Jon Oliva's Pain
Voice Of The Dark

23.02.2013

*** ARCHIVE ITEM - DATED 2003 *** The people who were around in the 1990s still remember the times when you only had to wait for a couple of years to hear a new phenomenal rock opera from U.S. metal titans Savatage. However, after the release of "Poets And Madmen" (2000) the band members engaged themselves in a variety of side projects, the most important of them being Trans-Siberian Orchestra whose latest album hit Top 30 in the U.S., and no new albums were in sight. But now we have something that can easily be called a Savatage album, though under a different name. This is "Tage Mahal", the record put together by Jon Oliva's Pain, which, as you can easily guess, is the creation of Savatage vocalist and keyboarder Jon Oliva. We got Jon on the phone to find out more about Savatage, Pain, and a plethora of his other projects…  

(EDITOR'S NOTE - THE YEAR 2013: We keep on putting up archive items that our authors penned before starting to write for HeadBanger.ru. We polled the visitors of our Vkontakte page, and poll results clearly show that these old interviews are still of interest to the readers and they want these texts to be available again to the general public. As to ourselves, this is a good opportunity to re-live some of the great moments of our careers as journalists, and we are naturally eager to share them with you...)

The album is now finished and released. What do you usually feel when the work on the album is over? Is it fulfillment, or relief, or happiness?

This album for me was a very important thing to do. I had a lot of things I wanted to say, and I worked very hard on it, probably harder than anything I've worked on in my whole life. I'm very proud of it, and I hope everybody enjoys it. If it goes good, I'll probably do a couple of more. So I'm very happy with it.

You said the recording process of "Tage Mahal" was much different from the way you record albums with Savatage. You did all the vocals in a couple of weeks, and everything else was done rather quickly, too…  

Well, the vocals didn't take me too long. The big difference was that I had to make a lot of decisions by myself, while in Savatage I always had Paul O'Neill and Chris Caffery to work with, and when my brother was alive, obviously him. With this, it was kind of like starting all over again. I made a bunch of mistakes in the beginning (laughs), I had to go back and start all over again, but it was good for me, it was a very different and very fresh approach. I was very excited, but it was very different from working with Savatage, because I have all those guys to help me. The guys I'm now playing with were not really involved in the songwriting process, I had to make all those decisions on my own - the lyrics obviously, the arrangements and things - so it was a little weird. (giggles)

You brought ex-Savatage drummer Steve Wachholz for the recording of two tracks. Was it difficult to talk him into doing music again?  

I just gave him a lot of money! (everybody cracks) No, it was fun! Actually I didn't give him any money! (laughter continues) I see Steve all the time, I love him, he's like a little brother to me, I've known him since he was 14 years old. And I had those two songs that reminded me very much of the old days of Savatage. I called him one night and I said, "I've got these two songs, I know you haven't played a lot, but come in the studio with me and do this!" He said "yeah", we went in, and we had so much fun. The atmosphere was really great that night, and they're two of my favorite tracks on the record because of that, because they just brought back so many great memories. It was cool, and he did a great job.

Yeah, absolutely. But what is Steve doing at the moment?

He makes knives, knives to kill people! (everybody laughs) He's amazing, he does it all by hand, like a blacksmith. He has his own company, and he's actually doing very good for himself, I'm happy for him. I actually bought five of them from him myself, and they're very cool, they're custom designed any way the person wants them, and he just does these brilliants with his hand. He's married now, he's got a stepson, and he's very happy with his life.  

Is there any song on the album that has a special importance for you? Which song was the most difficult to write?

The songs that probably means the most to me is the last song called "Fly Away", because I was thinking about my brother Criss when I wrote it. "Long ago, oh so long ago, how time seemed to pass slowly by…" When we were young, our practicing seemed to take forever, everything was slow, and as you get older, things move quicker and quicker, and then you're dead! (laughs) That song means the most to me, it has the most personal meaning. The hardest songs to do were, I think, "Guardian Of Forever" and "The Dark". Those two were the big production numbers that I really went out of the limit with. I've never done a big production song like that without Paul or Criss, I always had someone doing it with me. Those were very difficult, I re-recorded them several times, because they weren't quite right. All the singing is live, it's me, the bass player Kevin Rothery and John Zahner the keyboard player doing all the singing. It was very cool, it was a lot of fun, but it took a lot of time. I think we might have spent a month on each of those songs just on the back-up singing. The lead vocals I did in like a week (laughs), I just went in and sang everything as if I was doing a concert, and I might have done them two or three times, while with Savatage records I would sing vocals for months and months, it would be 200 takes of each song. It was ridiculous, believe me! Now you know why I can't stand so many Savatage songs anymore. (everybody cracks) If I have to sing "Sirens" one more time, I'm gonna shoot myself. So those two songs were the most difficult to do, but they sound great live, wait and hear them live, they're really cool.  

