Saturday June, 15th 2019 I made the two hour drive from Duluth to Maplewood, MN for the Dio Returns Hologram Show.  My initial partner in crime flaked so I flew solo as last minute for anything is tough to pull people in on as it is, include the fact that it's a hologram and takers for a free ticket and ride were scarce.

Regardless, I went and for starters Jizzy Pearl and his band Love/Hate opened the evenings events.  Jizzy still has a good voice but was barely ever a footnote in rock music history so badmouthing Ratt on stage, not too cool.  His set was short which was good because after about 5 songs I was ready for it to be over.

The title of this show is "Dio Returns", but it was more like The Dio Hologram will appear every other song or so and Oni Logan and Tim 'Ripper' Owens will sing all the rest.  Basically it was a Dio cover show.  The hologram was kind of neat when it was there but it's placed too far back on the stage and while the live backing band helped, it wasn't the experience I thought it would be.

Tim and Oni are great vocalists and even hit some Dio notes well, but I was under the impression they were only going to sing a song or two or do more backup type vocals.  The show had a few minutes stolen from the music of Ronnie James Dio by some drum soloing that I'm pretty sure a 6 year old could do and probably do better.  The line up of the hologram area and the main front screen surrounding the stage also didn't line up very well unless you were directly at stage height eye level and while it was decently in sync with Dio's previous concert vocal recordings, there were times when it was off a little more than it should have been.  Add to that the Myth's $10 for a drink even for rail crap, and it mostly was a waste of time.

The sound was decent at least but there was no feeling at the show like you sometimes get from concerts, no goosebumps here.  I feel like I could pull up YouTube videos of the actual Dio live and enjoy it more and I'm bummed, I wanted to like it and I was excited to see it.   Would I go again?  If it was free, maybe, if it wasn't my fuel and 4 hours of driving.  I'm bummed, I wanted to like it and I was excited to see it.  Did you see it?  What did you think?

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