Recently, legendary Jon Oliva’s Pain namesake (and ex-Savatage frontman/mastermind) Jon Oliva, always a man of many words and interesting stories, was kind enough to speak with us regarding, among many other things, his involvement with multi-Platinum Holiday rockers Trans Siberian Orchestra…

Todd: What was the main motivation behind the formation of Jon Oliva’s Pain?

Jon Oliva: “It was mainly the lack of Savatage work that was going on. Because of the huge success of Trans Siberian Orchestra, it was just taking up so much time. I waited around to see if something would break and it didn’t and I just didn’t feel like sitting around and waiting anymore. So I decided to put my own little thing together so I could go out and play some Savatage stuff, write a couple of albums and see what happens. And have some fun again.”

Todd: Towards the end, once the group started to become increasingly inactive, did being a member of Savatage stop being fun for you?

Jon: “…After (late Savatage axeman and Jon’s bother) Criss (Oliva) passed away, for me, it was never the same. I feel that the Savatage that took place after Criss’s passing was more the building blocks of Trans Siberian Orchestra. We kinda got away from what we had been doing. I still like a lot of the stuff, but I miss that sound that we had when we, for instance, did the Streets album and stuff like that. I consider that the band at it’s peak. …I was just getting tired of sitting around, ya know? With the orchestra, I don’t tour with them. I just play in the studio and I write. It’s not really my bag…my sort of thing. I’m a Heavy Metal and Hard Rock type of guy. I just can’t see myself up there playin’ Christmas music. I think it’s great, it’s a great show, people love it and it’s makin’ us lots of money so everyone can pay their bills, but as a player, I need a little bit more than that, ya know? And I love to sing. I finally got my voice back into shape and with the orchestra, we use lots of different singers, so I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do that much. Maybe a song or two…so that’s why I made that decision. I suppose I could go tour with the orchestra, but I’d just rather do this because it’s something I need to do, ya know? …We never gave up on Savatage, ya know? We just pushed it as far as we could push it. After the whole 9/11 thing…that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. …It just got to the point where we said we just need to get away from this for a while. When it feels right to come back and do it, we’ll do it.”

Todd: Well, at the end of the day, you’ve got to do what you feel is right…

Jon: “…Yeah, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about the money. You make music because it makes people happy and it makes you happy doing it. I was just really getting disheartened sitting around waiting to make another Savatage record. We’re gonna do something eventually…but the days of it being a full-time band are definitely over with. It’s just obvious. But we are gonna do some projects. An album, maybe some shows or something next Summer. We’ve been talking about it, but nothing’s in stone yet because it all kinda depends on the schedule with Trans Siberian. But there are plans to do something with Savatage.”

Todd: As a group, did you ever seriously considering disbanding after Criss passed away?

Jon: “Oh yeah. …I didn’t wanna do the Handful Of Rain album. I just wanted to do that song, but the record company was like ‘…well, we don’t really do singles anymore, so you need to do an album…’. I figured that was going to be the last thing. Even when I did that album, no one from the band even showed up in the studio. It was just me. That was really like my first solo album because I played everything on that album except for some of the solos which Alex Skolnick was nice enough to fly in and play. Then, at the very end, we ended up talking (former Savatage vocalist) Zach into coming in and singing. Other than that, no one else from the band played on it but me, so I thought that was the end. I was quite surprised when (producer) Paul (O’Neil) came to me with the idea for Dead Winter Dead… That convinced me to give it another shot because I knew it could be huge. …But that part of Savatage was good because it was actually us morphing into the Trans Siberian Orchestra.”

Todd: What prompted you to step down as the lead vocalist of Savatage?

Jon: “Well, that was after the Streets tour and I had a nervous breakdown. …I had been basically working and playing every night since 1978 and I was just tired. I had gotten myself involved in some stupid party activities, they started to get the best of me, I lost control and just needed to get away from it. The original idea was that I was just gonna be gone for a year. I was gonna take a year off, get myself back together and then I was gonna come back and join the band so we could have two singers, which is what we’ve always wanted to have anyway. But then Criss got killed and it just kinda shredded up the whole idea we had of that. From that point on, for me, it was kinda chaotic. People were comin’ and goin’ in the band like people visiting your house. …It was unfortunate, but it was all we could do. We were just tryin’ to keep it all together. We knew we had to go in some different directions and again, that’s were the whole Trans Siberian Orchestra thing really started. The Dead Winter Dead and Wake Of Magellan albums were really that start of what is now the Trans Siberian Orchestra. If you soften up some of the guitars, some of the songs, even as they are, I can imagine hearing on a Trans Siberian Orchestra album. …Songs like “One Child” and things like that…those could all be on TSO albums. …If you look at who’s playing on the TSO albums, the only real difference between them and Savatage is that TSO has different singers goin’ on. …The writers and the players are exactly the same as Savatage. It’s just what we became and what we morphed into…”

