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Jon Oliva's Pain



Push It To The Limit



Prologue
Some musicians are nice to talk to just once, and when you get offered an interview the next time, it turns out that there’s not much left to ask them about. But there are others to whom you can talk forever. The mighty Jon Oliva, frontman of Savatage and leader of his own band, is definitely among these few. He has a lot of say about every topic you offer, and with 25 years of musical career under his belt there are more than enough topics to discuss. This time our main focus was on “Maniacal Renderings”, a new record by Jon Oliva’s Pain, but of course, such bands as Savatage and Trans-Siberian Orchestra, could not be avoided…
Jon Oliva's Pain
“Maniacal Renderings” is once again very dark and aggressive, probably darker than most of Savatage albums. What makes you write such angry music, especially when you have a family, children, and many years of successful musical career?

The record is a darker side of me, I guess. It deals with a lot of what’s going on in the world, it’s pretty dark as it is anyway. It wasn’t really hard to come up with a lot of ideas for the lyrics (laughs) because of all the stuff going on today. It’s pretty much an open field.

Does it mean that you are interested in politics and watch the news regularly?

Well, as much as I can. I travel a lot, and in most of the places I stay the only thing you have is CNN. So I follow the things quite closely.

The previous album “Tage Mahal” (2004) was a direct continuation of what you did with Savatage, but the new album embraces a broader scope of music genres. Was that done intentionally, did you specifically want the new album to be different, or did you just let the music flow out of you?

When I did the first album, I kind of let everybody know that it’s gonna be the basic album of me doing stuff that I’m known for. It was a pretty straight-forward album. And when I was doing interviews for it, I told most of the people interviewing me that the next one was gonna be a little bit more experimental and a little bit deeper, because I would have had more time to work on it, I would have played with the guys in the band for a year and I would get to know them better. That’s basically what happened. I did the first record, and I toured then, so I got to know the guys in the band a lot better. When we started to work on the new record, we went into with in a whole different attitude. I was very confident with everything and with everybody, and that kind of helped. We spent a lot of time in pre-production on this record, three times the amount that I spent on the last one. I think that was important, too, because the songs are really very crafted. At least we knew what we were going to do before we went into the studio to cut the tracks, we pretty much knew how the songs were gonna go. The first album was more thrown together. But that’s the way it goes in this business – sometimes you get more time, sometimes you don’t, and you just make best of what you can do. With this record I wanted to take more time to make it a little special.

After listening to this album we got an impression that The Beatles and Pink Floyd are among your biggest musical influences. Is this impression correct?

Oh, The Beatles obviously, they were my biggest influence as a band, period. And Pink Floyd – I’m a big fan of theirs, too. Probably not as much as some other bands, I’d say Pink Floyd are probably in my Top 20, but they’re definitely not in my Top 5. I have other bands that I feel are more influential to me. I do hear some similarities, but you can’t help it nowadays. Anything you do will be compared to something else – “Hey, that sounds like Creedence Clearwater Revival!” (cracks) But you know, what can you day? And having any kind of comparison whatsoever to those two bands is an incredible honor anyway, so I don’t mind.

On many songs on “Maniacal Renderings” your late brother Criss Oliva is credited as a co-writer. Can you tell us how did you work on his stuff? Did you change his ideas a lot or did you mostly leave his music as it was?

One day my wife found a shoebox full of cassette tapes that had somehow been misplaced. You know, I move around a lot, I move from different place to different place, and as a matter of fact I’m in the process moving again right now. (laughs) So on that day we dug out a big box that was full of old shoes, boots and all kinds of things, and at the bottom of this box there were a couple of shoeboxes that were tape-closed. Upon opening one of them, we discovered that it was full of old writing tapes. When Criss was alive, we would record our ideas on a cassette, and then at practice that night we would trade cassettes with each other – he would give me his cassettes, and I would give him mine. Then we would go home and try to help the other person where they were stuck on the song. These were tapes that he had given me over the years, that I had thought I’d just misplaced or lost, so I didn’t remember any of the old tunes. (laughs) Of course, a lot of them had stuff on them that we had used with Savatage, but there were lots of little riffs and little pieces 30 seconds or one minute long that had never made it onto a record. I started discovering some of these, and I was like, “Oh, holy shit! This is great! What if I try to build some songs around some of these riffs or try to use some of these riffs to finish the stuff that I’m stuck on, just like we used to do in the old days? It would be like he was a part of the record, like he was writing the record with me!” The project took with it, and it just worked out that way. It was very magical and inspirational, because some of these riffs just happened to fit in certain places in my songs that I needed parts to change. I had to work with them a little bit, I had to change a couple of keys, speed them up, slow them down to get them to fit in, but there were two or three pieces that just fit exactly the way they were right into the songs. That was kind of spooky, but that was also very good. It’s cool, because it’s the first record since “Edge Of Thorns” (1993) that has music written by me and Criss together. I think that alone makes it worthwhile for any Savatage fan or Criss Oliva fan, because these are the riffs that no one’s ever heard before. Even I couldn’t remember them! (laughs) I’m sure I heard them 15 or 20 years ago, but they were like new riffs to me. He was a part of the album as a writer. I think
Jon Oliva's Pain
that’s very very cool.

