“We're not standing for this.”
Rainbow’s Ritchie Blackmore flinches as a sharp jab lands in his back.
He’s kneeling in front of his amp, trying to dial in a sound.
He turns. Ronnie James Dio and drummer Cozy Powell stand over him.
Dio holds up a copy of Circus magazine.
Ritchie Blackmore on the cover.
Alone.
Blackmore is defiant. He claims to know nothing about the cover.
But this wasn’t the first time Dio had been slighted by Blackmore.
When Rainbow’s first album was due to be released, Blackmore and Dio had agreed that the group would be called (the somewhat long-winded) “Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio’s Rainbow”:
“But when the first album came out, there it was: Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow! Did this become a bone of contention between us? Well, seeing as I had co-written all the songs and sung them, the short answer would be yes. But watcha gonna do? Cry about it?”
As Dio stands over him, holding the magazine cover in front of his face, Blackmore knows Rainbow is coming to an end.
That incarnation of the band, at least.
The question is… How did these two legends of heavy music end up here?
“Stargazer”
“Stargazer” is the fifth track on Rainbow Rising (1976) – the record widely regarded as Rainbow’s masterpiece.
The song runs eight and a half minutes and features the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.
Rolling Stone would later call it Ronnie James Dio’s finest vocal performance on record.
The song is about a slave who builds a tower for a man who wants to fly.
The man who wrote the lyrics knew what that felt like.
Two Men, One Band
By 1975, Ritchie Blackmore was looking for a new project.
Something he could – literally – put his name on.
Deep Purple, the band he’d co-founded in 1968, had drifted toward rock-funk fusion. Blackmore wanted something darker, edgier.
While still on tour with Deep Purple, he began recording music with Ronnie James Dio, the frontman of a small American band called Elf.
Together with the other members of Dio’s band, Blackmore and Dio recorded the first Rainbow album “in secret”:
“He decided he would record [the song] “Black Sheep” without Purple, partly because he was so stubborn, and partly just to piss Purple off, I think.”
When the tour ended, Blackmore told Deep Purple he was leaving.
Blackmore rebuilt Rainbow with musicians of his choosing. Cozy Powell on drums. Jimmy Bain on bass. And Tony Carey on keyboard.
Dio was the one constant moving forward.
But the terms were always Blackmore’s:
“Ritchie was the boss of the band [...] I did respect Ritchie's opinions and judgment, but it was not a very democratic situation at all.”
Elf
Ronnie James Dio was born Ronald Padavona in a quiet Italian-Catholic community in Cortland, New York.
He never took a singing lesson in his life.
He learned everything from the four hours his father made him spend – every day, Sundays included – learning the trumpet… from age six.
The trumpet would eventually give him the diaphragm and breath control to carry an eight-and-a-half minute epic without ever fading.
But Dio’s first choice was not to be a vocalist. In his earliest bands, The Vegas Kings and Ronnie and the Red Caps, he played guitar. It was in the latter that he discovered his latent talent:
“To our collective surprise (mine most of all!), as soon as I opened my mouth and started to sing, you could hear it was something I could do – and quite easily.”
What followed was nearly two decades of grind. The Vegas Kings. Ronnie and the Red Caps. Elf.
A career that kept almost breaking through… but never quite did.
He had finally got the break of his dreams at 33 years when Rainbow Rising was recorded.
On Ritchie Blackmore’s terms.
“Look at my flesh and bone”
Dio described “Stargazer” as a morality tale told from the standpoint of a slave in ancient Egypt.
A wizard – an astronomer, obsessed with the idea of flying – enslaves a vast army and puts them to work.
“In the heat and the rain
With whips and chains
Just to see him fly”
The task is simple and impossible: build a tower of stone tall enough to launch a man into the sky.
The people labor in heat and rain, under whips and chains, sustained by one thin thread of hope – that when the tower is finished, they’ll finally get to watch him fly.
But when the wizard makes it to the top, he falls “instead of rising”.
All that’s left is “blood in the sand.”
Building the Tower
The central riff of “Stargazer” wasn’t originally written on a guitar.
Blackmore had been tinkering around with a cello.
One of the most iconic early metal riffs was written by a guitarist on an instrument he barely knew how to play.