Todd: Personally, I’d like to see a 25^th Anniversary Savatage DVD…

Jon: “There are plans to do something like that, but we’re not sure when it’s going to happen. Probably after we finish this next Trans Siberian Orchestra record. …We’ll be in the studio this January as soon as this Christmas tour is over. And then, I think we’ll be looking to do the Savatage thing, as far as I know. But things change. We were looking to do a Savatage record three years ago and it never happened because of other commitments and things that were happening with the orchestra. No matter how much you love Savatage, you’re not going to shoot the goose that laid the golden egg, ya know? When you’ve finally got something that’s taking care of your people and you don’t have to worry about your rent anymore and your selling out sports arenas and getting Platinum records on your wall…it’s really hard to want to fuck that up to go play a club tour with Savatage in America. It would be like asking a successful brain surgeon to stop doing that and go work at McDonald’s, ya know? And it has nothing to with us liking Trans Siberian Orchestra more than Savatage or anything like that. It’s just the reality of the reality. You need to make money and Savatage costs us a lot of money. We never made a lot of money with Savatage. Not enough money to where the guys didn’t have to work other jobs when they got home off the road. I think my brother and I were the only ones who didn’t work outside jobs. That’s tough, man…after you do that for twenty something years, ya know? People get the illusion that just because you’re in a band, you’re rich. And it’s very untrue. So not only where we working the clubs and the studios, but we were also doing other things on the side so that we could make ends meet. We were working twice as hard as other people. The best years of our live were spent working everyday. …It was tough, but I think we finally got all the guys that worked with us what they deserve now. They all worked for a damn long time for very little pay and now we’ve finally got something that paying off. All these guys deserve it because they worked really hard.”

Todd: How many videos did Savatage do over the years? Is there anything floating around from the Power Of The Night era?

Jon: “There’s some live stuff. You can go on You Tube and see every video the band ever made. I think we really started to get into the video stuff from around the time of Hall Of The Mountain King on. We didn’t do a video for Power Of The Night. I think we did something live. MTV was just starting around that time. The first thing we did that got played on MTV was “Hall Of The Mountain King”…and we hosted Headbanger’s Ball a few times, which was cool. We did “Gutter Ballet”, which was successful for us, “The Crowds Are Gone” did pretty well for us…there were a few. I think we did six or seven…but we were never into that stuff. We didn’t like that stuff. We were old school, ya know? I liked the mystique of having to go out and buy a record so you could find out what a band looked like or how they dressed. To me, in a lot of ways, MTV ruined music in America because it made visuals more important than the music. …I think it was good in some ways, but it was also bad because they made the visual side more important. It didn’t matter if you had a great song or not. If you had a cool video and had a hot chick in the video…or if it was a guy band and they all looked like Barbie guys…we used to call them Barbie guys…bands like Poison and whatever. We always considered groups like that to be Pop Metal. No offense to groups like Poison, I’m just using them as a reference point. But to be quite honest with you, I couldn’t say a song like “Talk Dirty To Me” is on the same level as a song like “When The Crowds Are Gone”. But because we never dressed like that, we never got played. And that was very discouraging because we were a good fucking band. We didn’t get played because we refused to run around in fuckin’ high heels and hairspray. That was very difficulty for us to handle. We though it sucked. We were getting bigger and bigger in Europe because in Europe, people don’t give a fuck what you dress like. You had just better be good, ya know? And you’d better kick some ass when you come play there.”

Todd: What was the main motivation behind the Pop orientated sound on Fight For The Rock? Was it mainly record company pressure?

Jon: “It was total record company pressure and the new managers that we had that ended up being criminals. That was a very difficult year for us because we were totally fucked over by everybody. We had these managers that were total fuckin’ criminals that stole every single penny from us. They lied to us about the record company wanting us to do very Pop, Journey type stuff. …They basically told us ‘…if you don’t do a record like this, you’re done. They won’t wanna do another record with you…’. And of course us, being young an naive, we believed them, we went and did Fight For The Rock and it was a fucking nightmare. It broke up the band…the band was broken up until we met Paul. He kinda threw the line out in the water and reeled us in. He gave us some money, set us up in a rehearsal space and let us work like a band, ya know? He told us to go write a Savatage album and we went and wrote Hall Of The Mountain King. That brought us back, thank God…”

Todd: How did you end up using some of Criss’s unused material on your new album? Were they old Savatage outtakes or rehearsal tapes?

Jon: “My wife found a box of old work tapes. When we used to write together, we used to trade cassette tapes every night at practice. I would try to finish his songs and he would try to finish my songs. What she found was a box of tapes that spanned from 1983 or ‘84 when we started doing that all the way up to the Edge Of Thorns album before he passed away. …I had just lost track of them and had forgotten that I even had them. Fortunately, she save everything and had saved them and forgot that she had them until one day when we were moving. It was while I was working on Maniacal Renderings. I was out in my studio doing pre-production and she came out with this shoebox that was taped closed that had my writing on it. I said ‘…what’s that?’ and she said ‘…I don’t know, but it looks like it might be important.’ (laughs) I opened it up and it was full of like forty cassette tapes that were all Criss. Riffs, solos, just bits of things along with stuff that we did with Savatage. There were lots of little noodles and things that he did in between stuff that was never used. I found them and was able to make some of them adapt into some of the stuff that I was doing. It was very cool.”

