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It's
been nearly two years since we last caught up with this gentleman of
hard rock and with the release of his latest, and darkest album to date,
we catch up with the great man himself Mr Jon Oliva to find out what
he's been up to since we last spoke ...
MM
- Hi Jon, how are you today?
Jon - I’m fine.
MM
- Thanks for taking time out to do the interview I know you’re
extremely busy at the moment.
Jon - It’s kind of
crazy right now, the grill is full.
MM
- Well I’d like to start by congratulating you on another fine album
in 'Festival'.
Jon - Thank you.
MM
- Once again you’ve come up with an all out metal album, but I feel
there is a little more angst. It’s a little ballsier than 'Global
Warning'.
Jon - Yeh I agree with you on that one.
I
kind of wanted this records to be a little more edgy, a little more
darker, I played more guitar on this album than I have on any album in
my career. I wrote a lot of it on guitar so that gave it that darker
edge. My style of guitar playing is very old school, so I thought that
helped and I like that, you never know what to expect .
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MM
- So did you start out intentionally to have a more darker album or did
it just evolve that way?
Jon - The songs came out that
way, when I was writing just seemed darker and once a noticed that’s
the way it was going to go, once they open the road up you just drive down
it. I saw the songs were coming out darker and heavier so I just ran
with it. I was going for a darker sound anyway so it worked out well.
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MM
- You still retain the progressive element that you’ve had
in all your music, but when you take songs like 'Death Rides A Black
Horse' for instance, that’s really deep and dark.
Jon
- Yes, a lot of them ended coming out that way. Even the song 'After Glow'
for instance on there which is one of the big epic numbers, that started
out as a ballad, then all of a sudden all these parts started popping
up, and I started putting them together and came up with the dark riff
that starts the song. That was happening a lot. I’d start something
and then all these pieces come about. When I started putting them all
together I thought ... “WOW this is a bit darker than the last couple of
records, good let's keep going down that road". And you try to make
it even darker in the studio, by adding a lot of creepy keyboards, weird
things like that. A lot of open track guitar things that were diminished
notes and things like that to give it that horror kind of vibe.
MM
- So how long did the album take to complete?
Jon - I
think I would have to say about a year, including all the writing.
A lot
of the writing was done on tour last year. I had a little set up on the
tour bus when we were in Europe doing the festivals, we had a lot of
long drives and a lot of days off during the week where we’d just park
up somewhere. We rented a couple of cottages on Lake Balaton in Hungary
which was beautiful. I actually wrote a few songs there. So with all the
pre-production and the writing and the recording, I'd probably say about nine
or ten
months, maybe a year.
MM
- Once again you’ve taken things from the tapes you found that Chris and
you did, we spoke last time about this, and obviously this is still very
important to you.
Jon - Sure, but the thing that’s
sad is that we’re running out of stuff, we only about eight tapes left
when we started out with about forty five to fifty. I’m down to the
last little bundle and it’s gonna be a sad day when we run out of
those. It’s been a very encouraging part of the stuff we’ve been
doing and the guys really look forward to working on those tracks.
When I find stuff l’ll say I’ve found the great Chris riff on this
tape and I’ll play it and it's like wow, it's great, what are we gonna do with
it? So it's exciting and it keeps him a part of what I’m doing.
If I
didn’t do this people wouldn’t get to hear these riffs or this music
of his and it would have just gone by the wayside. Thankfully they
emerged and they’re getting put out, and that’s good. If there is
one thing I want before I join him is to make sure all the stuff we did
together gets put out. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
MM
- The band have tour plans at the moment but I’ve noticed that the TSO
tour has been put on hold, was this due to conflicting dates?
Jon - No it’s actually due to production. They were looking at
shows and what I was told was that the people
that were hired to check things out, were finding out that a lot of these
venues that they were thinking of booking were not capable of handling
that size of a show. So they decided to postpone it and go through some
other people and find better venues that able to handle the size of the
show, because we want to
take this whole show over to Europe, but because it’s a huge huge
production, they were running into problems with a lot of the places they
were finding, they were not big enough or didn’t have enough power.
They were not capable of taking it on. I don’t know what’s going on with
that right now, I stay out of that side of the business, I have a enough
headaches! (laughs). Though I was told that there are people working in it and it will
happen, I know that. Paul’s a stickler when it comes to that.
He wants
everything to be perfect and he won't compromise on that. He wants the
people in Europe to see the same size show as the people in the US,
they’re saying to scale them down and he’s saying ... "I don’t wanna scale
down!".
