DIO - Next In Line...
By Martin Popoff
...and it is a line, up for Ronnie, is a live DVD, followed by... well, read on. If you're still with me after a sick excuse for a sentence like that, here's the goods. On Friday, December 13, Ronnie and his band of rogues recorded a show at The Roseland in New York for an upcoming DVD. I talked to Ronnie a week before the show was to take place (so note his future tense with regard to the gig), never one to pass up an opportunity to talk to the only guy to have commandeered towering, unarguable metal classics with no less than three bands, Ronnie further putting the record out of reach by crafting a pair with each.
"Well, Jimmy has been with us for Magica, the album and the tour, and Jimmy fit in right away," says Ronnie when asked how the band has gelled after so many '02 dates on the road. "I mean, there was barely a breath there between when he was there before and till now. And Doug is such a great guitar player, just very fluid. The band kicked in right away right from the gates. There was just never a problem and I never expected there to be one. You choose the right people you get the best results. No hitches at all."
In terms of the set list for the Roseland show, it's no surprise that a headline set allows for a certain heavy metal elasticity. "All we've done is just added to the show we did with Scorpions and Purple. That was only an hour's worth of time and now we're doing between an hour and 30 and an hour and 40. We added two songs from Magica that we hadn't been doing on the summer shows, Lord Of The Last Day and Fever Dreams and were doing a couple more encore songs. We're doing We Rock, which we did not do during those shows, and sometimes, due to time restrictions, we weren't able to do Last In Line or Rainbow In The Dark, depending on which one we decided to take out for that day; we kind of switched them around. It's a longer set and it's a set that has more breadth to the guitar solo. When you have a nonspecific amount of time to do whatever you want to do, you just tend to make things a little bit longer, more audience interaction, and like I say, a longer guitar solo."