Todd: All things considered, I can understand why you didn’t wait to use them on the next Savatage record…

Jon: “All things considered, I don’t know when that’s going to be. I could do another Savatage record next year or twenty years from now. …Before thy plant me underground, I want to make sure these things get heard. There’s forty tapes and I’ve gone through nine of them so far and that was the material that I used on the Maniacal Renderings album. So I’ve still got about thirty five to go through (laughs), so I’m sure they’ll be more of that stuff in the future…which is cool because it’s like he’s kinda part of the band. He may not be here physically, but his music is here. And it’s stuff that no one has heard before, so in a way, he’s kinda our ghostwriter (laughs).”

Todd: Overall, how would you describe the music on Maniacal Renderings?

Jon: “…It’s deep. It’s a deep album, ya know? There’s a lot shit goin’ on in the world today…it’s what I think about the world through my eyes. It’s a deep, honest record. I’m very fond of it. For me, I think it’s the best singing that I’ve ever done on any record. For me, I’m the most satisfied with this record as a vocalist. I think it’s the best vocal work that I’ve ever done and it was exciting to have Criss’s contributions in there. So I’m very fond of it. I think it’s some of my best stuff, so I hope everyone enjoys it.”

Todd: I definitely enjoyed it more than your first solo record…

Jon: “Yeah, our first album was kinda our pre-season album. It was kinda rushed and thrown together and I hadn’t really played with the guys all that much. …I knew them, but I hadn’t played with them that much, so I was kinda learning and feeling them out, seeing what they could do. On this album, I was really able to home in on their strong points and what they do well. I was more comfortable with them and knowing them as players and what their strengths are. I think that’s why the album turned out a lot better than the first one did. The first one was just kinda thrown together. I like it and a lot of the songs on it, but to me, it doesn’t compare to the quality on this one. I spent almost a year and a month on this one. I actually spent more time on this one than I did on Savatage’s Streets album. …When you work that long on something, you end up being extremely proud of it. It’s like having a child, ya know?”

Todd: What are your current touring plans?

Jon: “I go back out on the road in March. I think I’ll be doing some US dates in early March and in April. And I’ll go back over to Europe. I’ll be doing the festival season over in Europe again. …So I’ll be pretty busy from March on.”

Todd: Have you found that European audiences respond differently or more favorably to you in comparison to domestic audiences?

Jon: “Oh…it’s night and day different! It’s hard for me to even get anything going in the US unless it’s the Trans Siberian Orchestra (laughs). …When I go over to Europe and play, I play in front of ten or fifteen thousand people a show. Over here, I play in front of three hundred, ya know? It’s a huge difference, but I don’t mind playin’ small shows. Playing is playing to me whether it’s in front of a hundred thousand people or a hundred people. I’m still gonna give it a hundred percent every night, ya know? It’s just sad that in your own country, the place that your from, you get labeled and…it’s like people try to write you off. Obviously you’re not going to get any help from radio. They label you as this kind of band or that kind of band and you’re never going to get played. …Everything is owned by Clear Channel now and there’s one play list for every Rock station in the country, ya know? They just play the same play list until your sick of hearing it and sick of the bands themselves. In a way, I’m kinda glad that hasn’t happened to me. It’s kinda aggravating, but I guess I’d rather be climbing the ladder than be pushed off of it, ya know?”

Todd: Any idea what type of set list you’ll be working with?

Jon: “Well, I do a lot of Savatage, but I do a lot of the obscure stuff when I play live with JOP. I do a lot of stuff that I wasn’t doing with the present version of Savatage. …I go back and do stuff like “Warriors” and “Beyond The Doors Of The Dark” and things like that and mix it with my new stuff. So when people come to see the show, they get a little bit of everything. They get to see some classic Savatage stuff. Of course I play “Hall Of The Mountain King” and “Gutter Ballet” because those are things people are expecting to hear, but I also play a lot of the obscure stuff and mix it in with the JOP stuff and it works very well.”

Todd: Will you be touring with the same group that you recorded Maniacal Renderings with?

Jon: “Yes…they are my pain (laughs). …They’re great players. All I have to do is sing and play piano, so I love it.”

Maniacal Renderings (2006) **

Straight-Jacket Memoirs (EP) (2006) **

'Tage Mahal (2004) **

Poets And Madmen (2001) *

The Wake Of Magellan (1997) *

From The Gutter To The Stage (1996) *

Dead Winter Dead (1995) *

Handful Of Rain (1994) *

Edge Of Thorns (1993) *

Streets: A Rock Opera (1991) *

Gutter Ballet (1989) *

Hall Of The Mountain King (1987) *

Fight For The Rock (1986) *

Power Of The Night (1985) *

The Dungeons Are Calling (EP) (1985) *

Sirens (1983) *

* as a member of Savatage

** as a member of Jon Oliva’s Pain

jonoliva.net