Former Dio‘s guitarist Vivian Campbell spoke out and clarified to UG’s David Slavković a shady point of his career with Dio. Read it here:
“Well, first of all, I’d like to be clear on one point – I didn’t leave Dio, I was fired from Dio. It’s still somewhat strange to me that after 35 years or whatever – that people might still think that.
“So I’d like to set the record straight. I never wanted to leave Dio, I was fired in the middle of the tour. But about a year or so after that, I got a call to ask if I was interested in joining Whitesnake for a tour.
“And this was when the ’87 album was completed and about to be released. And it was John Kalodner from Geffen Records who had contacted me and he was putting together the band.
“Prior to that, I didn’t really know David Coverdale, although Whitesnake had opened some shows for Dio on the ‘Last in Line’ tour in 1985, I think. But I didn’t really get to know David Coverdale until I joined Whitesnake.
“David and I had an okay relationship, I found him very easy to work with, at first. But things did change during the course of the tour. The tour was very successful and very long.
“And at some point during that long tour, David became sort of disenfranchised from the band and started traveling separately from the band and staying in different hotels and then having a different dressing room.
“So it became a strange situation after a while. I think it mostly had to do with his relationship with Tawny Kitaen [David Coverdale‘s ex-wife]. She also… At the time, I had just got married in 1987 to my first wife. And my first wife and Tawny Kitaen didn’t get along very well together. So it became a very difficult personal situation for me after a while.
“So between one thing and another, I think it’s fair to say that it was a mutual decision that I leave Whitesnake. At the time, I was working with the band Riverdogs in Los Angeles to produce some demos for the band. And I ended up leaving Whitesnake…
“I think if it had been solely up to me, I wouldn’t have left, I would have made the follow-up album, I was excited to do that. But the situation just became a little bit too strange. And we sat down, we talked, and I left the band.
“I pretty much immediately went from that to working with Riverdogs. Riverdogs were very unhappy with their original guitar player [Spencer Sercombe] at the time and they had wanted me to record with them. And I told them that I wouldn’t record with them while they had a guitar player. And several weeks or months later they fired the guitar player. So then I ended up joining the band and making the record with Riverdogs.”