When you look at the album right now, can you say that all the songs turned out exactly as you conceived them in the very beginning?  

Yes, every one of them. That's why I spent so long on it, because I wanted to make sure they came out the way I first heard them when writing them.

Does the album have a sort of lyrical concept, or is it just a collection of tracks you have written lately?  

Well, the album is really all about me. I was writing about fears that I have, like in the song "The Dark". I was always afraid of the dark when I was a little boy, and that was kind of a wild nightmare - some current events mixed with my whole fear of the dark in a kind of avant-garde type of way. But a lot of songs on the album are very deep and very personal. There are songs that deal with some of the drug problems I had when I was younger. I revisited a lot of things, I wrote a song about Criss, "Fly Away", and also "Walk Alone" was something when he was on my mind when I was writing the beginning part: "How do you walk alone, child / How do you walk alone?" I also wrote about the fears that I have of the safety of the world right now, there's a couple of songs that deal with that. When 9/11 happened here, six or seven of my friends who were policemen and firefighters got killed, and the song "Father, Son, Holy Ghost" is all about that, that's my 9/11 reflection. Once you listen to the record over and over, you will know I'm talking about a lot of feelings and emotions and things that are going on inside me. It's a very personal record.

By the way, did you use only new ideas for this album, or was there anything that was left over from Savatage?

There was one of the songs that Steve Wacholz played on called "Nowhere To Run". The actual verses for that song were from an early Savatage demo, I think we were doing it for either "Hall Of The Mountain King" (1987) or "Gutter Ballet" (1989). At that time we used to call that song "Target For The Bomb", or just "Target" or something like that. Criss and I always hated the rest of the music that went along with it, except for those verses, and we never did anything with it, and I was messing around with those verses one day, and I came up with the rest of the song and put it together. That was one song that had some Savatage things. The very beginning of "The Dark", where there's just me and the piano, was written for a song that was supposed to go on "Poets And Madmen", but we never used it. For some reason we took that out, and I used it because I always loved it. The ending of that song, where I'm playing a guitar solo on a device called e-bow, that long mellow ride-out, was something that was supposed to be on "The Wake Of Magellan" (1997). We ended up changing it into something different and we never ended up using it, so I used it on that, because it fit perfectly in with the song. Other that that, all the stuff is pretty much brand new that I just recently come up with.

A question about the band name that you choose. You originally wanted to call the band Tage Mahal, but later you changed it to Jon Oliva's Pain to avoid confusion with a blues artist. But there's also an industrial band called Pain from Sweden, and they're pretty famous in Europe…

I wasn't aware of the band in Sweden at all, and I'll probably change the name of the band on the next record anyway just to make everybody more confused. (everybody laughs) It was at the last second, and all I did was switch the titles around, because I didn't have time and I wasn't aware of the thing in Sweden since it was gonna be Jon Oliva's Tage Mahal anyway. I could have gone away with it, but this guy (blues artist Taj Mahal - ed.) was particularly nasty about it, and I didn't want to take the chance. The record meant more to me than just the name or anything. I didn't want to take the chance of the record having to be pulled off the shops because of that, so I just switched the titles around. I was initially gonna call the album "Pain", but anyway, that's the way it goes sometimes (laughs), I'll survive it. Now that I'm aware of the band in Sweden, I'll probably do something, I'll either spell it differently or call it Pain In The Ass. (everybody cracks, and Jon pronounces the next words in the voice of an MC announcing the next band) Jon Oliva's Pain In The Ass!!! (laughter continues)

In the United States the album is coming out two months later than in Europe. What is the reason?  

I think the record company is on drugs. (a new burst of laughter) I don't know, I just think they do it that way, because they hate America. (more and more laughter) I really don't know, I think that's just the way they schedule it. It comes out January 3 in America, I don't know why, because everyone in America's probably downloading it by now anyway. (laughs) I never see any money from that. I don't know why they do that, it doesn't make any sense to me. They must be doing good drugs or something, I don't know.

As far as we know, when you play live with Pain you also perform some Savatage songs. How do you choose the tracks for the live set?

