In November 1978 Ronnie James Dio was asked to leave wizards and witches and medieval times in general out of the album and write more love songs. In the evening of the day Glover joined the band, in November 1978, Ritchie Blackmore decided to fire everyone except Cozy Powell from the band. The reasons behind this are not known for sure, as quite many different stories exist.
The most common story tells that Ritchie wanted to change Rainbow's musical direction to more commercial than what it used to be and as the other band members, especially Dio, did not want to do that, he splitted up the band. The reason why Blackmore wanted to commercialize Rainbow was the USA; Rainbow did well, but not extremely well in States and he wanted to change it.
This page is maintained by Tapio Keihänen,
E-mail: dio@iki.fi.
The page has been updated on 11.05.1999
URL: http://www.dio.net/faq/why_rainbow.html,
the front page http://www.dio.net/.