http://www.classicrockrevisited.com/vivcambell.htm

Vivian Campbell: Reluctant Guitar Hero

Vivian Campbell is a guitar hero. And I can prove it. I remember listening to
Holy Diver when it first hit the shelves in the early 1980's. Everyone in the
metal community wondered if Ronnie James Dio could go from lead singer to band
leader. Dio had been the front man for Elf before being recruited to join
Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow. After that, he replaced Ozzy Osbourne in Black
Sabbath and released one of metal's most powerful albums, Heaven & Hell. Now, he
was going it alone. Having played with the two most famous guitar players in
hard rock/metal history, Ronnie knew the microscope would be on him to find
another who was in the same league. Instead of looking in the want ads for a
former player from an established band like Michael Shenker, Dio went searching
for new blood. He found Vivian Campbell. Campbell's ferocious guitar sound was
every bit as important to DIO's success as the short guy with the microphone.
The band took the metal genre by storm and hit big with "Rainbow in the Dark."
The following year they did it again with "The Last in Line." Eventually,
however, Campbell tired of DIO's taskmaster ways. The young guitar player knew
there was more to life than the dungeon and dragons themes his lead singer
worshiped and after the third album he walked.

After leaving DIO, Campbell discovered that coming to America and joining a high
profile band was a good career move. It was also a move that was hard to
replicate. Not sure where he fit in on the scene, Campbell attempted to join the
ranks of Malmsteen, Vai and Satriani. In the end, this road led to frustration
and disappointment. Viv was in and out of the Riverdogs, Shadow King and
Whitesnake. Nearly a decade flew by before Campbell decided to go it alone and
make a solo album. Just as production was about to begin, his phone rang with an
offer to join yet another band. This time, it was Def Leppard who were
tentatively desperate to replace their fallen comrade Steve Clark. After careful
deliberation, Viv accepted the gig putting his solo career on hold. After 13
years as a member of Camp Lep it looks as if Vivian made the right move.

During his tenure with Def Leppard, Campbell realized that he no longer craved
the role of guitar god. In fact, he downplays his past admitting that his
playing with DIO sounds clumsy. During a year and half break with Leppard,
Vivian became a student of the blues and went into the studio to record his
first solo record titled Two Sides of If. What follows is the story of how Two
Sides of If came to be and what it is like still being the new guy in Def
Leppard. We delve into Viv's past to discuss the downfalls of Shadow King and
his career in DIO.

Campbell is happy to be the second guitar player in Def Leppard. He does not
need the spotlight on him every song and he does not need to solo every three
minutes on stage. He is much more content to be a musician and play for the
song. Still, as humble as he is, no one can deny that Vivian is the real deal
when it comes to majestic guitar solos. He will always be a huge player in our
hearts. Even if he is reluctant to admit it, Campbell forged his place n heavy
metal history with his incredible fretwork on songs like "Holy Diver," "We Rock"
and "Invisible." Read on and discover more about the man who I can only describe
as the worlds most reluctant guitar hero!

- Jeb Wright, August 2005

Jeb: You have never been one to put yourself in the spotlight yet your name is
now in lights with your new blues album Two Sides of If. Why did you decide to
do the album now?

Vivian: I did it because I can - literary, not figuratively. We had a year and a
half off between Def Leppard tours. I don't know about the other guys but I feel
you are what you do. I am a musician so I have to play music. After being off
the road for two and a half months I started going to this Irish bar every
Thursday night in Santa Monica and playing with a friend of mine named PJ Smith.
I was doing nothing that was paying me a cent but it was fun. After that I
started going out to open mic blues jam nights in a couple of different clubs in
LA. A friend of mine who is a producer heard me do the blues and he pointed out
that when I sing I have this rough, blues thing going on. He asked me to do a
record. I told him that if he could go get a record deal then I would do a
record. He is a mover and shaker and he made a few calls and he got a deal.

The other thing reason I did it is because, in an artistic sense, I know I can
do it. I know that might sound a little strange to you. I have heard rock
players do the blues and crucify it. Most rock players cannot play the blues. I
would like to think that I can do it.

Jeb: Your lead guitar playing on this album is very soulful. The old school DIO
fans will be amazed that Viv Campbell can play slow!

