Ronnie James Dio: the man on the silver mountain

ABSTRACT

Ronald James Padovana was born 10 July 1942. In 1957 he began what became a fifty three-year career in music career. In 1960 he began singing under the name Ronnie Dio, and then Ronnie James Dio. Under this name he became an iconic hard rock vocalist, performing with numerous bands including Rainbow (1974–1979), Black Sabbath (1979–1982, 1992, and 2006–2010), and his own band Dio (1982–2004). Before his untimely death on 16 May 2010, he had performed 2293 shows in 627 cities in forty-eight countries around the world. He sold over 6,500,000 albums. This map shows every city he performed in during his career at a scale of 1:74,380,000, along with three insets at varying scales highlighting performances within different world regions, and a series of 28 separate inset maps at a scale of 1:575,000,000 showing the cities he performed in during each concert tour.

KEYWORDS:

• Ronnie James Dio
• hard rock
• heavy metal
• concerts

1. Introduction

Heavy metal music emerged in the early 1970s from several antecedents as a new form of rock music (Christe, 2003; Wiederhorn, 2014). Although metal reached its peak in mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it remains a flourishing genre worldwide and has been the focus of increasing scholarly attention (Brown et al., 2016; Florida, 2012, 2014; Wallach et al., 2011). It has spawned many legendary performers known throughout the world. Among them are Ronald James Padovana, born 10 July 1942 (Figure 1). In 1957 he began what became a fifty three-year career in music (Carroll, 2016; Curl, 2018; Dio, 2021; Pillsbury, 2013; Wall, 2015). In 1960 he began singing under the name Ronnie Dio, and then Ronnie James Dio. Under this name he became an iconic hard rock vocalist in the 1970s, performing with numerous bands including Rainbow (1974–1979), Black Sabbath (1979–1982, 1992, and 2006–2010), and his own band Dio (1982–2004). He popularized the devil’s horn hand gesture (), an iconic symbol among metal fans (Wiederhorn, 2014). He died on 16 May 2010, of stomach cancer. During his long career he performed 2293 shows in 627 cities in forty-eight countries around the world.

Figure 1. Ronnie James Dio performing in 2007, showing his devil horn gesture. Photo by Richard Forster. Source: Wikipedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en).

A singer performing on stage.

For rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s the concert tour was a fundamental part of the business, and has become even more important since the 1990s and the decline of revenues from album sales (Black et al., 2007). After each album was released, the band would go on tour, sometimes performing in over one hundred cities over a period of six months or more, before returning to the studio to begin a new album and repeat the process. For bands the experience not only earned money but helped build and sustain a fan base. For fans it provided a way to see their favorite band, often purchasing a souvenir T-shirt with a list of tour dates on the back. Tour dates are usually presented in chronological format as a list of places visited, but maps allow for an easier display of this data, and easily allow repeat performances in the same city to be shown. This map is intended as a cartographic tribute to his career in music, showing every performance. It is designed for fans of heavy metal music of the 1970s and 1980s, for whom the record cover was a respected art form and one that artists used to build their band’s identity.

2. Data and methods

The first step was to compile a database of every performance Dio gave over his lifetime. This is available from several sources online. Keihanen (2013) has a list of every show location and date, organized by tour, while Davies (2002) lists all those shows during his time in Rainbow. Both lists include some incomplete information or discrepancies, and only those concerts for which location was known are included. Only those shows that he performed in with a band in which he was a member are shown; joining a different band onstage for a single song was not counted, nor were other public appearances. Neither were performances of Dio’s music by tribute bands or the Last in Line band, made up of three of Dio’s former bandmembers. The posthumous 2017–2018 hologram tour, which used his image, was also left out, though this tour visited Santander, Spain, a city he never performed in while alive.

An Excel database was created for every concert, including the concert venue, date, and tour. XY coordinates for each city were added to each record. The coordinates obtained are for cities only rather than the theater, stadium, arena, or other venue where the performance took place. No attempt was made to find coordinates for these locations; many venues have been renamed or disappeared over the fifty-three years Dio was active.

Because one goal was to show how many times Dio performed in each city this master list of coordinates presented a problem in that many venues within different municipalities or suburbs within the same metropolis were listed separately in the database. Another city column was added so that concerts in the same metropolitan area could be aggregated. All concert locations within the same U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area were grouped together, and cities in Canada and the United Kingdom were aggregated if they were part of the same metropolitan area (as defined in each country). In no other countries was the density of concerts sufficient (or cities as decentralized) for this to be an issue.

After the master concert list was created cities were extracted by tour and twenty-eight spreadsheets, each corresponding to a particular tour, were created. All tables were saved as tab delimited text, opened in ArcGIS, added as an XY theme, and converted to shapefiles.

