The author at right,
It seems like everyone is suddenly dying- Dennis Hopper, Gary Coleman and Ronnie James Dio. As a lover of metal, when I heard that there would be a public memorial for the late great former singer for Elf, Rainbow and Black Sabbath I decided I should go. Then when I heard that the Westboro Baptist Church would be there protesting I was even more intrigued. In case you don’t know the Westboro Baptist Church are a group led by Reverend Fred Phelps who are famous for protesting at funerals with signs saying “God Hates Fags.”
Why were they there? Their website lists a lot of reasons including that Dio disrespected God by taking the name Dio (meaning God in Italian) and that he did not follow the Biblical precept to love his neighbor, evidenced by his being mean to Ozzy Osbourne. If there ever was any doubt that the Westboro folks are great performance artists, I think this proves it. It’s hard to believe that it has taken anyone this long to realize that they are the Christian equivalents of Billionaires for Bush or the English Monster Raving Loony Party. They take all the ridiculous ideas and hypocrisies of the Christian right and take them to their logical extremes. When Pat Robertson says that Katrina was New Orleans punishment for being a gay friendly city, they say that Americans soldiers dying is America’s punishment for being a gay friendly country. Right wind Christians recoil at them while they are shoving the mirror of their own homophobia and hatred in their faces. These same people also once claimed that heavy metal would lead the world to hell and so the Westboro folks have to show up at Ronnie James Dio’s funeral to prove this point.
When we got to Forest Lawn Cemetery, there were only three Westboro protesters there but they were surrounded by a larger group of pranksters with their own comical signs riffing on Westboro’s signature themes. A memorial is naturally a time of sadness but the protesters brought a little bit of fun to the proceedings. We all stopped to take pictures and pose with our own signs that my good friend Jill McGraw had been kind enough to make. I was surprised to find the Westboro people to be uniformly friendly and glad to pose for photo after photo with everybody. A few people tried to logically argue with them, which I have to say, sure sounded silly. As you can see from the photos they added to their bag of tricks some new great slogans for which they have websites. The woman was promoting their brilliant new site Jews Killed Jesus, while the men were promoting Priest Rape Boys. They obviously realize that God Hates Fags isn’t as fun as it used to be, so I’m glad they are branching out into new areas of comic extremism.
After the levity of this time with the wonderful Westboro people and the pranksters they inspired, we trekked up the giant hill to the memorial. So many people showed up that they had to issue admittance wristbands to the first 600 people who showed up. Those folks got to enter the memorial hall where the memorial took place. Most had showed up at 8AM for an event that started at 2. The rest of us got to watch the memorial from outside the hall on jumbotrons. Memorial buttons were issued to everyone as well as a beautiful program with testimonials. Sadly no heavyweights like Tony Iommi or Richie Blackmore made it there. There were musical performances which featured Dio songs played for some odd reason on acoustic guitars and flutes(!!!). Somebody from the awful band Asia sang “Heaven and Hell” which almost seemed more disrespectful than the Westboro people being there. But the testimonials from friends and family were great. I learned that Dio was his high school class president! There was lots of talk about who Dio was jamming with in Heaven. (I don’t know why but everyone thought he’d be working with Dimebag Darrell from Pantera first!) All in all a sad but inspiring tribute to one of the great rockers of the heavy metal era!
—Julien Nitzberg