A former guitarist for Dio, Doug Aldrich, has shared his opinion on what the late, great Ronnie James Dio would think of the decision for his legacy to live on by way of hologram performances.
Back in 2010, Ronnie James Dio passed away at the age of 67. Just two years later, the idea of a late artist performing via hologram reached mainstream attention when Tupac Shakur managed to perform at Coachella in 2012, despite having passed away 16 years previously.
Since then, there has been plenty of talk of more hologram tours. While Prince was almost resurrected at this year’s Superbowl before that idea was shot down, Australia’s first hologram tour almost took place this year, before Roy Orbison’s posthumous appearance was cancelled. Likewise, ABBA is supposedly still set to make an appearance on Aussie shores in 2019, but we’ll see how that turns out.
However, in 2016, the Ronnie James Dio hologram first appeared at the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany. Originally a one-off, the show hit the road in 2017, and was even supposed to come to Australia last year.
However, former Dio guitarist Doug Aldrich has said the rocker would be “pissed” at the sheer concept of the hologram show.
“Everyone keeps asking me about the hologram thing … I would like to see it myself, just to see it,” Aldrich explained to the White Line Fever podcast (via Loudwire).
“I love hearing those songs, I love Ronnie, so that would be cool, but I think Ronnie would be pissed. I think so. Ronnie would be, like, ‘C’mon, let me be dead in peace!’ Ronnie was a no-frills guy. He was not down for stuff like that.”
“At the Super Bowl, they had a halftime show with Prince,” Aldrich continued. “A big curtain came down and there was kind of a projection of Prince. It was, like, 300 feet tall. It was really cool, I thought.”
“My neighbor is the old guitar player for Prince, Wendy,” he explained. “[I asked] ‘Oh, by the way, what do you think Prince would think about that?’ She goes, ‘He’d hate it – hate, hate it!’ But I thought it was great. So I’d love to see the hologram thing. I just hope they get it to be bigger than life because that’s how Ronnie was.”
Incidentally, the hologram was actually recently defended by Wendy Dio, the late rocker’s widow, who said that he would have embraced the new technology.
“I think that Ronnie was an innovator of heavy metal music, so why not be an innovator of technology?” she questioned while being interviewed onUS radio station KLOS.
“And I think technology is coming a long way with holograms — a lot of people are doing it now. And I think the reason is because we are losing all of our innovators; everybody is getting older. And we need to keep them alive and keep their memory and their music alive.
“It’s like when people first came out with a CD or a cassette: ‘Ooh, we don’t want that.’ But then it was the way of technology.”
“We took it out to see if there was an audience for it, because it’s been very… some people like it, some people don’t; there is a lot of talk about that,” she continued. “We wanted to see if there was actually an audience for it. And we took it to Europe, and we found there definitely was an audience for it. The people that came loved it.”
“I think the people that say, ‘Ooh, this is terrible,’ should at least see it,” she concluded. “Don’t criticize it if you haven’t seen it. It’s done with love. The band love doing it. And we just wanna keep Ronnie’s memory and his music alive.
While the Ronnie James Dio will likely continue to divide fans for quite some time to come, it remains to be seen whether it will indeed ever make its way to Australia.
Check out the Ronnie James Dio hologram performing live:
