They called themselves Heaven & Hell, but we know it’s really the Dio-lineup of Black Sabbath. When Tony Iommi, Ronnie James Dio, Geezer Butler, and Vinny Appice returned from the grave in 2007 to write and record new songs for the greatest hits album Black Sabbath: The Dio Years, it was the first time they had worked together for about 12 years.
We can thank Rhino Records for making it happen. Iommi was working on putting together the anthology when the record company informed Iommi’s management that they would like to include previously unreleased material. It had to be something that people didn’t already have, and they were not content with live material – they wanted unheard studio material, which they presumed existed in the vaults.
Iommi scoured his archives for leftover material from any of the Dio-era albums but felt there wasn’t anything worth releasing. In many ways, it would be easier to start from scratch with new ideas rather than trying to finish the few half-cooked things that were lying around. This led Iommi to have his first conversation with Ronnie James Dio in 12 years.
Their previous working experience had ended on a sour note – for the second time – and it would have been interesting to be a fly on the wall for their first conversation after all that time. Clearly it went well, because they got on the same page and agreed to do a new song together. In the end they ended up doing three, as their reunion was such a positive experience for all of them. Wanting to diversify, they consciously did one fast track, one mid-tempo rocker, and one slow, heavy, and brooding track.
In an interview with MTV’s HeadbangersBlog.com in 2009, Dio said: “We did it because we were asked by the record company to do something a little bit more special for the release of the album rather than just some live tracks that people have actually heard anyway. We felt that it was important that the request should be honoured, because we wanted to please the people who were going to buy this product. And we really felt it was not good value for money just giving, or regurgitating, things back again. So we did that, and that was only for that project. Even when it was finished we still didn’t know about touring, and certainly had no idea that we might be doing an album together. Everything was a gradual progression. And it started with The Dio Years album. Without that, and without writing and finding out we could do it, that it was easy again, and that it was fun, none of this would ever have happened.”
One thing can as we know lead to another, and as things were working well, they decided to go out on a tour. The plan was to go out for about two and a half weeks, but in the end it grew to last for most of 2007. Starting with warm-up shows in Canada, it was meant to culminate in the first American show this line-up had performed in 15 years at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. This show was filmed for the spectacular CD and DVD Live From Radio City Music Hall.
“It all started really with the Radio City Music Hall,” Dio told HeadbangersBlog. “It was a stunning revelation to us that we sold the place out in 20 minutes, and we haven’t been together for… 12 years? That was pretty amazing.”
Geezer Butler added: “That was as far as it was going to go in the first place. We were just going to do the three new songs for the anthology, and then we thought we’d do a DVD while we’re all together. Radio City Music Hall… that was as far as we’d planned to do. And we booked about three weeks in Canada before New York. As soon as promoters heard that we were going on the road we kept getting all these offers from everywhere in the world. It went from like a month to the whole year.”
Ahead of starting the tour, the decision was made to change their name. According to Iommi, changing their name to Heaven & Hell was done to differentiate the project from the Osbourne-led Black Sabbath line-up as the group would now only perform Dio-era material. The name is obviously derived from the 1980 album Heaven and Hell, the first Black Sabbath album to feature Dio as vocalist.
In an interview with Cleveland Scene, Iommi said that hopefully fans at concerts “would not expect to hear Iron Man and War Pigs and all that… it’s none of the old stuff, it’s none of the Ozzy period. It’s all Dio stuff. So by calling ourselves Heaven & Hell, it’s revisiting that period.”
Other things might also have influenced this. In the background, Iommi and Osbourne were having disagreements about the rights to the Sabbath name. Osbourne eventually sued Iommi over this, seeking 50% ownership of the trademark, claiming that Iommi had illegally claimed the band name. This dispute went on for a few years before matters were settled in June 2010. The exact terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but it’s become clear that Osbourne got a lot of what he asked for, meaning that no new Black Sabbath projects could be instigated without either party’s involvement or blessing. While this made it easier for the original Sabbath to have their eventual reunion album and tours in the 2010s, it has also unfortunately severely hampered plans to re-release expanded Sabbath product from the 1980s and 90s that Osbourne does not feature on, as the shared ownership extends to anything under the Sabbath name. Renaming the newest project with Dio into Heaven & Hell sidesteps those type of issues. Perhaps Iommi saw which direction the wind was blowing.
Meanwhile, the 2007 tour was clearly going well. People were keen not to repeat past mistakes, got along well, and the tour was enjoyable. They performed their three new songs, as well as material from the three previously released Dio-fronted studio albums Heaven and Hell (1980), Mob Rules (1981) and Dehumanizer (1992). All of them are classic albums with top notch material, but if Heaven & Hell were to continue to grow, everyone knew they needed to do a new album.
