Vinny Appice recalls telling Sabbath he would leave to play with Dio

The American drummer Vinny Appice was a member of Black Sabbath for the first time from 1980 to 1982 when Ronnie James Dio decided to leave the band and invited him to be part of his new band Dio.

Appice recalled in an interview with VRP Rocks (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar) how he told Geezer and Tony he was leaving the band too.

Vinny Appice recalls telling Sabbath he would leave to play with Dio

“Tony, Geezer, and Ronnie weren’t getting along. So, at one point, Ronnie and I went to the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood, and he said, ‘I’m going to leave the band.’ He had a record deal already.”

“So, Ronnie said ‘I’m leaving the band,’ and I went, ‘Hmmm.’ And he said, ‘I want you to come with me. I’d love you to be part of this.’ I went, ‘Ah, OK.’ And by then, I was, like, 20 years old — 21, 22 years old. So I said, ‘Sure, OK. I don’t think this is gonna fail with a singer like that. And we’re excited about it.’ So I told Sabbath, ‘I’m gonna stick with Ronnie.'”

“We started playing together: Ronnie on bass and me on drums, of course, in the rehearsal thing. And we had ‘Holy Diver’. We had that already, Ronnie wrote that. And then we put in some accents. We didn’t have the whole thing, but it was a skeleton of a song. That’s what we started with,” Vinny Appice said.

The American musician joined Black Sabbath in 1980, not long after “Heaven & Hell” was released. His first studio album with the band was “Mob Rules”(1981) and he was also part of the live record “Live Evil” (1982) and the 1992 album “Dehumanizer”. Later on, he was the drummer in the Sabbath spin-off group Heaven & Hell, which also had Dio, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler.