Dio – The Last In Line

Warner wanted a video about teenagers in hell. Ronnie James Dio told the director: from birth to death, we’re all in a line — imagine being last.

When horror director Don Coscarelli got a mysterious call summoning him to Warner Bros. to discuss a heavy metal video, the studio’s pitch was blunt: teenagers in hell. Then he met the singer. Ronnie James Dio, Coscarelli later recalled, had a far more philosophical take — from birth to death, we’re all standing in a line, so imagine being the last one in it. Out of that conversation came one of MTV’s strangest and most beloved metal videos, and the song beneath it became the only Dio single ever to crack the Top 10 of Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart.

Keep watching: more from the 80s →

The band arrived at “The Last in Line” carrying the weight of a hard act to follow: their own debut. Holy Diver, released in 1983, had established Dio — the singer fresh out of Black Sabbath, with drummer Vinny Appice alongside him, guitarist Vivian Campbell and bassist Jimmy Bain completing the original four — as one of the premier metal bands of the decade. The label suggested bringing in Ted Templeman, the star producer behind Van Halen, for the follow-up. Ronnie refused and produced the record himself, the way he had the first one. The writing stayed collaborative too: the band built songs together in rehearsal, with the title track credited to Dio, Campbell, and Bain, and every lyric on the album written by Ronnie. Appice remembered the sessions, up in the Colorado Rockies, as some of the most fun of his life.

Two Hundred Thousand Dollars and a Haywire Elevator

The single arrived June 11, 1984, three weeks ahead of the album, and this time the band had real video money. The Holy Diver clip had been shot cheap and looked it; for the new record, manager Wendy Dio negotiated a $200,000 budget from Warner Bros., and most of it went to “The Last in Line.” Coscarelli — whose Phantasm and The Beastmaster were, in Ronnie’s words, right up his alley — built the concept around an ordinary teenage delivery boy who steps into an elevator that suddenly drops him into a fantastical dimension of the damned. The director described it as the Wizard of Oz tornado inverted: instead of being swept up into a dream, the kid is pulled down into a nightmare, with Murray, the band’s demonic mascot, looming in the distance. MTV played it relentlessly, and the song rode the exposure to No. 10 on the Album Rock Tracks chart.

The album did the rest. The Last in Line, released July 2, 1984, reached No. 23 in America and a remarkable No. 4 in the UK — the highest chart positions the band ever achieved in either country. It went Gold inside ten weeks and, in February 1987, became the first Dio album certified Platinum. Critics and fans have kept it near the top of the band’s catalog ever since, second only to Holy Diver in most rankings, with the title track’s slow-building intro and Campbell’s soloing singled out as career-defining work. Campbell has said Ronnie taught him to build a solo from memorable lines rather than cramming in notes — advice he still honors, playing those solos exactly as recorded.

The Voice That Never Left the Line

Ronnie James Dio was born Ronald James Padavona on July 10, 1942 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and raised in Cortland, New York, where his music career began in 1957 and where a street now bears the name Dio Way. By the time “The Last in Line” arrived he had already fronted Elf, sung Rainbow’s greatest records with Ritchie Blackmore, and replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath — three careers’ worth of work before the band bearing his own name made him a headliner. He gave metal its defining gesture along the way: the devil horns, borrowed from an Italian grandmother who used the sign to ward off evil. He died on May 16, 2010, at 67, mourned across the entire genre as its greatest voice.

That voice never lost the song. The footage below comes from Evil or Divine – Live in New York City, the official concert film shot at New York’s Roseland Ballroom on Friday, December 13, 2002 — eighteen years after the record, with Ronnie at 60 delivering “The Last in Line” at full power. From birth to death, we’re all in the line. Few ever stood in it taller.