In this excerpt from DIO: The Unholy Scriptures, we hear from Ronnie’s New Yorker partner-in-crime Vinny Appice, on the novel construction of Holy Diver track “Invincible.” No surprise, but Vinny turned out to be a key part of the Dio sound on the album, when it’s rare for a drummer to exhibit this degree of personality. And speaking of important drummers, Vinny also tells us about pranking his older brother, storied percussion legend Carmine.
As for Vinny’s memories of making the record, Appice told Jimmy Kay that, “Holy Diver was recorded at Sound City. Everybody knows Sound City now, thanks to the Dave Grohl movie. Holy Diver was a great time in everybody’s life in the band. Vivian was new. He was like a young kid and Jimmy was Jimmy (laughs). We were just having a great time. Every night we would go to Sound City at seven o’clock, get in the rehearsal room and write and smoke a lot of pot. They would drink; I didn’t really drink. But we smoked loads of pot and we’d record stuff. And our soundman, Angelo Arcuri, who recorded Holy Diver, was there every night.”
“We even got to the point of… we’d get really stoned and put down riffs and stuff, and the next night we would come in and we’d ask Angelo to play the riff on the cassette we made. It’s a four-track cassette so you could put everything upside down and it goes backwards. And that’s what he did by mistake. And we were laughing at him, ‘Ah, you jerk, you put it in upside-down.’ We’re laughing, and then we go, ‘Wait a minute; that sounds pretty good.’ So we’re listening to some backwards stuff now. And we said that sounds good—let’s learn the riff backwards. So we learned the riff backward, and we used it in the song ‘Invisible.’ The song ‘Invisible’ is the riff forward and the riff backwards, too, in the song.”
“So we did crazy stuff. There was nothing we said we can’t do. And then we destroyed the place. We’d open up the pinball machines and put little ramps there so we couldn’t move the balls and we’d be playing video games and having a ball. It was like a boys club every night. That’s why it came out so good. We were all having such a great time. And when we were ready, when we had four songs, we just dragged all the stuff across the parking lot into the studio part of Sound City. You had the rehearsal part and then you had the parking lot and then you had the recording part.
We set up there and we recorded four songs and then we brought everything back across the parking lot, put it back in the room. At one time the Vanilla Fudge, with my brother Carmine, came to rehearse at one of the rooms. So we’re in there, they’re in there, let’s lock them in. So we took all the road cases and piled them up so they couldn’t get out. We just put them in front of their door and we left them there for a couple hours. They were pissed-off, but hey, what the hell, it was fun.”
DIO: The Unholy Scriptures—The Complete Unofficial Chronicle of Ronnie James Dio’s Solo Canon (Schiffer Publishing) by Martin Popoff will be available in stores on September 28, 2025.
