In a way Holy Diver informed my thinking about music without me having heard it. I was living in Columbia, South Carolina in 1983 when Dio released their debut, just discovering music for the first time thanks in large part to MTV and while not quite yet in high school already seeing how musical tastes were used by other people my age as a way to signal something about who they were and what they were into. I was aware of metal, but only the stuff mainstream enough to make it onto MTV – so mostly hair metal and glam. Mötley Crüe was probably the must cutting edge thing I’d seen up to that point and while the “Looks That Kill” video was a bit outrageous, it wasn’t any more so than low budget fantasy movies at the time.
So imagine my surprised when I wandered into whatever chain music store was in the mall that my mom worked at and, flipping through the D section, came across Holy Diver. How visceral was my reaction? Well, I still remember it 40+ years later. For a kid who’d spent a number of years in Catholic school the imagery was startling and, frankly, terrifying. A priest bound and locked in chains and having just fallen or been dropped into the water, his glasses coming off and a look of shock and horror on his face. And standing over him, so enormous that it rises above the rocks along the edge of the water, some kind of demon or devil or embodiment of evil, the chain wrapped around its arm and swinging it like a whip, the fingers on its other hand giving the devil horns. It’s a striking image and one for which I had no context – I’d never seen anything even remotely like this before. In the internet age it’s hard to explain how shocking something like this was in the past. How evil would a band need to be to put this on their record cover, I wondered. And if this was what the cover looked like, what was the music like?? I came back to it a few other times, as if trying to confirm that I had in fact seen it. And I had. That red-eyed demon was always there.
I first heard Dio in 1984. We moved to the Seattle-area over the summer and lived with my parents’ friends (RIP Mac and Dorothy, you guys were amazing) for a number of months after arriving. I had a stereo at this point and spent a lot of time in the basement listening to music, which was fine with my parents because it kept me occupied and there were no other kids around for me to do anything with anyway. One day I convinced someone to buy me the Masters Of Metal compilation cassette, not because I knew any of the bands on it but because it said “metal” in the title and looked cool as hell. And that was how I first heard “Rainbow In The Dark” a song that… isn’t terrifying? Huh, so this band with the evil album cover sounded a lot like other metal bands of the time and were nothing to be scared of. I never ended up getting into Dio (in fact until a few days ago I don’t think I’ve ever owned a Dio album), but hearing that song over and over (I wore out that tape) helped break the spell of the cover art.
This past weekend I was over at one of my local haunts, Volver Records, and traded in a bunch of records because, well, I needed the space. I took store credit and as soon as my eyes fell upon this 1983 Japanese pressing of Holy Diver I knew I had to take it home with me.
Nobody needs me to review Holy Diver. It’s been written about by way better writers and more knowledgeable music fans than me. Are “Holy Diver” and “Rainbow In The Dark” the best songs on the record? Sure? But I’ve heard them both a hundred times and know how much they rule. The fact remains that the rest of the album is actual just as good as those two tracks. I mean, “Gypsy”? C’mon, that’s flat out killer. This is a great band with a phenomenal vocalist.
One thing I can comment on, perhaps, is this pressing. The Japanese version pushes the vocals right up to the front. The bass and deeper drum sounds are a bit recessed, though not at all flat. The sonic profile is vocals, then snares, then guitar, and given the power of Ronnie James Dio’s voice, that makes sense – that’s also arguably “how it was” back in the early 1980s before hip hop and the loudness wars brought the low end to the forefront. Japanese releases are fetishized for their quality and this pressing of Holy Diver certainly reinforces that perception – it’s immaculate.