Interview with Ronnie talking about Rainbow and Sabbath

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More from the estate of the late great Geoff Nicholls comes this very nice little radio interview with Ronnie done back in early 1981.

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About 2/3rds in, have to break for a call... but it's interesting comments for sure about Rainbow and that he's claiming to still be good friends with Cozy Powell, even though he would later refuse entirely to work with him.

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Also, a note on his attachment to Ozzy-era material: in his solo concerts, he'd cover his stuff from Black Sabbath, Rainbow tracks, his own solo material... and "Mistreated". Can't fault him for that, because that song really suited him well. Ozzy-era material is something he'll do in a Sabbath concert, nowhere else.

[Charger]

Also, a note on his attachment to Ozzy-era material: in his solo concerts, he'd cover his stuff from Black Sabbath, Rainbow tracks, his own solo material... and "Mistreated". Can't fault him for that, because that song really suited him well. Ozzy-era material is something he'll do in a Sabbath concert, nowhere else.

Elf did do a cover of War Pigs back in 1972. And I think they actually played it live quite often even.

But as far as the DIO-band doing anything outside of material Ronnie wrote Mistreated was the only one...which probably just showed how much he liked that song.

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Even more fun with "Mistreated" is that it's a direct descendant of Free's "Heartbreaker" in terms of phrasing and mood. Not a note-for-note lifting of the tune, but Blackmore took quite a lot of influence from that track in making "Mistreated".

Which makes me wonder what would things would have been like if Dio had gone into Free and Bad Company and Paul Rodgers had done Rainbow.