3. Cartographic design

The traditional album cover was the guiding plan for the map, with a central map image to draw the eye, but also many details around the edge to reward closer viewing, as on many album covers (Iron Maiden’s 1986 Somewhere in Time album cover includes at least 32 such details, each a reference to songs or individuals associated with the band). The initial plan was to use three hemispherical maps, on a black background, one centered on the Americas, one on Europe, one on eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean, reflecting the three areas where heavy metal has traditionally been most popular (the United States, Western Europe, and Japan). Experimentation showed this was not a workable idea in ArcGIS due to the limits of the software. New inspiration came in the form of a hurricane map posted on ESRI’s website (ESRI, 2019), with instructions on how this kind of map could be made. The map was centered on Antarctica using a South Pole Stereographic projection, with the tracks of every hurricane since 1800 displayed on a natural earth theme. This was chosen to display the entire world while giving the northern hemisphere, which contained most tracks, the greatest amount of space on the map.

This approach was used to map Dio’s concerts, but in this case the map was centered on the North Pole using the North Pole Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection. This provided adequate northern hemisphere detail for the three main concert areas in North America, Europe, and Japan, but still allows the few southern hemisphere concerts to be visible. The central meridian was set at −90 degrees to center the map on North America, the area of his greatest activity. I used the Firefly Natural Earth map from the ESRI ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World (as in the hurricane map) and NASA Digital Earth. These were displayed together with the Firefly Natural Earth set at forty percent transparent. An ocean shapefile was downloaded from Natural Earth (Natural Earth, 2020) set as dark blue (RGB values of 0, 130, 255). National borders were not shown, as heavy metal is a community of fans that crosses boundaries. The map was intended to be placed against a black background, with only a simple set of colors used, in keeping with colors commonly used on heavy metal album covers, but this was changed to white to make the map easier to read. This choice, along with others, was an attempt to strike a balance between staying true to metal conventions and creating a usable map.

I had originally intended the map would be square, twenty-four inches (30.48 cm) to a side, twice the size (four times the area) of a vinyl record album, but an A2 page size was selected instead; this rectangular shape turned out to provide more room for text and details and worked better than a square format would have been. The number of times he performed in each metropolitan area was depicted using a graduated symbol scheme with four classes. The classes limits were manually specified to show cities with one concert, those with two or three, four to ten, and more than ten. This scheme provided a better appearance than quantile or equal interval. The cities were red, reflecting the color scheme of the map. Continents and oceans were labeled using the Poor Richard font, inspired by the use of gothic fonts on heavy metal but much easier to read. Circles for cities with a greater number of concerts were put below smaller circles to show both Dio’s favorite cities as well as the number of places he visited. Labels for land were colored light tan to stand out, those in the water were dark blue italic; no attempt was made to label cities where he performed on the main map. This would not have been feasible at this scale and not doing so focuses the attention on the breadth of his career rather than a particular city. A faint graticule was used to provide context without being distracting. No north arrow is used as north is at the center of the map and therefore varies by longitude; no scale bar is provided as it varies by latitude.

Inset maps were included of the three areas where he performed the most: North America, Europe, and Japan. Albers Equal Area was used for the contiguous United States, a European-specific Albers Equal Area for Europe, and UTM zone 54N for Japan. A fourth inset showing New York was also included. These show each city he performed in, and those where he performed 10 or more times, which are labeled. State and national boundaries were obtained from Natural Earth. Country names were spelled out in full on the North America and Japan maps while standard two-letter abbreviations were used for European countries; U.S. and Mexican states and Canadian provinces were labeled with standard two-letter abbreviations. As with the main map north arrows were not shown because it varies depending on location within the map.

Twenty-eight inset maps were used to display cities Dio performed in during his early years in New York and on each tour. The maps were arranged in a sequence around the margins of the main map, beginning in the upper left corner and continuing clockwise around the map sheet, providing a graphic depiction of the growing popularity of his music. This design was inspired by Dio’s 1985 Sacred Heart album cover, which featured writing that wrapped around the central image in this fashion. The insets were 64.8888 by 34.0 mm in size, at a scale of 1:575,000,000. Those on the right side of the map were rotated 270 degrees, those on left side rotated ninety degrees, but inset maps along the bottom were shown right side up for readability. These maps follow the principle of using small multiples to show different patterns on a series of maps with the same extent and scale (Tufte, 1990).

A country shapefile was downloaded from Natural Earth (Natural Earth, 2020) to provide land areas for all insets. The Robinson projection was used for these maps, as it represents an attractive projection that balances shape and size distortion. All concerts are shown with a point size of seven, allowing most to be seen individually but coalescing in regions where many shows were performed. As with the main map these cities were not labeled; the goal was to show patterns and concentrations. Each tour map was labeled by tour name and beginning and ending years (except for the first map, simply labeled Early Shows), using the Poor Richard font.

Initially it was planned to map each tour using straight lines and arrows to show sequential concerts, allowing the path of the tour to be traced. This was abandoned, partly in the interests of clarity, as the maps would have been illegible when covered with these lines. Another reason was conceptual: rock tours are not organized to minimize distance or driving time (Johansson & Bell, 2014), so they do not always show what would seem to be a logical path. A tour route shown as a series of lines would have reversals and crossed lines that would confuse the viewer.