During the Japan dates in October that year, Iommi first broached the topic of a new album with Dio. In a 2008 interview with Total Guitar, Iommi said: “We talked about it on the last part of the tour. In Japan I said to Ronnie, ‘Are you up for doing a new album, or what?’ and everybody seems really keen to do it.”
This meant that as 2007 turned into 2008, the members of the band started writing. “Each of us submitted a CD of our ideas, and we narrowed it down from there,” Iommi told Classic Rock in 2009.
The album was written in two six-week sessions, split in two by the Metal Masters tour which the band had agreed to do throughout August 2008. Heaven & Hell were co-headliners alongside Judas Priest, with Motörhead and Testament also on the bill.
This meant they spent six weeks on getting the songwriting done in Iommi’s house in England, went on tour, and spent six further weeks on songwriting in Dio’s house in California. Having the band stay in their private homes made for a more relaxed and friendly atmosphere. “We had Ronnie’s cats to help us as well,” Butler chuckled in the HeadbangersBlog interview, with Dio adding: “One of them helped Tony a lot – the black cat – it would sit there and look at him while he was playing. I guess that helped!”
After a total of three months they had the material, after which they moved base to Rockwell for one month of recording and mixing. This was familiar ground for the band as they had recorded the Dehumanizer album there sixteen years prior.
Bible Black was one of the first songs written for the project, and it established a tone for the rest of the album. “When you start off with a blockbuster like that,” said Dio, “it makes the rest of the album so much easier because it gives you a benchmark to measure the other songs against.”
Contrary to what one might think based on the title, it’s not an anti-religious song by any means. It is a dark story about self-destruction.
A bible is meant to lead to the promised land; to provide salvation, but what if something isn’t what it seems? What if something that looks like a lifeline is in fact a corrupted and evil version of something that ends up taking all the joy out of our lives and even killing us?
The song tells us about a man who becomes addicted to the sinister scriptures found within a book called the Bible Black, which instead of helping him ends up destroying him. The tale is clearly an allegory about addiction in a wider sense, whether we are talking about alcohol or hard drugs or anything that makes you so obsessed that you lose sight of what matters. You often lose control on the path of self-destruction, which is the path that the song describes.
“Bible Black is about this guy who lives a real humdrum life,” Dio said, “who goes to work and comes back to his little hovel someplace with one room, and probably a little bathroom somewhere. No dogs and no cats. He just goes back there and feels lonely and sorry for himself. One night he reaches for a book that he had there, that he has never seen before. He starts to read it, and it turns out to be the Bible Black. The spells and scriptures inside the book lead him to find himself lying naked in the rain the next day. He says, ‘I don’t know why this happened, all I do know is that I need to read that book again.’ Obviously, it is an ominous kind of narcotic to him. It took him to this place were he didn’t belong and shouldn’t be, but it was better than his humdrum life, so he just wanted to go back to that. And that’s what it’s about. Finding this book, and reading it.”
As detailed in the song, the warning signs are there, but are ignored, as they usually are. Dio said, ”As the song says in the beginning, “The first page says ‘beware, you’ve found the answer’ / The next one says ‘I wish that you were dead’”. That should have warned him a little bit, but it didn’t. So the song is about that, really.”
At last alone, his fire’s dying
Burned another day
Now to pretend and make up an ending
Somewhere far awayHe reached for a book all bound in leather
Something that he knows he’s never read
And the first page says, “Beware, you’ve found the answer.”
The next one says, “I wish that you were dead.”Don’t go on! Put it back!
You’re reading from the Bible Black!
The track begins on an ominously atmospheric note, with Tony Iommi building a guitar theme over layers of gradually appearing ambient keyboards. When Dio comes in it is with a plaintive yet insistent delivery, pleading and warning, before the rhythm shifts to a menacing stomp at the moment when the unfortunate man grabs the book – or is it the book that grabs him? As Dio mentions “bible black” for the first time, the song undergoes a dramatic transition. The threat is revealed and the song changes to reflect this.
The echo on Dio’s voice as he delivers the word ‘black’ while the song transforms is particularly effective.
The song has now adopted a menacing slow-burn intensity that suits the rest of this dark tale very well. It chugs along with an intense and brooding feeling of things going wrong as the book of sinister scriptures takes hold over its victim.
What’s this world I see?
Who are you and who are me?
Maybe I just stumbled in the dark?
I must have been out cold
But the way the story’s told
They found me lying naked in the rain, yeahLet me go
I’ve seen religion but the light has left me blind
Take me back
I must have the Bible Black!