Vivian: Rory Gallagher was the first concert that I ever saw. Live in Europe was
the first album I ever owned. So, my first guitar licks came from Rory. Later
on, I morphed my style to more rock guys like Brian Robertson and Gary Moore
from Thin Lizzy. But their playing was based on the blues. It was always a
source of frustration for me in the 80's because I could not do sweeping
arpeggios very well. I couldn't do the alternate picking that good, either. No
matter what I did I couldn't play like Paul Gilbert or Yngwie Malmsteen. For
many years I tried to do it because it was the flavor of the moment. I was
playing in the heavy metal genre and that is the way most of the players were
playing. I was never a great technical player. The reason for that is because I
learned how to play from a blues player. Years later I finally came to accept
it. Now I feel that it actually serves me better. I come from the rock/blues
idiom. I love guys like Paul Kossoff. I like to play with an economy of notes
within the technique.

Jeb: I love shredding as much as the next guy but it tends to be one
dimensional. It is like going to a restaurant that only serves one choice for
dinner.

Vivian: They are two different things. Even when I was playing with DIO, I
always tried to put in a lot of emotional content within my playing. I had
actually not listened to my stuff with DIO for years but after doing this record
I went back and listened to Holy Diver. It had literally been years and years
since I listened to that album because I never really accepted what I played
back then; I was never really content with it. I was always looking to push the
technical aspect of playing, which I never really felt I had. When I listened
back to it what I heard was more emotional than technical. I was very pleased
with that.

Jeb: When you broke big with Ronnie Dio everyone was blown away by your playing.
You were the new kid on the block so to speak. It is funny to hear you say you
were insecure about your playing.

Vivian: I was never a technical player. If you listen to a lot of my playing
back then it sounds awfully clumsy - because it is! I am okay with it because
the intent was there.

Jeb: Rory Gallagher was clumsy too but I think he may be the most underrated
player of all time.

Vivian: Rory was great. The one thing that I got from him was that he never
played things the same. I saw him in concert a whole bunch of times and he never
played anything the same. Even the arrangements were different. The bass player
and drummer were always focused on him because they never knew where he was
going. He was a totally spontaneous, by the seat of the pants kind of guy. When
he played slide he was fucking amazing. He played a metal slide on a white
Telecaster through a Fender amp.

Jeb: How hard was it for you to choose a track list for the new album?

Vivian: It was pretty tough. I cut 15 songs in three days in the studio. The
entire album was recorded live - there is only one track that I over dubbed and
that is the Joan Osborne song "Spoonful." I did a guide vocal and then Joan did
hers. It took a long time for Joan's manager to let her do the album. I had to
fly to New York for her to sing it and then I took it back to Los Angeles. After
all that was done I did over dub a slide track. Everything else was real time
playing in a big room in the studio.

We did 15 songs but because of the licensing I can only put 12 songs on the
record. Otherwise, it costs me a fortune. I have to pay the mechanicals for
anything more than 12; that is the number that Sanctuary will pay for. It was
very difficult because there were a lot of things I wanted to do. I wanted to do
some Free songs but then again I wanted the songs to be traditional songs. The
blues is a difficult genre. It is hard to get any credibility in the genre
because I am a rock player; worse yet I am a heavy metal player. I feel like I
have to earn the respect of the blues community but I am really am not expecting
to get it. I didn't want to further muddy the waters - forgive the pun - by
doing a Free song. A lot of people don't think of Free as a blues band. It is
obvious to me that is what they were. The blues is where rock came from. I was
talked out of doing the Free song but I kept Rory in there because he was my
guy. I used to sit there and disseminate all of his guitar licks.

I spent about 14 months researching songs for the record. I never meant to go
back as far as I did but you keep on going back further and further. I went all
the way back to the Delta. Guys like Tommy Johnson, Bukka White and Charlie
Patton. I wanted to do a Son House song but I didn't have the balls, to be
honest. I didn't feel confident enough to sit alone with an acoustic guitar and
a slide.

Jeb: As a guitar player what was the most important thing you learned
researching the blues?

Vivian: The most important lesson I learned was just how important a guitar
player Muddy Waters was. He was the guy who took the blues into the electric
age. When you listen to certain songs and certain licks that he plays you
realize that one is a Jeff Beck lick or a Jimmy Page lick. You hear where guys
like Jimi Hendrix were getting their influence. I first heard these licks in the
70's and I never realized that they all came from Muddy. It is not only Muddy.
He had Jimmy Rodgers in his band. It was the classic band with Otis Span and
Little Walter.

Jeb: You really know your stuff.

