“The whole rig went completely silent – 10,000 people started booing me”: The 17-year-old guitar prodigy who flourished with Dio, but got off to a nightmare start

Rowan Robertson’s story sounds like something you’d hear on the evening news – ‘… and a kid who got a chance to play onstage with his musical hero – more after the break…’ Except it wasn’t a one-off, perfect-for-the-cameras moment.

Hearing that legendary metal belter Ronnie James Dio was in need of a new guitarist, in 1988, Robertson – then 17 – sent a scratchy demo tape of his playing to the singer’s fan club. The tape was impressive enough that it eventually fell into the hands of the singer and his management, and subsequently landed him an audition, which in turn, incredibly, got Robertson the gig in Dio’s self-titled band.

This lifted Robertson’s audiences from, as he put it to Guitar World in a 2022 interview, “pubs and some rock competitions” to shows with five-figure attendance virtually overnight.

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Setting the scene at that first gig, Robertson recounted to GW, “The lights go down and there’s this big buildup to the opening song, Wild One, with a long intro tape being played, and then there’s a big drum fill and I run out on stage.

“Before the gig, my guitar tech, ‘Pops,’ had asked if I wanted him to turn my distortion pedal on and have it ready to go. I said, ‘No, I’ll do it when I get out there.’

“So I ran out there and – of course – I hit the ‘off’ switch and the whole rig went completely silent and 10,000 people started booing me!”

Needless to say, his boss wasn’t thrilled, but Dio had faith that his young-gun hire would learn his lesson without a heated lecture – and indeed he did.

“I was pretty nervous for the second show, but I got over it,” Robertson said. “Ronnie wasn’t happy after that first show, but there wasn’t any conversation and I just didn’t go near him that night. The first thing with Ronnie was you had to do your job well.

“Ronnie certainly didn’t micro-manage anybody; he hired you and you were in a band with him and he wrote the music with us as a band. If you made a mistake, he wouldn’t say anything, but you wouldn’t want to make that same mistake again. He cared about his art and his craft deeply.”

Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.