One Million Beers For Metal

By now, the sad news of Ron­nie James Dio’s death has reached every cor­ner of the world, and the trib­utes from fans and bands alike have poured in by the thou­sands – like these sub­mis­sions gath­ered from Metal As Fuck fans. The diminu­tive singer, front­man of Elf, Rain­bow, Black Sabbath/Heaven and Hell and his own solo out­fit Dio, was truly one of the best loved fig­ures in metal. Trag­i­cally taken from us before his time by stom­ach can­cer, he will be greatly missed.

One of Dio’s endur­ing con­tri­bu­tions to metal was the intro­duc­tion of the metal horns – the uni­ver­sal salute that fea­tures in so many of the pho­tos sub­mit­ted on this site. In an inter­view with Metal Ham­mer, unpub­lished until last week, he says:

“The sign was pro­tec­tion against the evil eye. My grand­mother used to do it. I can also give evil with it, the sign of the devil. The horns. Peo­ple say ‘So you invented that?’ It was prob­a­bly some guy 50,000 years ago called Og. It was a super­sti­tious sign to ward off evil and give evil back. Because I used it so much I became syn­ony­mous with it. A sym­bol that has become so prevalent.”

Dio him­self enjoyed a beer on occa­sion, like in this short clip with Lemmy, recorded only about a year ago (horns up to Bazil­lion Points Pub­lish­ing):

.

in these sad times, the One Mil­lion Beers team encour­age every­one to do what we think Ron­nie would have liked – crank up some clas­sic Dio tunes, open a nice cold beer, raise the horns to hon­our a heavy metal leg­end… and don’t for­get to take a photo and send it in!