Ronnie James Dio’s name used the Parchment font, which provided a gothic feel similar to the logo used on his solo albums (the use of this logo and photograph was contemplated but rejected due to lack of suitable non-copyrighted images). One of Dio’s signature songs was Man on the Silver Mountain, which was recorded for the 1975 album Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow, his first with Rainbow. According to the website www.setlist.fm (Live Nation Entertainment, 2021) he performed this song, or portions of it, 1057 times, and the song title appears on his tomb. This phrase was therefore a fitting tribute as a subtitle for this map. This was added, in Poor Richard font, below and offset slightly from Dio’s name. Text discussing Dio’s career was included in the central right of the map sheet, formatted to follow the curving shape of the earth. Author information and notes about data, projection, and datum were put in the lower right quadrant of the map sheet.

4. Results

The final map shows not only the spatial extent of Ronnie James Dio’s career but also reveals much about the geography of heavy metal and its relation to changing world geopolitics. While western Europe and North America are the traditional source regions for the genre, it has spread around much of the world. Japan joined the global metal community early, a result of the country having adopted American style popular music soon after World War Two (Furmanovsky, 2008). Performances in Russia and Eastern Europe appear on the map only after the fall of communism and were quite limited even then. Dio made fewer visits to other parts of the world; he toured South America six times and visited Australia only five times. In both regions he performed in only the largest cities. Australia has long been seen as a difficult country to tour in, with just a few large cities, distant from each other and the rest of the world (Rogers & Whiting, 2020). Dio never performed in South Asia, a region where metal has held little appeal until quite recently (the first major heavy metal concert in this region did not take place until 2007, headlined by Iron Maiden), and aside from Japan, performed only one show in Asia (in Singapore, in 2007). Mayer and Timberlake (2014) note that heavy metal has not yet taken root in Africa, a region Dio never visited.

The series of small maps around the margins show the changing scale and scope of Dio’s concert touring, originally clustered in upstate New York before achieving wider recognition in the early 1970s and then regularly touring throughout North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Occasional excursions to Australia and later to South America are apparent. Since the decline of mainstream metal music in the early 1990s his tours featured fewer performances concentrated in larger cities, a trend common to many musical acts in recent decades because contemporary economics of touring greatly favor larger markets (Black et al., 2007).

But while the main map constructed here does not show national boundaries the inset of Europe reveals differences among countries, as with the many concerts Dio performed in the UK, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands compared to very few in France or Ireland. The idea of an international community of metal connected by the Internet must be tempered by the very real effect of boundaries and cultures. Work such as Liew and Fu (2006) and Levine (2009) show barriers to the diffusion of metal into Muslim and authoritarian countries. Studying tour patterns by different generations of metal musicians, or those performing in different languages or subgenres, would be helpful in better understanding the importance of boundaries.

5. Conclusions

Although the field of metal studies is well established (Brown, 2011) there has unfortunately been little work on touring by rock bands (Black et al., 2007; Johansson & Bell, 2014; Rogers & Whiting, 2020). Rather, metal scholars have been more likely to focus on local metal cultures, whether the original source region in England (Harrison, 2010) or more recent developments in such places as Sweden, Singapore, or Arizona’s Navajo Indian Reservation (Liew & Fu, 2006; Lucas et al., 2011; Stone & Zappia, 2020). Such a focus is relevant as since the 1980s metal has spread throughout the world, with 75,000 metal bands working in 130 countries by 2008 (Mayer & Timberlake, 2014). This diffusion is remarkable as metal has often been on the margins of national music scenes as well as having lyrics that commonly espouse anti-authoritarian values. But the performance of heavy metal by touring bands has been neglected, and largely restricted to the Global North. Here it is evident that metal performances are increasingly concentrated near the top of urban hierarchies, and this appears to be even more true of the developing world. Should India or China adopt heavy metal this could clearly change.

Much of the diffusion of heavy metal has been due to the Internet and the ease of disseminating ideas and music around the world (Mayer & Timberlake, 2014). Metal fans have also used the Internet to gather information about bands and albums, such as the Encyclopaedia Metallum (2024). The data collected within this allows for academic study, as with Mayer and Timberlake’s (2014) study of metal diffusion. Other sources include the Concert Archives (2024), which provides tour dates and venues, and Setlist.fm (2024), which tracks the songs performed at each concert. The maps presented here about the career of Ronnie James Dio likewise makes use of data sources created by fans who compiled and distributed this information on the internet. It is the first the author is aware of that maps out a musician’s entire professional career.

There are many opportunities for further work with the metal data sources discussed above, exploring the changing geography of heavy metal around the world, within countries, and even within specific cities. Although this work discussed the career of one musician in cartographic form, there are other visual approaches that can be used, such as three-dimensional space–time diagrams (Mayr & Windhager, 2018). Much remains to be learned from the fusion of metal and geospatial technologies.

Software

Excel was used to compile database of tour dates and join XY coordinates to cities, Google Earth Pro to compile additional XY coordinates, and ArcGIS 10.6 for mapping.

Acknowledgements

The author is deeply grateful to Ronnie James Dio for his music and nearly tireless ability to perform for more than five decades. Long live rock ‘n’ roll!

Data availability statement

The concert tour data used in this paper can be found on Tapio Keihanen’s Ronnie James Dio tour information website: http://www.dio.net/tour/

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).