Long Live Rockin' Troll!

I saw Dio thrice, but oddly enough, never by intention. I saw him with Black Sabbath in '81, but I was WAY too fucked up to even recall where or when. I just knew that Ozzie had started sounding really whiny as the toxic substances started eating away at his brain (though getting arrested for pissing on the Alamo while wearing a dress was a great idea, I thought) and this Dio dude could WAIL. Good God, what a voice. LISTEN  I also saw him again, two more times (with his band "Dio") and I always thought he and Burton Cummings of the Guess Who had the best natural voices in Rock n' Roll. But here's the thing; as much as I loved hearing him sing, I absolutely could not look at the fucker without shuddering. He was, without a doubt, the ugliest motherfucking dwarf to ever wrap his sweaty lips around an SM-58.

And he just got uglier. Boy didn't do himself any favors, either. I mean, there are some ugly fuckers in Heavy Metal, for sure. Judas Priest looks like a bunch of geezers whose faces have gradually transformed into scrotums with facial features. Halford looks like Elmer Fudd with a goatee http://preview.tinyurl.com/Halford-is-a-ball-bag and the bassist looks like somebody put a face on a scrotum http://tinyurl.com/scrotumface The drummer from Iron Maiden looks like he was dropped face-first onto a concrete patio fixture by his post-partum depressed mother, and just imagine Lemmy unzipping and pulling out from his dank jeans a musty, encrusted pee-hole for some giggling schoolgirl to slurp, while he rubs his ungodly facial-growths on her downy pudenda... (shudder).

But Dio was in a different class of ugly. A misshapen hunchbacked dwarf with long, scrawny hair hanging over his grotesque face, alternating between his two poses; pointing at the crowd, and sticking the "devil's horns" hand-sign in the air every three fucking seconds ("yeah, I get it. The sign of the devil, the old evil eye. Very clever. Now do it again and again and again, for cryin' out loud") But jeez, the sonofabitch could belt it out, better'd anybody. I liked him, though. I could listen to him all day. I just couldn't stomach LOOKING at him. Besides, it's kinda nice to know ugly fuckers could make it as rock stars, y'know?

(I'm pretty sure Gene Simmons did the devil's horns thing first, anyway. He said it was the only way to stash his prick while he waved to the crowd, which makes sense.)