MM
- Yes I know what you mean, you wouldn’t want to see Jeff Wayne's War
Of The Worlds scaled down to half an orchestra and half a cast, or a KISS
show halved.
Jon - Yes, you wouldn't want to see Dracula
without a cape and a coffin.
MM
- Also on the Savatage front I see earMusic are re-releasing a "best of"
as well as the bands back catalogue.
Jon - We want stuff to be
out there. This doesn’t mean that Savatage is getting back together,
this is way of putting closure to that whole thing. It is starting to
get annoying that whole thing, honestly to me it’s really stupid
because for me that band never broke up, we just changed the name of the
band.
You look at those records and
then you look at TSO, it’s the same
people in the band who played in Savatage from 1994 onwards. To me
Savatage finished when Chris died and ever since that point Paul and I
were looking for new roads to go down and TSO was something of an idea
we were starting to basically forge with Savatage. But Savatage was
labelled as a heavy metal band and we couldn’t not get any kind of
attention here in America, even though we were doing songs like '12/24',
which actually became a number one single here in America. We released
it under the name Savatage and nobody gave a shit! No one played it,
no
one did anything. We released the same song the next year under the new
name and it was the number one most requested song in the country for
eight weeks! So it just goes to show that names and things like that
can sometimes be a nuisance to you and you get labelled as something
and no matter what you do or what you try, no one cares about it.
It’s ... “Savatage, they're a heavy metal band, we can't play that”.
Meanwhile the very next year they all look like idiots when the very same
band release it under a new name and they're playing it twenty times a day.
We sent
them exactly the same song but with a Christmas tree on the front with a
girl and an angel and every station that told us to sod off, they were playing the song every
hour!
MM
- I’ve got my review of the "best of" album here in front of me and I’ve
described Savatage as the most individualistic band of the
eighties.
Jon - Well thank you.
MM
- The first line actually reads ... "before Power Metal, before Symphonic
Metal, before Progressive Metal there was Savatage".
Jon
- We were doing that before everyone else. We were labelled Heavy Metal
but for me that is Slayer or Metallica, bands like that. That to me is Heavy
Metal, even Black Sabbath to me are not a Heavy Metal band, Black Sabbath to
me are a Hard Rock band. Heavy Metal to me is more the straight ahead
double bass, real fast paced stuff. Then they started calling it Speed
Metal, then Death Metal, and this metal and that metal. DAMN IT,
IT'S HEAVY METAL!!!.
I always considered Savatage a Hard Rock band, we
were a rock band that played songs with a harder edge and we played
stuff that wasn’t hard edged, we were very versatile. Same thing with
Black Sabbath, they had some of the darkest songs in the world, take
songs off 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' like ‘Fluff’ and stuff like that, and
some of the beautiful acoustic stuff they did. How can you call that
Heavy Metal? It’s rock music! But that’s the way of everything,
everything has to have a label. When people ask me what kind of music is
JOP I say “good”.
MM
- Yes, well take myself for instance I’m a die hard eighties Glam and Hair
Metal fan, but I listen and enjoy other styles of music. It annoys me
when people think you have to stick to one style of music the rest of
you life, you have to spread your wings and embrace different musical
styles.
Jon - Exactly, because
then you become very one dimensional as that’s all you see or hear.
I’ve always been a big believer in versatility, I think people don’t
want to get bombarded with the same old thing. If you mix it up a little
bit, you switch it up a little bit and it keeps the interest. Not
flagging anyone but if I put a Slayer album on, I know what it’s gonna
sound like from the first song right on through to the last one. There
really isn’t going to be a lot of change, maybe some pacing or some
tempo’s might be a little faster or slower, but the overall sound and
songs structures are all basically the same, whereas if you put the 'Streets
- A Rock Opera' album on from Savatage, you don’t know what you're going
to get from song to song. You’ll hear a Heavy Metal song then maybe a
Hard Rock song then a ballad, a progressive song. That’s what keeps the
people listening, that’s what I think.
Queen was a great
band for doing that sort of thing that’s why I love Queen so much.
You
put on the 'Sheer Heart Attack' album for instance and the first song
‘Brighton Rock’ is awesome, then you hear ‘Killer Queen’, that is
campy and king of 1940’s, that stuff to me is interesting. You’ve got
‘Flick Of The Wrist’ which is a really dark song on that album then
you go into ‘Lilly Of The Valley’ which is beautiful, that for me is
what keeps things interesting.
MM
- Yeh you want a roller-coaster ride when you listen to an album.
