Bury the past with an axe

On May 28, Finding the Sacred Heart — Live in Philly, 1986 will be released for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray. The concert was filmed at the Spectrum in Philadelphia during the second leg of the Sacred Heart tour and featured Dio’s newest guitarist, San Diego shred master Craig Goldy.

“I didn’t know it was gonna be re-released until recently,” he says by phone from his home in Allied Gardens. Goldy was born and raised in San Diego. “I lived in L.A. for 25 years, and I decided to come back.”

It was the death of guitarist Randy Rhoads in 1982 that set the process in motion that would land Goldy in Dio’s band. Prior, another homegrown guitarist named Jake E. Lee had moved north to play in the L.A. band Rough Cutt. Lee quit to join up with Dio before moving on to Ozzy Osbourne’s band as Rhoads’s replacement.

Goldy was called to fill the opening in Rough Cutt, which was being managed by Ronnie James Dio’s wife Wendy. He says that Dio came to his audition. “I told him that his was the voice I turned to in rough times,” Goldy recalls. The Dios would become like surrogate parents to Goldy. “Ronnie and Wendy,” he says, “were so good to me.”

Goldy says he learned scales from Guitar Player magazine and was able to navigate the solos that Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore had recorded on Burn. Still, Goldy says, he got kicked out of the local band Fury because he didn’t know how to play solos over chord progressions. “That was the last band I was ever kicked out of.”

Goldy now performs in Dio Disciples, a tribute sanctioned by Wendy Dio; they played Brick by Brick late last year. Ronnie James Dio died in 2010. As for his biological parents, Goldy says they patched things up before his father died. “When we were headlining the Sports Arena, I got them a limo and backstage passes. We buried the past.”