The hologram of the late Ronnie James Dio will tour this year with singers with Ripper Owens and Oni Logan.
The hologram debuted on August 6, 2016 with a surprise appearance before 75,000-plus fans at the Wacken Open Air music festival in Germany. Dio, who died in 2010 at age 67, was shown belting out “We Rock,” the late singer’s go-to encore song, with Dio Disciples, a band made up of several of his former bandmates.
Created by Eyellusion, the Dio hologram is the world’s first rock hologram performance and its Wacker Open Air performance marked the first time a hologram had been accompanied by a live band onstage.
Eyellusion CEO Jeff Pezzuti tells Talking Metal that, for the 2017 tour, Dio will presented in different eras.
“[At Wacken] he was somewhere around ’88, the Dream Evil era,” Pezzuti says. “For this next tour we’re going to be somewhere later than that for certain songs and maybe earlier than that for other songs.
In addition, Owens and Logan will perform in various portions of the show and sing duets with the hologram.
“It’s going to be mind-blowing from the fans’ perspective,” Pezzuti says. “We are going to bring album covers to life. We are going to bring things that are known to Ronnie to life onstage.
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“Ronnie will be involved in each show from probably six to seven song a night that he will be singing on. Some of the ones we can expect are ‘We Rock,’ ‘Holy Diver’ and ‘Rainbow in the Dark.’”You can watch a video from the Wacken performance below.
Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