Vivian: I spent a year listening to nothing but the blues. Thank god for Apple
iTunes! I would just go off on these tangents. I would hear that someone was
influenced by someone and I would be buying it. There is a great radio station
in LA called KJJZ and every Saturday and Sunday afternoon they play nothing but
the blues. I found it to be very educational.

Jeb: You mentioned Joan but there is another guest on the album as well.

Vivian: When I started making the album I decided I wanted to have a couple of
guests on it. I wanted one male and one female. I started looking for a great
living blues guy. I didn't want to ask a heavy rock player to come join me as it
was bad enough that I was a heavy rock guy doing a blues album. It is not like I
am going to get Honeyboy Edwards, he is not going to play on my album. I thought
about ZZ Top. They straddle both camps of rock and blues. Ironically, I didn't
know Billy Gibbons. I met him through a friend of mine who is a photographer. He
was having an exhibit at a gallery in Santa Monica. I went there on Saturday
night and met Billy. Apparently Billy spends his time between Houston and LA. I
eventually had the balls to ask him.

In the back of my mind I thought the song "Like It This Way," the Fleetwood Mac
song, would be a great song to do with Billy Gibbons. It has a great twin guitar
lick. So I told him that I was doing a blues album of covers and cutting it live
in the studio and that I thought that song would be great. Billy knew the song
right away. I think the fact that I had that song in mind helped. I had no idea
he was such a fan of Peter Green. Not only did he agree to come in and do it he
told me that he had a new song that would be great. He asked if I would be into
doing a new song on the album. He said he just needed to write the last verse.
He came in for three days. We set up the first day and cut a couple of tracks -
nothing to keep. The second day we played around but the third day he came in
and leaned over the grand piano and scribbled down the lyrics and we cut the
song. He actually showed me a "D" chord that I had never seen - it was very ZZ
Top.

Billy was my first choice as was Joan Osborne. I had been a huge fan of hers
since I heard her in 1996. I think there is a lot of great female talent that
came out in the 90's but to me, she is the Janis Joplin of the bunch. I think
she is the best of her generation. I had never met her. It was a total shot in
the dark. Getting Billy on the album was total luck but getting Joan was a lot
of hard work. It cost me some money because she has some big time manager who
didn't want to play ball. I had to fly to New York but I was determined to make
it work.

Jeb: Tell my why you chose "Come on In My Kitchen."

Vivian: I chose that song because of Keb Mo's version, not Robert Johnson's. Keb
does a very offbeat version. It is almost like Little Feat's Ritchie Hayward and
I thought it was very interesting. Keb also played it in the key of "G" where
Robert Johnson played it somewhere between "A" and "Bb." Keb did it in "G" and
made it work with a bunch open notes that he could play. I hit upon the idea of
doubling the turnaround to make it more dramatic. It totally worked for me. It
really was the Keb Mo version.

Jeb: Were people raising an eyebrow when they saw you come into an open blues
jam?

Vivian: A few people did but I have to tell you that it is really cutthroat. The
best place for a blues jam in LA is a place called Cozy's. The first Monday
night that I went there it was pouring down torrential rain. In LA it rains so
hard that people can't drive because it floods. I went there that night because
I figured the rain would keep everyone away. I thought there would maybe be
three people in the club. I walked in and it was fucking full to the rafters.
They had a house band play for about an hour and a half. You sign up and then it
is first come first served. They have two or three artists at a time jamming.
There were about fifty guitar players signed up. Most of them, it is sad to say,
were rock guys. There were these twenty year olds who had these Steve Vai seven
string guitars with a whole array of foot pedals and they came in to play the
blues. They didn't quite get it.

The first night I was in there I didn't get to play so I just sat back and
watched. The next week I got there earlier so I got to play. It was through the
first jam at Cozy's that I got the harp player for the album, Michael Fell. He
played through a distortion pedal and a 410 Bassman amp.

Jeb: Tell me why you chose the song "The Hunter."

Vivian: I always thought it was a Free song, I didn't know that it was a blues
song. So, it worked out well.

Jeb: "Calling Card" may be my favorite track on the album.

Vivian: The reason I chose "Calling Card" was that I had "Messin' with Kid" on
the album. Everyone, including me, thinks that is a Rory Gallagher song. But
Junior Wells did it. I thought it was a Junior Wells song until I found out that
Mel London wrote it. My version of that song is more like Rory's. Because of
that, I didn't want to do another rock Rory Gallagher song. I didn't have the
balls to go acoustic on this album so I chose "Calling Card." I thought it was a
cool song for Rory to do. I like the way it modulates to the piano break.