With these guys I'm choosing songs I haven't really done with Savatage that much or have never done with Savatage. I'm going back into the archives a little bit and looking at some things I'm gonna be doing, such as "Hounds" from "Gutter Ballet" or "Ghost In The Ruins" from "Streets" (1991), I'm gonna dig up a couple of oldies here and there. I'm just doing them because I love doing them. But I have so many Savatage records to choose from, it's really kind of easy. (cracks)  

We will now ask you a very stupid question - you have written a lot of great songs lately, both for Pain and for Circle II Circle, the band of ex-Savatage singer Zak Stevens. Chris Caffery has also released a solo record ("Faces"). Why not combine the material into one album and release it as Savatage?

It's a little bit more intricate than that. Chris and a lot of other guys in Savatage don't get the chance to really write that much for Savatage. There was always Criss Oliva and me, and then Paul came in, and his talents were obviously recognized by me and Criss, and then it was the three of us, and when Criss died, it was just me and Paul. And Chris Caffery over all these years has built a lot of things that he wants to say and get off of his chest. I think it was a good thing for him to do his own thing. That wouldn't have been so easy, and it wouldn't have been Savatage if Paul wasn't working on it, and Johnny (Lee Middleton, bassist) wasn't working on it, and Al (Pitrelli, guitarist), and everybody that's in the band. If there were just me and Chris, that's really not Savatage. It's kind of a respect thing to the guys in Savatage, we're still a band, and we still plan on doing Savatage records, but after the "Poets And Madmen" tour everybody just realized that after 21 years of doing this they needed to get away from it for a while. Most bands are only together for three or four years, five years maybe, and we've been at it for 21 years, and today it's 23 years. It's a long time, most of the best years of our lives were spent in a tour bus or in a hotel room or in a recording studio, we never really spent any time with our families. I hardly saw my son until 2001, and he was born in 1983! I never spent any time with him, because I was always working. I just think that after the 9/11 thing happened, it was the straw that broke the camel's back - everyone realized that we've been doing this for so long, and maybe it's time to spend some time with our families. That kind of opened the door for me, I just got that feeling that everyone needed to get away from it for a while. I think that's the reason why Chris and I both decided that if we were gonna do some kind of solo work, we had this time to do it, the time to do it would be now, because it's been a while since the last Savatage record. I think my record could be called a Savatage record, it's the same songwriter and the same voice, and we used different musicians on Savatage records, too. It's really the same thing basically, it's just me writing lyrics on my own and saying some of the things that I've had to say. I think with Chris it's the same way, there's things that he wanted to say. That's why that happened, and it was never just combined. We needed to do some stuff on our own and get that stuff out of our system.

On the first Circle II Circle album ("Watching In Silence", 2003) you co-wrote nearly all of the songs. Could you tell us about your cooperation with Zak? How are you writing songs together?

The songs on his first record were all songs that I had written for him over the years he was with Savatage. They didn't become part of the concept records that we were doing, but they were still great songs, and we still had them. I wasn't gonna do anything with them, because they were written for Zak, so I gave them to him, and he said he wanted to use these. He worked with me on the lyrics a bit, and we got them ready for his first record, and for his second record that is coming out, I didn't really do that much with him. I just gave him some song ideas for six or seven songs, I gave him some pieces of music that I had, and he basically put it together on his own. I didn't work with him in the studio at all on the second record, and I did a lot of work with him in the studio on the fist one. But I think Zak has been in the studio enough, and he knows what he's doing and what he wants, and it's also good for him. He's got another baby now, and he can only work when his personal life allows him to. I haven't heard the album yet, but I'm sure it's gonna be good. I heard a couple of rough mixes of some of the songs that I gave him, and they were very good. The opening song especially is very good.

Lately there have been a lot of speculations about the possibility of Zak returning to Savatage in the near future…

I wouldn't doubt that Zak may be involved in another Savatage record in the future. We are planning something special for the 25th anniversary of Savatage, and we're planning on asking Steve Wacholz, Alex Skolnick and maybe Zak to come in and work on a couple of songs, because we want everybody that's been involved with Savatage to be a part of that record, because it's gonna be a very special record. I think that's where those rumors started. I don't think that Zak, due to his personal life, is capable to do that again, to be in Savatage full-time, but I don't think that Savatage is gonna work full-time anymore. I think we're just gonna do records and maybe do some summer tours and stuff like that, but the success of Trans-Siberian Orchestra occupies a lot of time, because the guys are playing in the band, and I don't, I just write for it. They're on tour actually right now with that. Zak has to do his own thing, because he has a new baby, and now he's got two regrets running around the house. (everybody laughs) I think it's good for him, I think he's very talented, I love him very much, and we're very close friends. He has things that he wants to say, and it's good that he's doing it.

