There were a few moments of false hope this morning that reports of Ronnie James Dio's death were just a vicious Internet rumor. A UPI article hit the web around 9:30am PST telling us that the golden voiced metal singer was battling stomach cancer at Houston's M.D. Anderson Hospital, but hadn't succumbed just yet. The source of the good news was Dio's wife, Wendy. I went to the Hotel Utah on Bryant Street in San Francisco for brunch and drink or two. Brandi, my longtime friend and bartender, was spinning "The Sign of the Southern Cross" from Sabbath's "Mob Rules" album. She hadn't heard that the word that Dio was still with us, at least according to official reports. Brandi often wears an upside down cross. She was happy for the optimistic update.

However, it was only a couple of hours before the Associated Press and the LA Times made news of Dio's passing official. The quashing of all hope was delivered via smartphone to me on a barstool. "Brandi, Dio really is dead now," I said while settling up my tab. "His wife issued a statement." Dio had actually been gone since 7:45am. He was 67 years old.

"Aw fuck it," Brandi said, "I'm playing 'We Rock' right now.'"

The opening guitar riff to the opening track off the "Last in Line" album thundered through the bar's aging sound system. "You watch their faces/You'll see the traces/Of the things they want to be/But only we can see," Dio's recorded voice sang. Lyrics that always bore a certain kind of mock profundity to me became more genuine with the finality of the situation.

By the time the song reached its third verse, it was hard not to choke back a tear for the poet of my ninth grade imagination: "We pray to someone/But when it's said and done/It's really all the same/With just a different name."

But then there were those choruses to remind us of the ethos that Dio had devoted his life to: " But sail on, sing a song, carry on/'Cause We Rock, We Rock, We Rock, We Rock."

Yes, because of Ronnie James Dio, the man who fronted Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, fronted Sabbath after Ozzy, and then went solo for the platinum selling "Holy Diver" and "Last in Line" albums, we did in fact rock. Maybe not as often, or as hard, or as purely as Ronnie James himself did, but for a few moments at Konocti Harbor in Mendocino County, or a cramped nightclub on Fourth Street in San Francisco, or driving down the 101 blasting Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" on the cassette deck, or cutting class in the Menlo Atherton High School parking lot, we rocked. And we owe all of this rocking to Ronnie James Dio.