Jon - Exactly, it keeps it fresh and you're not taking one thing and
beating it into the dirt. That’s the only problem I have with the
newer bands and stuff that they put out. That's one of the problems I’ve
had with the Speed Metal or the Death Metal is that although I love some
of it because of the grooves and the power, it’s just that after forty
five minute of it, it's ... “can you play anything different?’
MM
- Record labels have to take some of the blame because they label a band
to attract fans of a particular genre, but sometimes they don’t do the
bands any favours because people will see a genre label and won't touch
that band no matter what they actually sound like.
Jon
- I agree, but I’m still waiting for the next guitar god to emerge, I
have haven’t heard one in twenty years. You know like a Randy Rhoads, a Brian May or a Eddie Van Halen, what
happened to these guys? Guitar
players today just learn enough to get by, they don’t have the
dedication that the guys had a few years back. Then they argue with you
and I say ... "OK where are all the great guitar players?"
I haven’t heard
one at all. I can't remember the last time someone said ... “hey you’ve
got to check out this guitar player, he’s awesome’.
There’s no more
Jimmy Page’s or Randy Rhoads where you want to study their solo’s
and say ... “wow how did they do that?” all that stuff. The excitement of
hearing a new Ritchie Blackmore or a Tony Iommi record, to hear what
those guys were doing, if it wasn’t for those guys none of these guys
that run around today would be doing anything. These guys forged all these
styles and today there is all this open tuning, the simplest and easiest
way.
MM
- Yes today if someone mentions a band you couldn’t list the
guitarist, but if you mentioned twenty years ago, say Black Sabbath, you’d
instantly say Tony Iommi, or if you said AC/DC then you'd instantly say Angus Young.
Jon - I bet you know every band member of all your favourite bands,
you can name the guitar player, the bassist. Take Uriah Heap, they
were just a
great band that I was familiar with, I thought Gary Thain was one of the
greatest bass players that ever played in a rock band, but if I mention
that to someone today they'd say ... “WHO?'
MM
- These people are legends, if you say to anyone who's your guitar hero
they don’t mention someone from a band five years ago, it always your
Halen’s, your Young’s, your Iommi’s, those sort of people.
Jon - Yeh exactly. You look at their musicianship and that’s why
people still talk about them and still go and see them and buy their
records because they had that much of an impact, especially on the Hard
Rock and Heavy Rock genres and everything in between.
MM
- I went to see Michael Schenker last year and the guy just played the
guitar, no fancy pedals just bending strings and using the amps. Nowadays
you see a young guitarist with a pedal boards five or six feet long.
Jon - (laughs) They’ve
got that many pedals you’d think they're trying to fly the fucking
space shuttle! When I play I use just one pedal, an overdrive
pedal, that’s all I play and that’s all my brother used to use as
well.
MM
- Jon this year is also a big year birthday wise, it's your 50th, are
you doing anything special?
Jon - Yes, get drunk.
Not really, I don’t really take much attention of that stuff, I just
go on ... you're only as old as you feel. Some days I feel
25 and some days I feel a 125! (laughs). It's
just life goes on. As long as
I’m making music I’m happy.
MM
- Going back to the album, the title track ‘Festival’ now that’s
something quite different.
Jon - It sure is.
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MM
- Was that a track that just turned out that way, or was it your intention
to make it sound the way it does?
Jon - Actually that
track was an accident. The tuning on that is what makes it so
bizarre. It’s tuned to an open A minor chord, which I don’t think anybody has
actually used on a song, but I was trying it. I was looking through a
book on tunings that a friend had got for me and I was just messing
around and some how I tuned it wrong. I tuned the guitar the wrong way
and when I played it I was like
... “what is that?”. I
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| took my other guitar and was trying to find what
chord it was and it was an A minor chord, so I just started messing
around, just moving my fingers in different places and found these weird
sounding chords, and I said I’m gonna put this together into something
and I started working on it. I was like ... "WOW!
this is really cool!". It's different and you really
can't play it if the guitar isn’t tuned that way, so anyone
who was sitting there trying to learn it would be beating their
heads against the wall, because you can't do it unless the
guitar is tuned to an A minor chord. That’s what gives it that
weird sound, so it actually started off as an accident.
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MM
- Going back to the "Best of" album that’s coming out, this
gave me a great opportunity to listen again to some of Savatage’s
finest moments. Take the likes of 'Gutter Ballet', that is one of my all
time favourite tracks. I mean when I first heard it I was blown away,
as I said I am a Glam fan at heart but when I heard that song I was
wondering what I had been listening to, when there were songs like that out at
the time.
