the chase is worth the pain."

Campbell was a flashy guitarist and his solo on this song is one of his best. The song went to #10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and the album hit #23 on the Billboard 200. I saw Dio on this tour at the Worcester Centrum with Twisted Sister opening, and then again a few years later in Portland.

The band released the album Sacred Heart in 1985 and later that year spearheaded the Hear 'N Aid charity project, basically a metal version of We Are the World that featured about 75 guitar solos. Not long after, Campbell left the band and later joined Whitesnake right as that band got huge. 

Dio the band went through numerous lineup changes after that. In 1991, he reteamed with Black Sabbath to record the album Dehumanizer, but the reunion was short-lived. By this point, I was completely uninterested in metal and barely remember Dio getting back together with Sabbath, something that would have been a big deal to me a few years earlier. At any rate, Dio kept plugging along through that metal-deficient decade of the '90s and into the 2000s, even as the album sales and the venues shrank.

In 2006, Dio and Vinny Appice once again reunited with Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler, but called the band Heaven and Hell (Iommi and Butler were still technically in Black Sabbath with Ozzy at the time). They did a world tour and released an album in 2009, but Dio was diagnosed with stomach cancer that year and died six months later at the age of 67.

Even in death, there are Dio tours. In 2016, his widow Wendy authorized a tour that consisted of a hologram version of Dio singing and backed by former Dio band members. After that got mixed reviews, the hologram was scrapped but a live band called Dio Disciples started touring behind the Dio catalog, with live singers including Tim "Ripper" Owens, the former copy shop worker who replaced Rob Halford in Judas Priest in the '90s. Whatever.