Jeb: Explain the name of the album. What does Two Sides of If mean?

Vivian: I had another title. I was going to call it Wires & Wood. I was going to
have a close up of a Gibson guitar that my guitar tech lent me on the cover. We
ended up doing a close up of my face and a close up of the guitar. There are two
sides to the cover. I still wanted it to be called Wired & Wood because it was
all about the guitar. The record company came to me and said they didn't want
the emphasis on the guitar because I am already known as a guitar player. They
said that since this was a vocal debut that the emphasis should be on me. They
didn't like the name or the concept of the album cover. We were stuck and we
didn't have any idea of what to call the album.

A long time after the album was done, it was pointed out to me that I had sung
one of the lyric's wrong in one of the songs. I did a Willie Dixon song called
"I Ain't Superstitious." Lyrically, I drew from the Howlin' Wolf version.
Instead of going to the internet to get the lyrics, I just transcribed it by
listening to it over and over. In the third verse it goes, "and the dogs began
to howl all over the neighborhood / always two sides of death." I had always
heard that lyric as saying "always two sides of if." I sang 'two sides of if' on
the record. I listened to the song very intently and I really thought that I had
the lyric correct. I got to thinking that there were two sides of me on the
album; the guitar and the vocal. So, it just sort of fit. I thought it was a
sign so it became my title.

Jeb: Def Leppard is also doing an album of cover tunes as well. Def Lep is
highly influenced by Glam Rock. How are you going to handle being a blues player
playing Glam remakes?

Vivian: The chronology of music for me goes back to being nine years old. I saw
Marc Bolan and wanted to be a guitar player. Then I went to see Rory in concert.
All of us in Leppard are similar in age so we all cut our teeth listening to the
Glam movement of the early 70's. Later on we got into Thin Lizzy and UFO. For
the Leppard covers album we decided to pay homage to the bands that first made
us want to pick up our instruments. It should be out in February or March of
2006.

Jeb: Def Lep is a great live band. However, you don't show off much in this
band. Your playing is very straightforward and Phil Collen takes way more solos
than you do. Your thoughts?

Vivian: You are right. From a guitar point of view it is a very easy sort of a
gig. It is not as challenging because I am not the only guitar player in the
band. In DIO, I had a guitar solo in every song. With Leppard, I may play 35% of
the solos. A lot of what we play are classic hits. It would be very
inappropriate for me to play the solo to "Photograph" when Phil Collen is right
there and he was the one who first played it. Plus, I couldn't play like that -
I can't play like Phil. Part of what makes Def Leppard work is that Phil and I
are very different guitar players.

Jeb: What is more important to you: Being a guitar player or a guitar hero?

Vivian: It is more important to me to be a musician. I think it is fair to say
that I am not nearly as proficient of a guitar player now as before I joined Def
Leppard. I say that only because this gig does not require me to exercise that
particular muscle as much. Having said that, I feel I am much more of a complete
musician. I know a lot more about writing songs and a lot more about the studio
craft than I knew before. I am also a much, much better singer from being in
this band. I feel more complete as a musician. As a guitar player, although it
is not as technically challenging, I am okay with that. I spent my time in the
80's spinning my wheels trying to pay homage to the great technical gods of
guitar playing. I would much rather play like Mick Ronson than Yngwie Malmsteen.

Jeb: Viv, you need to clarify yourself. The readers are going to be sending me
emails crying that you said Def Leppard's music is too easy.

Vivian: No, I don't mean that. I don't have to take a solo every song and I
don't have to play with blazing speed in this band. That is the way we work in
this band. If we are writing a new song, and we are in the studio and the time
has come to add a solo, then Phil and I instinctively know who is better suited
for the solo. It if is a blazing fast solo then Phil will do it because he has
the alternate picking thing down whereas my right hand doesn't work that way. If
it is something epic or very melodic then chances are that I will do it.

Jeb: Why do you think X did not sell as well as other albums? Let's face it, a
lot of Def Leppard fans really didn't jump up and down for it.

Vivian: A lot of Def Leppard fans didn't even know it was there. From a
marketing point of view, the record label totally dropped the ball. I remember
going to a Virgin Megastore in Denver the day before our show - we are talking
about a huge fucking store - and I wondered if they had any Def Leppard albums.
I cruised along to "D" and there was not one copy of our new album. We are
playing in a major venue in a major city and there is not one copy in a major
store. If it ain't there then people can't buy it. It was a really difficult
time for the band with the record label. Personally, I think it was strongest
record the band had made since Hysteria.

