Vinny Appice Says Rob Halford Wanted to Replace Dio in Heaven & Hell
It’s not hard to imagine what a version of Black Sabbath fronted by Rob Halford would sound like. After all, Halford fronted Sabbath on three separate occasions: twice in 1992, with the Mob Rules/Dehumanizer line-up, after Ronnie James Dio balked at the band opening for Ozzy Osbourne, and then again in 2004, when Ozzy had to bow out of an Ozzfest performance due to bronchitis.
But what might it have sounded like if the Judas Priest singer had ever actually had the opportunity to record with Black Sabbath? According to drummer Vinny Appice, we almost found out!
Speaking to Rock Fantasy, Appice reveals that there was talk of having Halford join Black Sabbath both after the ’92 concerts and again in 2010, after Ronnie James Dio passed away (and Black Sabbath was forced, for Ozzy-related legal reasons, to go by the moniker Heaven & Hell).
Said Appice of the 1992 performances (transcript via Blabbermouth):
“Ronnie didn’t wanna do those shows; he doesn’t wanna go on before Ozzy, ’cause who knows what would happen. So he refused to do ’em. But Tony [Iommi, guitar] and Geezer [Butler, bass] really wanted to do ’em, so now we’ve got a little conflict going. And it’s decided we’re doing the shows. So now I’m in the middle. What do I do? So I had to sit down with Ronnie and go, ‘Look, I’m in the middle. What do you suggest? I don’t wanna really leave them hanging — there’s not much time to get a [different] drummer — and I don’t wanna burn my ties with you, obviously. I wanna play with you.’ And he said, ‘Do it. You’ve gotta do it. You can’t leave them without a drummer.’ So we agreed on what we were doing.”
Appice continued:
“We played Phoenix with Ronnie, and then the next day was off. So the next day we were gonna rehearse with Rob Halford at some rehearsal place. So it was really funny, because it was just a regular rehearsal place. And in comes Rob Halford, Iommi, Butler, me. People in there are going, ‘Ah, oh my God. What the fuck is this? What’s going on?’ I remember the faces — everybody was freaking out.”
“So we rehearsed with Rob for about two or three hours, and went over songs that I never played before; they were Ozzy tunes. The only thing we did of Dio’s was only a couple of ’em; one of ’em was ‘Heaven And Hell.’ So now we’ve got all these new songs, and Tony and Geezer haven’t played them in a while either, and I haven’t played them. And now we’re playing with Rob, and we’re kind of now on edge. Like, ‘Oh, shit.’ You don’t have that confidence of, ‘Man, we’ve been playing the whole tour together.’ You don’t have that confidence. So it was a bit nerve-racking.
“We went out, and it sounded great — Rob killed it. Except the teleprompter went off. So, luckily, Rob had all the lyrics on the floor on paper, but he couldn’t see them. So he got down on one knee so he could read the fucking lyrics.
“It was great. It sounded great. People loved it. And it was good. Then there was words talked about maybe carrying on from there, with Rob. And then there was also talk, after Ronnie passed [in 2010], about doing it after that, after the dust settled too. And, actually, Rob kept wanting to do it — he wanted to do it. When I saw him somewhere — at an award show — [he told me,] ‘I’m gonna talk to Tony.’ And then recently, I sent a message over to management about, ‘Hey, we could easily do an album and not even see each other, the way things are done these days, with Rob.’”
Is there a snowball’s chance in hell (& heaven) that this could still happen? Hey, never say never! Us fans would certainly eat it up — especially if they made a record as good as 2009’s The Devil You Know.
You can check out the entire interview below.
