#104, “Falling Off the Edge of the World,” Black Sabbath (1981)

150 Favorite Songs: #104, “Falling Off the Edge of the World,” Black Sabbath (1981)

There are few things I admire more than conviction. We live in a world full of opportunists and cynics, con men and hustlers, sycophants and cowards. I’ve seen people cave to bullies in order to advance their careers, I’ve seen them rally crowds by screaming lines they didn’t even believe, I’ve watched them sell out people they claimed to care about to snatch some short-lived material reward. I’ve wondered how those people live with themselves.

And then I’ve heard Ronnie James Dio.

I have no fucking clue what “Falling Off the Edge of the World” is about. Or, rather, I have great confidence that “Falling Off the Edge of the World” isn’t about anything that makes any sense or that could be parsed. But my god. Listen to it.

Listen to the haunting, etheral strings and the pedal-distorted guitar that build the atmosphere at the beginning, Dio—who was on his second album as the replacement for Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath at the point at which he recorded the song, and fully settled into the role—gently crooning. Ozzy’s charm was that he was basically what you’d get if you picked any random guy out of a pub from Manchester, England and told him he had thirty minutes to lead the heaviest band in the world, get ready to sing. Dio, though, was an operatic belter, someone who could make that band reach heights that Ozzy could never get to. You don’t always want to reach those heights—there’s a visceral, bluesy joy in the lows that Ozzy dwelled in—but by the time the band recorded “Falling Off the Edge of the World,” they’d learned how glorious those highs could be. To use a metaphor that both, I think, would appreciate and identify with, Ozzy is a druid, Dio is a wizard.

So you’ve got Dio, singing softly about living out of time, passionately pleading to someone—the gods?—that he should be sitting at literally the Round Table, a knight in King Arthur’s Court, something so ridiculous that it feels dopey just to type it. And then—get ready—because Tony Iommi and Vinny Appice, the band’s new drummer, come in after that quiet preamble, Appice stomping away on the kick drum, patiently tapping out the rhythm like a heartbeat until Iommi brings the sort of unstoppable guitar riff that Tony Iommi could toss off three times a week to join him. Appice backs him up with cymbals and this instrumental bridge leads us to a showcase for Dio’s vocals, which really never sounded better anywhere in his five decades of singing rock and roll.

What does he sing about? Nothing. He’s not even singing about knights and wizards once the song gets going, he’s just delivering these lines that are all clearly etched upon his soul with such utter conviction that I am forced to believe him. “Look out, there’s danger / nowhere to run / seems like desperate measures / but sometimes it’s got to be done!” he belts, and god damn it if I am not putting my head on a fucking swivel, looking for danger, confirming that there’s nowhere to run, aware that this—whatever it is, whatever action I am being compelled to—is indeed a desperate measure. But I have no regrets, because Dio, with the righteousness of his voice, has fully assured me of the virtue of what will come next. Sometimes, indeed, it’s got to be done.

I know it sounds like I’m goofing on the song here, but I’m not—not in the slightest. I love this stuff. I live for it. I want—if you’ve met me, you know this—I want to feel like perhaps I too have seen some the faces of doom and I am also only a man. I adore what isn’t just a dramatic song but what is, in fact, epic, high fantasy drama. This isn’t a song about the Lord of the Rings—everybody who made rock music in the ‘70s has those—it’s something much weirder and more convincing. It’s Dio, in full command of a band that was desperate to return to form after a bad stretch of ‘70s rock cliches, singing what’s in his heart. The fact that what’s in his heart is nonsense about demons and feeling “a change in the earth, in the wind and the rain” and wishing he could carry a lance to fight against it is all the better—that’s how you know he means it. Nobody would fake that.