#vinnie appice

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Black Sabbath

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Black Sabbath - Heaven & Hell UK tour programme. Front & back covers.

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Black Sabbath

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The Runaways with Rick Derringer, Vinnie Appice, and disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, photographed by Richard Creamer (1976)

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Black Sabbath: Dehumanizer (1992)

For all the surrounding hype and excitement, Black Sabbath’s second go-round with Ronnie James Dio and Vinnie Appice via 1992’s Dehumanizer album fell decidedly short of the glorious benchmarks achieved by Heaven and Hell (*) and even Mob Rules, a decade prior.

But no one really expected that, now did they?

Certainly not anyone who’d been paying attention to Sabbath’s all-but-complete career collapse during the 1980s, which had recently bottomed out both in record stores and the box office -- in spite of the relative musical renaissance heard on albums like The Eternal Idol (awesome!), Headless Cross (amazing!) and Tyr (meh), all featuring frontman Tony Martin.

Meanwhile, Dio’s once high-flying solo band had likewise steadily fallen from grace, taking a qualitative and quantitative nose-dive from the commercial and creative peaks of 1983’s Holy Diver and ‘84’s The Last in Line to the ‘90’s widely ignored Lock Up the Wolves.

Thus was hatched the daring (desperate?) plan to reassemble the by-then-semi-mythical early ‘80s formation of Ronnie, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Appice for Dehumanizer, which not surprisingly reignited interest in the Black Sabbath brand before a single note was even heard.

And, to his credit, Ronnie’s technology-inspired lyrics for energetic head-bangers like “TV Crimes” and “Time Machine,” as well as monolithic doom stomps like “Computer God” and “Letters from Earth,” showed a willingness to modernize Sabbath’s image for the MTV generation.

Other highlights included the deliciously morbid “After All (The Dead)” and the conversely positive, self-empowerment statement “I” (surely the shortest song title of all time?), plus, somewhere in between, thematically-speaking, the thought-provoking “Sins of the Father.”

So I was, needless to say, beyond thrilled when Black Sabbath Mk. III (or was they Mk. IIb?) brought the Dehumanizer tour to São Paulo and delivered a powerful ‘greatest hits’ set, beginning with “Mob Rules” and the remaining classics (and new cuts) you can watch here via the magic of YouTube!

Unfortunately, both the tour and the entire Dehumanizer experiment blew up in everyone’s faces by mid-November, when Dio understandably refused to open for Ozzy Osbourne’s farcical retirement concert, which I suspect Sharon O. orchestrated, in part, to sabotage (see what I did there?) this Sabbath reunion.

In the short term, this colossal faux pas allowed a few lucky fans to witness Judas Priest legend Rob Halford fronting Black Sabbath, and, in the long term Dehumanizer served as a bridge to Dio, Iommi, Geezer, and Appice’s third go-round with 2009’s The Devil You Know (as Heaven & Hell).

But, in the middle term, the collapse of this early ‘90s comeback left Sabbath with no recourse other than to call back the once spurned Tony Martin (plus drummer Bobby Rondinelli and, later, Cozy Powell) for the dismal Cross Purposes and absolutely dire Forbidden albums.

* Yes, yes, I know Appice had yet to replace Bill Ward on Heaven and Hell. 

More Black Sabbath: "Evil Woman," Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Sabotage, Technical Ecstasy, Never Say Die!, Heaven and Hell, Live at Last, Mob Rules, Live Evil, Born Again, Seventh Star, The Eternal Idol, Headless Cross, Cross Purposes, Forbidden, The Devil You Know, 13.

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