Does it mean that Damond Ginya is still the singer of Savatage?

Yeah, unless he quit. He didn't tell me. (everybody laughs)

We were recently checking Chris Caffery's website, and there he mentions the Savatage live album "Live Devastation" which was supposed to be released by Metal Blade in the early 1990s but was stopped at the production stage. What happened to this release?

It ended up being "Ghost In The Ruins" (a 1995 live tribute to Criss Oliva - ed.).

Oh, is it the same record?

Well, it's not all the same, parts of it are, but the production work took us a lot of time, we were cleaning things up, there was a lot of tape noise and things that we had to send the stuff off to California to have them removed before bringing the tapes back and mixing them in the studio. There were three or four tracks that were on that "Live Devastation" thing that we salvaged and used on "Ghost In The Ruins", but I think no more than a couple. I don't know about it very well, that was a thing that Steve Wacholz put together, I really didn't have anything to do with that.

Can you give some advice to young vocalists? What should they never do if they want to keep their voice for many years?

Don't ever gargle with razorblades! (everybody cracks) Actually the best advice that I can give is go get some vocal lessons and learn how to breathe right, because that's how I ended up destroying my voice after the "Streets" tour, where I had to basically quit singing until now. It took me years to get my confidence back. I sang a little bit on "Dead Winter Dead" (1995) and "The Wake Of Magellan", but I still wasn't really happy where my voice was. But I took lessons and learned how to breathe properly, and that is so important, because it's so much easier to sing now than it was in all those years when I was killing myself on stage (laughs) wondering, "What the hell is going on here?" That's my best advice! And try to stay away from alcohol before you sing, it was another thing I learned the hard way. (cracks) The worst thing to do is to drink any kind of alcohol before you sing, because it numbs your vocal cords, and you end up overdoing it, and it ends up hurting them badly. I know because that's exactly what I did to mine. (laughs)

When you stepped down from the position of the singer in Savatage after the "Streets" tour, were you somehow involved in choosing the next lead singer?

Oh yeah, I chose Zak. We had hundreds of tapes, and Zak's was one of them. I just liked his voice, because of all the tapes we had, he was the only one who wasn't trying to sound like me. I didn't want someone to come in and sound like me, I wanted something who was different, because I knew I had to still write for the person. He was by far the best singer that I heard, and I liked his voice. I thought he was somebody who I'd be able to write for.

Who was responsible for the lyrics on the album "Handful Of Rain" (1994) - you or Paul O'Neill?

Both of us. We both wrote that record pretty much together, lyrically and musically.

By the way, there is a very popular belief that you represent the dark side of the band, and Paul is your opposite, the light side, so to say. Is there any truth in that?

It's very true. (everybody laughs) If you know Paul O'Neill, he always wears a white shirt, and I always wear black. He is definitely the light side, and I am the dark side, and together we find that pretty limbo. Paul can be pretty dark too, when he wants to be. He has written some dark lyrics, some really dark stuff, but he's just not quite as dark as me.

Another very popular belief - people are currently discussing it on the message board of your website. They say that some lines in the song "Alone You Breathe" can be interpreted in the way that your brother had some responsibility for his own death…

Ah well… I think Paul wrote most of the lyrics for that, and I think he meant that you can't be responsible. No one really knows, unless you were there, exactly what happened. I think that Paul was trying to reflect it that way, maybe in a warning type of way, that if you don't watch yourself, bad things can happen to you. That's never been mentioned to me before that people have been interpreting it that way, I know for sure Paul didn't mean it that way, but that's something I would have to ask him about, because I only worked lyrically on the first verse: "You were never one for waiting / Still I always thought you'd wait for me." And that all came from Criss and I talking many times in the bus thinking that if anything ever happened to one of us, what the other one would want him to do. And I always said, "Well, you don't have to worry about that, because I know I'll be dead way before you." And he would always laugh, and we would laugh about it, because at that time I was a mess, I had serious drug problems, and I was drinking every day. I was just like a lunatic set free every night. And it was scary, looking back at it I can't believe that I lived through all of it. That's where that line came from. I'm gonna ask Paul about it, that's a good question.

Your name is not mentioned in the original version of "Handful Of Rain" because of "legal reasons". Was it because of your involvement in the band Doctor Butcher?