The song is announced by Cozy Powell’s drum intro – a statement in itself:
“I had to work out all these little things that have been copied to death since and I’m very proud of it”
The song is built on two related scales.
The harmonic minor runs through Dio's vocal lines and anchors the opening of Blackmore's solo – it's the scale most associated with Middle Eastern music.
The B Phrygian Dominant – what Blackmore called his “half-Turkish scale” (technically the fifth mode of E Harmonic Minor) – which defines the phrasing of the solo.
Together, they create the song's unmistakably exotic atmosphere.
The guitar solo establishes the tower’s foundation, the labor, the scale of what’s being built.
As it climbs, the pitches grow more distorted and torturous, mirroring the suffering of the men doing the building.
Blackmore and Dio’s vocal lines share note choices throughout the song. The guitar becomes “another voice” echoing Dio's melodic vocal phrasing.
The first ten bars build and rise, but never quite resolve.
Then Blackmore begins a chromatic climb towards the peak:
The wizard’s fall is first announced by the guitar.
Rolling Stone called Dio’s performance on “Stargazer” the finest vocal performance of his career.
His vibrato arrives as a weapon – to push through a run or attack a note.
His unique phrasing carries the story. He emphasises the words that carry weight: “Hot wind”, “whips”, “chains”.
“I began to take what I did on that stage very seriously. I still liked to have fun up there, but I really did mean every word I sang or said. And I wanted people to know that.”
Then the major scale arrives and his voice lifts with it.
The wizard climbs and the voice climbs with him.
Until:
"No sound as he falls instead of rising.”
The wizard finally plummets to his death.
“I see a rainbow rising”
Until his death, the wizard himself is barely present in the song.
He’s simply an evil force.
A will imposed on other people from a height they can't reach.
Most listeners consider the wizard's death as the song’s resolution. But for Dio, the story wasn't over.
“A Light in the Black” continues the story. The slaves are free now. But purpose doesn’t arrive with their freedom.
They have to find the light on their own.
Dio's position in Rainbow was unambiguous.
Blackmore's band. Blackmore's terms.
Absolute from day one.
Dio himself said it was “not a very democratic situation at all”.
He was the voice the structure needed, without power to shape it itself.
The man below the wizard.
And every night he stood on a stage and shared his story.
The Fall
People around the band – management, associates – started whispering that the fantastical material was uncommercial.
Then bassist Roger Glover joined the band. Glover had been persuaded to sign up partly by hearing "Stargazer" — he'd recognised it as a groundbreaking achievement.
But shortly after joining, he suggested Dio try writing "love songs."
Dio's response was immediate:
"I wasn't gonna write love songs. It's not what I do. It's not what I ever wanted to do."
Compromising the mythological themes would mean compromising away from the music he loved to make:
“I became well known for what the music press would sometimes chide as my ‘obsession’ with writing about mythical figures, kings and queens, angels and demons, dungeons and dragons. For me, though, it really suited the kind of epically scaled rock music I loved to perform. It suited my voice, and it suited my imagination.”
Then came the magazine incident.
Blackmore alone on the cover of Circus.
Dio had seen too many members get fired on a whim by Blackmore.
He felt less like an equal collaborator, and more like a disposable piece of an ever-rotating machine.
“This was Ritchie Blackmore; he didn’t need any help with the music, he just needed someone to write the lyrics and sing them.”
Dio left in 1979.
Blackmore replaced him with Graham Bonnet, a singer who came from an R&B background.
Upon listening to the Dio-era material for the first time, Bonnet didn't consider Dio’s operatic gymnastics real singing. To him it was “pretend singing”, lacking soul.
Rainbow pivoted immediately to slicker, softer, radio-ready music.
"Since You Been Gone" went to number six in the UK.
Successful.
Yet forgotten.
“Where was your star?”
Dio spent his final years writing an autobiography he titled Rainbow in the Dark. Not a Dio song. A Rainbow song. The man looked back at the tower h’'d built for someone else and named his life story after it.
“Stargazer” outlasted Rainbow.
It outlasted Dio.
And it outlasted Blackmore's commercial ambitions.
The wizard fell.
But the song still rises.
Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media
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