"I'll Get You, Dio!"
The legend of Ronnie James Dio's giant spider
This one goes out to Jason, my brother from another mother and proud annual subscriber to Jagged Time Lapse. While I already have a whole list of things on deck to write about for this Substack, I’m not unreceptive to requests, especially when it comes from a paid subscriber and longtime pal. So when he asked a while back if I would (and I may be paraphrasing here) “Do something about Dio’s giant spider,” my mental wheels immediately started turning.
Jason and I met as freshmen in high school, and while music quickly became a major part of our bond — I already knew that The Beatles were great, but he’s the one who really showed me why — we initially connected over a shared sense of absurd humor. Monty Python and National Lampoon were big deals for us both, and one of our very first interactions involved him showing me how to make a Commodore PET run “Reagan Licks George’s Bush” on its screen in perpetuity during our Intro to Computing class. We would spend a significant part of the next four years trying to make each other laugh, often at really awkward and inappropriate times.
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This highly-tuned sense of absurdity was what led to our mutual appreciation — or at least mirthful enjoyment — of ‘80s metal. We generally talked way more about stuff like Elvis Costello, The Kinks, The Jam and The Clash, with Blue Oyster Cult being about the heaviest band that ever came up in our appreciative conversations. But in 1984, between clips from bands like Judas Priest, Quiet Riot and Ratt appearing with regularity on Friday Night Videos and Channel 66 (the Chicagoland area’s short-lived answer to MTV) and the theatrical release of This is Spinal Tap, the inherent silliness of the spandex-and-pointy-guitars brigade definitely caught our attention. As did this guy in the glasses and plaid shirt, who rose up out of the crowd in Van Halen’s “Panama” video right around the time when David Lee Roth reached down between his legs to ease his seed bag…
That guy looked like he was having a great time, and we both admitted to feeling a grudging respect for his fist-waving, give-no-fucks enthusiasm, even if neither of us would have been caught dead wearing a flannel shirt over a rock T since about 1980…