No, not at all. It was because of a shithead manager I had at that time, who was stealing from me like a thief. I had to stay off of that so that he couldn't get any more money. But in actuality I played every instrument on the record, there's nobody from Savatage on that record except me and Zak, and Alex Skolnick who came in and played the guitar solos in the last two days or a week before we were done with the record. Every other instrument on there is me, but I couldn't do it, because if I did that, he would have gotten the money for it, and I was trying to get out of my deal with asshole who will remain nameless, and that's how I had to do it. A worthy sacrifice.

Could you tell us more about the album you did with Doctor Butcher in 1995? Did you enjoy the recording process? And how did the album do sales-wise?

I thought the album was great, and it was a lot of fun to do. It was Chris Caffery's deal, he put the deal together, and I think he just didn't hook up with a very good record company with it, I don't think they did a very good job with it. I thought it could have sold a lot more, but no one could ever find it anywhere. (laughs) That was the big problem, because the record company that he did the deal with just couldn't get the records out there. But it was fun, it was a very angry album, it had a lot of heavy stuff on it. At the same time, it wasn't versatile enough for me to wanna do something like that all the time. There's no keyboards, I don't think there's any piano or keyboards on the entire record at all, and I'm a keyboard player! But it was fun to do, because at that time Chris and I had never done anything together. I may do some more of that with him down the road, who knows? But it's something I don't think I want to do permanently.

But there were a lot of reports that you were planning to do another Doctor Butcher album circa the year 2000…

Yeah, we were planning on doing something like that, but it just never came about. We are doing some new recordings in January, Chris and I, because he's got another company that wants to put the record out, and we're gonna add three songs to the original one and re-release it with a new company that hopefully will be able to put it in stores.

Doctor Butcher also had a CD called "Demos" (1999), but it's hard to get, and it's not even listed on the Savatage official website any longer. Where did it actually come out?

The label is called Crook'd Records. If you go to www.crook-drecords.com, you'll be able to get those. The guy has still got them.

When you were picking up singers for Trans Siberian Orchestra's "Beethoven's Last Night" (2000), whose idea was it to let you sing the part of Mephistopheles?

Paul's. (everybody laughs) He's like, "There's no one darker than you, but I need a dark sarcastic guy." And I said, "Well, that would be me." So we tried it, and it worked out really well. I was very happy with it.

It's an interesting thing - on the album "Symphony Of Life" (2001) of the German band Rough Silk you also sing the part of Lucifer. Was it a coincidence, or do you really enjoy playing the part of the Lord of Darkness?

It's just that no one else can do it! Paul says that no one else is as convincing as I am. (everybody laughs) So that's why he keeps choosing me to play the Devil.

By the way, the Rough Silk album is your only guest appearance that we know of. Have you ever contributed your vocals to any other bands outside the Savatage-related circle?

No, I think that's all I've done. I don't know, that's a good question… (laughs) I did that Metallica tribute thing, I sang a song on that, there's a Metallica tribute CD where I did a song with Lemmy. He played bass and I sang, but I don't even remember what Metallica song it was that I did. (After an Internet research we found out that the album is called "Metallic Assault", and the song Jon and Lemmy perform is "Nothing Else Matters" - ed.)

When we did an interview with Paul O'Neill in February 2002 he said that the band is in the studio working on two albums. But the next Christmas album ("The Lost Christmas Eve") only came out in October this year. Why did it take you so long to complete it?

It's because Paul is the slowest man in the world. A turtle is faster than Paul O'Neill. He just takes so much time to do thing, but he's a perfectionist, and unless it's 100 percent ready he's not gonna put it out.

We heard that you have been writing a musical called "Romanov" a few years ago. What is the situation with this musical at the moment? By the way, how did you get interested in Russian history?

Actually it was Paul's idea again, he told me the story that he wrote about the 1914 Revolution. We put music to it, and it's going to be the Trans-Siberian Orchestra record that's gonna be the record after this next one that we're gonna be putting out, which is an instrumental record. We are going to do that, and it's really dark. We're gonna see what will happen with it.

And what will the future bring for Jon Oliva's Pain? What are your touring plans? When can we expect a second album?

I'm putting the next album together, we start touring next month, I'll be in Europe some time in February for some shows, and we're also doing some festivals this summer. I'm gonna keep doing the Pain thing as long as I can, it's a lot of fun, and it's something I can experiment with and do some things that I wouldn't necessarily do with Savatage or with Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I'll be out there, you'll be able to find me.

Jon Oliva on the Internet: http://www.jonoliva.net

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Roman "Maniac" Patrashov, Natalie "Lynx" Patrashova
November 18, 2004
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