Jon - Oh
great, thank you!
MM
- Also the three new acoustic versions on that best album I really love.
Jon - It was fun to do them. It was just a little something
extra. The whole thing is just to put closure on the whole Savatage thing,
because there are so many rumours flying around about Savatage that it
was starting to get annoying. So it’s just like ... here it is, it time
for us to move on, life goes on.
MM
- Yes we touched on this last time we spoke, I mean the last Savatage
album was in 2001 that’s nine years ago, the fans have got to move on.
You’ve now got JOP which is a great band with a great line up, you’ve
moved on so the fans should move on with you.
Jon - It could
be called the third phase of Savatage, we just decided not to call it
Savatage because it didn’t want people bitching on and moaning about
it. If you think about it all these songs that I’ve written for JOP
could have been on Savatage albums, I mean the fact that you’ve got
Chris’s music involved with it and me singing, well I mean to me,
that is more like Savatage than I remember Savatage was when
we were doing ‘Dead Winter Dead’ and ‘The Wake Of Magellan’ and
all that stuff. That for me was definitely not the same Savatage as on
'Streets' and 'Gutter Ballet' and stuff like that. If you listen to my
stuff now it's more like 'Gutter Ballet' and 'Street's ... and 'Hall Of The
Mountain King', than any of the other stuff we were doing in the
nineties. But that’s just my opinion and everyone has a right to
their own opinion. I’m still gonna have a bunch of people who are gonna give me a hard
time about it. I don’t know
what to tell them anymore ... (laughs) ... come on!
MM
- TSO actually evolved from 'The Wake Of Magellan'.
Jon -
Absolutely.
MM
- That was the point where Savatage became TSO.
Jon -
We were heading that way anyway. Obviously the name was an issue with
us, and with us getting to the next level, as soon as we changed the
name, well TSO is now the biggest band in America! We went from no one wanting
to play anything by us because of the name and what it represented, to now
where we sell out sports arenas. Two shows a day we're doing, forty
thousand people each city we go to. It’s really quite amazing to think
the name was holding us back that much. What you gonna do?
MM
- Yes, the fans have to realise that this is another chapter in the
Savatage story. Chapter one Savatage, Chapter two TSO, Chapter three JOP.
I mean you wouldn’t want to read the same chapter in a book time after
time, you want to find out how the story goes, you want to follow it from
chapter to chapter to see how the story unfolds.
Jon -
Exactly, maybe I should write it down sometime.
MM
- That’s what frustrates me about people who only listen to one style
of music, why
not listen to something different for a change, you never know you might
enjoy yourself
.
Jon - That’s
all I ask.
MM
- Seriously, someone’s not going to put a gun to the back of your head if you put
a different CD on.
Jon - Right! (laughs)
MM
- You can't be stuck on the same road all your life, you have to take a
fork now and then.
Jon - You
got it, you got to take a turn now and then.
MM
- So Jon, when are JOP coming to the UK?
Jon - September /
October, that’s what they're looking at. They're hoping to book some stuff
September / October time and the UK is on the docket for a couple of shows.
I don’t know exactly when, but I know our booking agents are looking into
that and as soon as I know you’ll know.
MM
- So what does the rest of 2010 have in store for you?
Jon
- We're just working on things. TSO’s going on the road in a couple of
weeks time to do some smaller shows, then I’m coming over to Europe in June
for some festivals. Then I’m coming back in September / October for a more lengthy
tour and that’s basically it. In
between I’ll be working on some new material, so I’ve got a full
plate and lot of work to do, but I’m ready to go.
MM
- I love getting anything you're involved with. I loved 'Global Warning'
but for me ‘Festival’ took it to another level, there’s something
different to listen to every time you put it on.
Jon -
Thanks, that’s what important
to me, the variety, the versatility. With the JOP stuff that’s what you’re
gonna get and also with TSO. You know it's very versatile stuff, because
that’s the way we do it, hopefully everyone will enjoy as much as we
do.
MM
- Well Jon I'd like to wrap it up there, it’s been an absolute pleasure
as always.
Jon - Thank you so much. You take
care and
all your friends and family and everyone in the UK, I appreciate all the
support and I will get to you this year, I promise.
We'd
like to thank Jon for taking the time out to chat with us today as we
know he has been busy as always. Check out the new album
'Festival' before the summer festivals come round. Fingers crossed
we'll see him live in action in the Autumn with the JOP tour. |