Iommi delivers a sharp guitar solo, although his usual clear tone seems to be somewhat buried – or drowning, just like the character in the song – in the huge behemoth of a rhythm track that has been mounting. The track keeps building in intensity as the story reaches the point of no return.
Dio is keen to stress that although the album seems to feature a lot of the usual serious and dark themes that the band is known for, that “there is a lot of wry humour in most of these songs. I think that is important. The intention is not for the listener to sit down and think, ‘Ooh, I’m so frightened, I wanna know what’s going on here!’, it’s just things that come from how you feel at the time. The songs are not meant to be this wonderous bubble that pops and suddenly puts you into hell. I try as a lyricist and title writer to write titles that are interesting… I don’t know of anybody who writes songs called Eating the Cannibals. I thought of that and right away said, take this one and stuff it you bum… well, anyway. [laughs] It’s about the government. The government has eaten us for a while, you know…I just thought, it’s about time we reverse the trend.”
Bible Black was selected to represent the album in the shape of a single, released to radio on 20 March 2009, with other formats following suit on 31 March. Being old-school, the band released it both as a 7’’ vinyl single and a CD single, in spite of the marketplace’s lack of interest in either format at the time. That mattered not. Fans of Sabbath/Heaven & Hell are also old-school, and all formats sold out in no time.
A music video was also made for the song, which was premiered on VH1 Classic as the first video of Metal Mania. It came on right after the season 2 finale of That Metal Show with Eddie Trunk, which had Ronnie James Dio and Geezer Butler of Heaven & Hell as guests. The video is an animation and features the band via shadows. The premise of the video is an angel in Heaven picks up a black book (as per the song title). When he opens it, it sends him down to Hell.
Tony Iommi was no fan of the animated music video, admitting to Billboard magazine that it rubbed him the wrong way: “I think it’s bloody awful, to be honest. It looks like Casper the Ghost or something. We didn’t have anything to do with it; that was sort of just presented to us, really. I’d have thought it could be done better than that, but that’s just my opinion, and I’m just one of four.”
In an interview by Justin Donnelly posted on his MySpace site, bassist Geezer Butler explained the album title: “Everybody was asking me if I had any ideas for the title of the album. So I got a few titles together, and that was the one that everybody seemed to like. So you can say that I was the one responsible for coming up with The Devil You Know. The meaning behind the title is really quite simple. Everybody still calls us and sees us as Black Sabbath. So even though we call ourselves Heaven & Hell, we’re still very much the devil you know in the sense that we’re still Black Sabbath.”
The album artwork is adapted from a painting by Norwegian artist Per Øyvind Haagensen’s entitled Satan. Butler told Justin Donnelly that the artwork doesn’t sit comfortably with him: “The record company found that image for us. I think Iommi and Dio quite liked it. I wasn’t that happy with it, but then what can I say? It’s a majority rules within this band, and I was outvoted It’s a bit too satanic looking for me, but it is what it is.”
The Devil You Know was released worldwide on 28 April 2009. It sold 30,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release, debuting at #8 on the Billboard 200 chart (although it made it to #1 on the Billboard Hard Rock chart, #2 on the Billboard Tastemaker chart, and #3 on the Billboard Rock Albums chart). It went to #5 in Finland, #8 in Sweden, #15 in Norway, and mostly made it into the Top 30 across the rest of Europe and the world.
The band had plans to go out on an extensive international tour again in support of The Devil You Know. They started in Colombia in May, and carried on through South America and Europe, including a show at Oslo Spectrum where this Norselander was fortunate enough to see them, and a headlining show at Wacken Open Air in Germany at the end of July. August was filled with North American dates.
Further shows were planned after August, but a break was needed. Dio had been feeling unwell with stomach pains and had postponed a doctor’s visit for too long. He was eventually diagnosed with stomach cancer and underwent chemotherapy. Although the initial prognosis was good, he never really got better. He passed away from the affliction on 16 May 2010 at the age of 67.
In an April 2021 interview with Rockin’ Metal Revival, Tony Iommi said: “The last tour we did with Ronnie was real precious, and we had such a great time. And we really bonded. The last generation of the period with Ronnie was really close – everybody was close. Yeah, Ronnie was such a really nice person. What I liked about Ronnie… he gave everybody time. It was just remarkable. Before the show, he’d have people in his dressing room — ’cause we’d have separate dressing rooms — he’d have people in there talking away and drinking and whatever. And he never warmed up or anything; he’d never done any kind of warming-up procedure before he went on stage. And he’d walk on stage and he’s just unbelievable; his voice was spot-on. It was just amazing, really, how he could do that.”
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