Guitarist Doug Aldrich spoke with White Line Fever podcast about Ronnie James Dio’s holograph and its subsequent tours.
The guitarist, who joined Dio’s band in 2002, said (via Blabbermouth.net) “I would like to see it myself, just to see it. 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.”
Also, Aldrich says Prince’s former guitarist Wendy Melvoin believes her late boss would feel the same about similar tributes.
Aldrich takes up the story. “At the Super Bowl, they had a half-time thing with Prince,” he said. “A big curtain came down and there was a projection of Prince. It was, like, 300 feet tall. It was really cool, I thought.
My neighbor is the old guitar players for Prince, Wendy. She had gotten her son a basketball hoop and was trying to assemble it by herself. I hadn’t met her yet. I went over and said, ‘You need a hand, I think,’ and she’s, like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I don’t know how the hell… There’s all these parts.’ We built this hoop for her together, and I said, ‘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 [the Prince projection] 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.”
The Dio hologram was created by a company called Eyeillusion and made its debut at the Wacken Open Air festival in August 2016 in front of more than 75,000 fans.
2 Responses
“If it seems to be real, it’s illusion….”
I first became aware of Doug through his work with Whitesnake, and he’s a serious player. Great Les Paul>Marshall Amp fireworks.