In his 2011 memoir, Iommi was considerably less harsh in his summation of Dio's behaviour, stating "By then Ronnie did come over a little more. The way he conducted himself, the way he talked, it might have given that impression to the outside world, but he usually didn't mean anything by it. Ronnie certainly has the vocal chops, if not the same everyman charm, to handle the Osbourne classics, but his incessant banter between (and during!

I can now say I’ve heard everything on Live Evil including the Ozzy era songs because I heard them during the times I saw Black Sabbath between 1997 and 2013. In the liner notes to the 2008 retrospective The Rules of Hell, vocalist Ronnie James Dio remembers, "It was an excellent tour. The first was the 1980 release of the unsanctioned Live at Last album, and the second was former lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne's 1982 release of a live album consisting entirely of Black Sabbath songs. Each of these WB CDs came in its own jewel case, complete with artwork, rather than a 2CD jewel case.

We had to give the old man two albums, well, a live album counted as two," she is quoted as saying in Mick Wall's 2013 biography on the band. In the liner notes to The Rules of Hell, Appice states, "I knew things were coming to a close from some of the things that were happening on the road. I also remember playing it in my friend’s garage and we couldn’t listen to all of it because we all felt jealous about being at the show. I knew it would be better than the other two and put it on the stereo and was really pleased to hear (properly) Sabbath live. War Pigs" contains a drum solo from Vinny Appice, and "Heaven and Hell" contains a guitar solo from Tony Iommi.

When Iommi arrived days later, he asked the engineer what Dio had been doing in his absence and was told that he had frequently requested that the vocals be brought up higher in the mix. In his autobiography, Iommi confesses that he was "unpleasantly surprised" that Osbourne had included only Sabbath songs and speculates "I think putting out the live album like that was down to Sharon (Osbourne, Ozzy's wife and manager), trying to put the cat among the pigeons.

citation needed] It seems this was not a mistake, rather a money-saving exercise, since the running-times of the two sides of the tape were more-or-less equal in this configuration. I think we were probably riding quite high on the Heaven and Hell success, and so we ended up playing really, really well. I’ve owned a Japanese pressing of this for sometime now and I always believed that these recordings could never sound any better until I listened to this presentation.