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The story of Rowan Robertson and his brief tenure with metal heavyweights Dio is pure Hollywood.
An unknown 17-year-old whose gigs have mostly been in pubs sends a Hail Mary, shred-heavy audition tape to the fan club of one of the greatest metal frontmen of all time, Ronnie James Dio; it gets passed along, he gets an audition, and the rest is history.
The Dio job was multi-faceted – in addition to the band's beloved catalog, he also had to get his hands around material from the singer's two previous gigs, Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and Black Sabbath.
Despite his age, Dio had the utmost confidence in his new guitarist. In a new interview with Guitar World, Robertson reflected, for instance, on a moment of insecurity he had during the writing process for what became the guitarist's only album with the band, 1990's Lock Up the Wolves.
“‘I don’t know if I can do this…’” he says he told Dio. “But he said to me, ‘Trust me; you can.’”
Along those lines, Dio wasn't a micromanager when it came to Robertson's replication of the guitar parts laid down by Blackmore, Sabbath riff-lord Tony Iommi, and his two predecessors in the band – Vivian Campbell and Craig Goldy.
“Ronnie told me, ‘Watch out, there will probably be people at the gigs who will not like you for replacing Viv’, but I barely ever saw that,” Robertson recalled to Guitar World. “As for replicating the songs live, the ones that sat most easily with me were the Ritchie Blackmore ones.
“Ronnie only ever said one thing to me about sounding like anyone he’d played with before. And that was, ‘Tony used to vibrate the chords with his left hand.’”
Unfortunately, it was Iommi and Sabbath that led to the premature end of Robertson's time with Dio, as the singer regrouped with the heavy metal forefathers in 1992, and hired a new guitarist, Tracy G, upon Dio's re-formation a year later.
Robertson had no hard feelings, though he does wish he had another opportunity to play with the fiery frontman, who died of stomach cancer in 2010.
“When Wendy [Ronnie James Dio's wife] told me the news, I don’t remember feeling much of anything,” he told Guitar World, “but in hindsight, as I explored musically over the years, I would have loved to play for him on another recording – [I felt I] could have brought so much more of interest to him at that time.”
Look out for our full interview with Robertson in the coming weeks.