Jeb: To be honest, I liked Euphoria a lot better than X.

Vivian: Well, that is classic Leppard. X was a more adventurous record. It was
certainly done a disservice by the record company.

Jeb: The age old cop out is that the record company didn't promote it. In this
case, you are telling me they really didn't promote it.

Vivian: They didn't promote it. What can you do? It is like pissing in the wind.

Jeb: On the tour for that album you did something that I found totally cool. I
have to ask how in the hell you talked Joe Elliott into opening the concert with
the entire Side A of High 'N' Dry?

Vivian: I just thought it would be a good way to start a show. I remember
mentioning it to Phil. I thought that as a concept, it would be cool to just
play the entire first side of the album without saying a word to the crowd -
just play the songs in the order of the record. We didn't do it every show on
the tour. It doesn't play well to a lot of the audience. Most people don't get
it. Most people don't come to a Def Leppard concert to hear songs from High 'N'
Dry.

When we went to Canada we were not playing with Bryan Adams so we were back in
arenas. We started playing "Gods of War." That song is from Hysteria and a lot
of people don't get it. It is pretty tough because most of the audience comes to
hear "Pour Some Sugar On Me," "Rock of Ages," "Photograph" and "Promises." There
is a percentage of fans that are really hardcore and feel disappointed that you
don't play something more obscure. But you can't please all the people all of
the time.

Jeb: With the state of music today Two Sides of If and even the new Def Lep
album will not get the promotion they should by the business of music.

Vivian: I have no expectations for my blues album. I don't think that it is
going to be a big seller. I am not expecting to make anything off of this
record. I do expect that the next Def Leppard album will have the potential to
sell a lot of copies. I think the whole music industry is in a state of flux;
things are changing quickly. The way people buy music is changing a lot; as is
the way people hear music. You have to be proactive with your record company.
You can't rely on the record label to sell records. As strange as it may seem,
record companies don't know how to sell records anymore.

We are in a position where a lot of things are changing for the band. We are
seeing very consistent and good attendance with our Rock of Ages tour. We are
seeing a varied age group and gender attending the show. We have received more
air play then we have in the last ten years. There is a good buzz about the
band. We are expecting things to change. We have even changed our management,
who we were with for 25 years. We are taking the bull by the horns. You have to
take care of things yourself. For a lot of years people thought the record
company knew best but they don't always know best.

Jeb: Was your first gig with Def Leppard the Freddie Mercury tribute? You must
have been nervous as hell.

Vivian: It was actually my second gig. We played a club in Dublin a few days
before that. I swear to God that I was not nervous. Everyone else in the band
was much more nervous than I was. I think they had more reason to be nervous.
They had never been on stage with anyone other than Steve [Clark]. They were
stressing really bad. Before the Adrenalize tour we did a 13-gig club tour of
Europe as a warm up. This was supposed to be all for my benefit but I was
perfectly okay with everything; I think it was really more for their benefit. I
actually find the bigger gigs are so impersonal that they are really not very
nerve racking. It is not like playing in the clubs where you can see the white's
of their eyes. When I am only six feet away from the front row, I get nervous.
When they are a hundred feet away then that is no problem.

Jeb: When you joined Def Leppard you really knew you were leaving the guitar
hero thing behind.

Vivian: I was glad to leave it behind. Around the time I played with Whitesnake
I accepted that I couldn't compete with those guys as a guitar player. I also
knew that I was no longer there musically. As a kid I just wanted to play
guitar. I didn't make the distinction between pop, blues, rock or heavy metal. I
was attracted to anything that had a guitar solo. You get drawn into hard rock
and heavy metal because it glorifies the instrument. You don't hear a lot of
guitar solos in pop music. As a teenager trying to write songs, I would write
riffs. If I had a cool riff then I thought I had a song. I wasn't thinking about
the melody or the lyric; I was only thinking about the riff. I thought it was
all about finding something to lead up to the guitar solo - that is all there
was.

