Guitar god Craig Goldy was born and raised in San Diego, though he spent approximately half his life elsewhere. “I lived in L.A. for 25 years, and I decided to come back,” he says.
It was the death of guitarist Randy Rhoads in 1982 that set the process in motion that would land Goldy in Ronnie James Dio’s band. Prior, another San Diego 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.”
After Ronnie James Dio died in 2010, Goldy began performing in Dio Disciples, a tribute sanctioned by Wendy Dio which played Brick by Brick in late 2012. The Dio concert film Finding the Sacred Heart — Live in Philly, 1986 was released for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray on May 28, 2013, filmed at the Spectrum in Philadelphia during the second leg of the Sacred Heart tour and featuring Goldy, then new to the group, on guitar.