"I don't know about that, man. I just don't know about it. It looks creepy to me, 'cause it's not [Ronnie]. It looks like a puppet. It's cool to keep his music alive and all that jazz.
"What little I've seen, it looks weird to me, and I just don't know if he'd be a big fan of it. People say different things, and it's all hearsay. I knew the guy for six years, and what I knew about him, I can't see him looking at that and going, 'Bitching.'
"It's just weird, man. And anyway, I'm not here to put down anybody, but... Craig Goldy doing all the guitars and Simon Wright doing all the drums... I love Simon Wright; he's a great AC/DC drummer.
"I know they're playing along with Ronnie's voice, but the music's real stiff... It's just, like, 'Oh, man.' It doesn't have that feel."And he's singing - the hologram is singing it - but then they're playing the song; they're following Ronnie. So, I was, like, 'That's pretty cool.'
Ronnie James Dio's widow and manager Wendy revealed in a recent interview that she has discovered a wealth of tapes that include some material from the legendary metal singer that no one has heard before.
"I have so much footage people have never seen. I got unseen Super 8 stuff. I found a whole huge box with stuff from his childhood, from the Rainbow days, behind the scenes stuff, all in a big box, which I'm getting it now transferred so that we can actually view it. A lot of these Super 8's were at Ronnie's parents house and when they passed away Ronnie and I went there and took it.
"I also found a whole bunch of tapes of Ronnie, demos of his songs, in his own studio and we had all these tapes which I had no idea what they were there. Demo stuff that probably no one has never heard before or it's the beginnings of songs or its songs, you know, that haven't been finished, this is a treasure trove.
The month-long Dio Returns tour kicked off at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall in Fort Myers, Florida on Friday night (31st May) before hitting The Plaza Theatre in Orlando on Saturday (1st June).
Dio Disciples features former members of Dio, alongside three additional singers, but for part of the show Dio will front the band himself. The Dio hologram first performed at last year’s Wacken Open Air festival in Germany and made its US debut at the Pollstar Live! awards in Los Angeles.
The hologram was created by the company Eyellusion, with the backing of Dio’s widow and manager, Wendy Dio.
Eyellusion’s Jeff Pezzuti told axs.com that a new Dio hologram would be created for the tour. “The tour is currently being routed and we are hoping to make an announcement for an end-of-year kickoff in the coming months,” he said. “This is not just about the US. It is truly a world tour. Ronnie’s fans are spread around the world and we intend to bring this exciting show to as many as we can. The show will not only feature Ronnie and his band but also live singers like Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens [formerly of Judas Priest] and others to complete the overall show vision.”
At the Wacken Open Air festival last summer, the Dio hologram made its live debut, performing the song We Rock. “It was very surreal,” the Dio Disciples guitarist Craig Goldey told Rolling Stone of his first encounter with the hologram, at a rehearsal. “I could see him – he was moving and singing – but I couldn’t touch him. It was surreal almost to have him here again.”
Hologram world tours have previously been announced, but never come to fruition. In 2015 it was announced that Whitney Houston would go on the road in holographic form, but a leak of a duet with Christina Aguilera, which suggested the hologram was not up to scratch, led to the withdrawal of the Houston hologram by her estate.
Last April it was announced that a Judy Garland hologram would tour the world in 2017, but tour dates have been conspicuous by their absence.