When I started playing with DIO we would sit around and write riffs. It was all
about the guitar hero thing. There were a lot of fresher bands out than DIO,
like Van Halen. I always thought Van Halen were a lot more interesting than DIO.
They had a sense of humor and they had a very fresh sound. Eddie Van Halen was
doing things no one else had done on the guitar before him. David Lee Roth is a
million miles away from Ronnie James Dio in terms of vocal ability and what they
were singing about but David Lee Roth was interesting and he was perfect for Van
Halen. Ronnie was very, very ridged and set in his ways. What he was doing was
not just heavy metal, it was classic heavy metal. He would only write about
certain things. He had very, very strict boundaries in which you had to work. As
a result of that, I sort of got burned out on heavy metal. I remember being on
the road with DIO and buying all these different cassette tapes. I would buy
Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Peter Gabriel - anything but hard rock. I
listened to a lot of soul music at that time. If I was listening to guitar music
I was not listening to Yngwie, Shenker or Van Halen. I was listening to Jeff
Beck, David Gilmour or early Eric Clapton.

Later on, I found myself in a very competitive situation with Adrian Vandenberg
in Whitesnake. We would try to one-up the other one. It was all very technical
and it was all very flash. We were not a very good band. We looked good on paper
but we sounded horrendous on stage from where I was. No one listened to anyone
else in the band. It was all flash; there was no substance.

Jeb: Tell me about the band that never made it: Riverdogs.

Vivian: I was really trying to get away from the guitar hero thing. But the
record label and the producer they hired were really trying to push me back in
that direction. They were like "Get back in your box!" I was really trying to
write in a more blues/pop vein. They wanted me to make it more hard rock to
appeal to the fan base. As a result, I think that record is very compromised.
When I listen to it, that is not the band I remember. When we played live we did
the songs more justice. It has always been a battle for me.

Jeb: I thought Shadow King was a good band.

Vivian: I have to disagree with that. I did not enjoy that experience. It was
just a bad time for Lou Gramm. If Lou was honest he would have to admit it was a
low point for him in terms of his personal life and his drug addiction. As a
result, Lou was barely there when we were making the record. There were
contradicting opinions on what that record should have been. When Lou enlisted
me to do the gig we talked about setting up a band like Free. For me it was
Kossoff and for him it was Paul Rodgers. The Shadow King record ended up
sounding nothing like a blues record. Lou enlisted me under the auspices of what
it was going to be. When we made the record Lou was unavailable, both
emotionally and physically, to make that happen. I would find myself alone in
the studio with a producer who really was just putting his time in. Bruce
Turgeon, who was Lou's bass player and song writing partner, was basically
making the record that he wanted to make. It was really to such an extent that
when we were doing the rhythm tracks for the record Bruce would say, "Play it
more this way." I actually walked out. I said, "Bruce, here is my guitar and
here is my amp. You play the songs and call me when it is done." I didn't even
play rhythm guitar on most of the songs. We were basically replicating Bruce
Turgeon's demos. It was so not what it was supposed to be that my heart and soul
was not into it. I was still under contract with Epic and I was writing and
recording demos for my solo record. It was more of a pop album. It ended up not
happening because I joined Def Leppard. I had to make a hard choice. I was six
weeks away from starting my own album when Joe called me.

Jeb: Were you sure it was the right thing to do?

Vivian: It was a hard decision because you can imagine how tired I was of the
whole band thing. I had been through a lot of bands in a sort period of time.
Each time period was getting shorter too. I was in DIO for three to four years.
I was with Whitesnake two years. I was with Riverdogs for about a year and then
I was only with Shadow King for six months and we only did one gig. I really
didn't think I could have a future in a band. I thought maybe it was me. I
wondered if it was my personality. Thirteen years later I think it was not me.

Jeb: To appeal to your ego, with DIO you were on three albums and they are
considered his best three albums by most people. Is there a personal
satisfaction there?

Vivian: Yeah, I know what I contributed. I know it was a sum of the parts and
that it was a great band. I also know what went wrong because I was there.

Jeb: What did go wrong?

Vivian: I have talked about this enough in the past twenty years. I can't really
cross that bridge without getting personal and I don't want to get personal. I
have heard it said that it all fell apart because I was listening to a different
genre of music. But it was not a musical thing; it was a personal thing that
tore it apart.

Jeb: Ronnie James DIO - as much as there is animosity between you guys - told me
that you and Jimmy Bain were the ones responsible for the idea of Hear 'n Aid.

Vivian: That's right. Jimmy Bain and I kick started that whole thing. We were
doing an interview at KLOS in Los Angeles and the DJ asked us why no one in
metal was invited to participate in Live Aid. Jimmy Bain was joking around and
said, "We could call ours Hear 'n Aid." We rolled around on the floor and
laughed for a few minutes and then said, "Let's do it." I put a lot of work into
that; I believe I was instrumental in bringing it together. I wrote a song and
took it to Ronnie for a lyric and the rest is what it is.