Speaking about guitar players, your line-up is now reinforced by second guitarist Shane French. But why didn’t he join you earlier, since he played with the rest of your band in Circle II Circle anyway?

He was doing other things at that time, I think. And we had another guitar player Jerry Outlaw, who was touring with us. It looked like Jerry was gonna work out until we ended up starting the pre-production for the album, and Jerry just started going off the deep end. I don’t know what happened to him, but mentally he was just clashing with everybody, starting arguments, he just put a bad vibe on everything. The rest of the guys just came to me and said, “Look, we can’t… We gotta do something about it.” We decided to make a change, and then Shane was available, so we grabbed him.

You said that you’ve known all your musicians for a long time. How did it happen that all of them met in the band of Zak Stevens, your successor in Savatage? Did you help him put the band together?

What happened was that I got the band for Zak originally, they are all friends of mine. Zak needed a band to go on tour with, and I wasn’t doing anything at that time anyway, I was working with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, so I asked the guys if they would be interested in working with Zak. They said, “Sure!”, they went out and did the tour. They all didn’t play on the album (“Watching In Silence”, 2003), I think just Matt LaPorte (guitar) did. But they did go out and tour, and they couldn’t get along with Zak’s manager. They didn’t like they way they were being treated. There is nothing against Zak, because Zak has nothing to do with it, all he does is sleep all day, like most singers do. But they had a really difficult time getting along with his manager, so when they were done with the tour, they just said they weren’t interested in doing it anymore with that organization, and they left. I found out about it a couple of months after they had left, and I decided at that time to put my own thing together, so I just said, “If you guys don’t wanna play with Zak, come play with me!” They said “Sure!”, so that’s how it happened. I didn’t steal Zak’s band, he didn’t fire them or anything like that, they just couldn’t get along with his manager. So they said, “Forget it!”, and I grabbed them up, because they’re great players. Now Zak’s got new guys he is very happy with, and I’ve got guys I’m very happy with, so everybody’s happy, and it’s a good thing.

You now have two guitar players in the band, but still you played most of the guitar parts on “Maniacal Renderings” yourself. What is the reason?

Actually me and Matt played most of the guitar. I played guitar on every song, I played a lot of slide guitar solos, all the acoustic guitars are me, and I played electric rhythm guitar on every single song on the album. Shane played on three songs, he came in right at the end of the album, so there wasn’t really a lot of time to get him on in that many songs, because pretty much everything had been finished by then. He did play some solos on “Push It To The Limit”, and he played rhythm on a couple of other songs, I’m not sure which ones.

You have members of your family guesting on the song “Reality’s Fool”. Is there any specific story about this song and this collaboration?

It was a song I’d had for a while. I didn’t really know what to do with it, because I liked the song a lot, but I didn’t think that it fit in with the rest of the album. But that’s the beautiful thing about bonus tracks – bonus tracks can be whatever you want them to be. We have three of them on this album – this “Reality’s Fool”, which features my nephew Criss Oliva Jr. playing first two guitar solos, then it’s “Only You”, which is on the tin-can issue, which also features the hidden instrumental track “Pyramids And Mars”, which was actually written by Matt and John Zahner (keyboards). “Only You” and “Reality’s Fool” were the songs that I’ve been working on for a movie in America. I played them a couple of times at acoustic shows, and fans really liked them. They came up to me and said, “Wow, you should do an acoustic song or something like that on the next album!” I said, “Well, maybe for a bonus track.” Then I talked to the label and I told them I have to record these songs anyway for a movie soundtrack. We decided that instead of having somebody else do it in their own interpretation, it would rather be done by me, and the label will use these recordings as bonus tracks. But since then a lot of people have commented to me about them being their favorite songs. (laughs) There you go – you think you make everybody happy, and you just find out that you don’t.

Can you tell us a bit more about this movie you’ve been working on?

I can’t tell you the title, but I can tell you that I met the movie producer at Madison Square Garden last year during a Trans-Siberian Orchestra show. He’s putting this secret thing together with some big stars – actually I can’t talk about it because certain people haven’t signed to do the deal yet - and it’s scheduled to come out in 2008. It’s a big-budget movie. The producer is a big fan of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, he loves my Beatles-type of stuff, so he asked me for a couple of songs that would be in the style of current-day John Lennon. These two songs were written with that John Lennon style in mind, I wanted to have his type of singing. The producer likes the songs very much, and once the movie deal gets decided on, and everyone signs to do it, it will probably be announced when it’s out and who’s gonna be in it. At the moment they’re still trying to get the stars they want in it, so I think I can’t tell you more about it.

Then let us ask you a very trivial question: what made you name the r
Jon Oliva's Pain
ecord “Maniacal Renderings”?


Actually the bass player Kevin came up with the title. He walked into rehearsal one night, and we were working on the song that ended up being called “Maniacal Renderings”. He was playing the bass riff that opens up the song, and I said or somebody else said, “That’s pretty maniacal!” That’s how “maniacal” came about, and “renderings” is kind of like “after-thought,” so the song is something that you leave behind for people to see or hear. That’s how the name “Maniacal Renderings” came about, and that’s what we went with.

And what does the cover artwork mean?

The cover was my idea. I wanted something that, in my eyes, would represent good and evil. The angel is supposed to represent the good, and as you see on the cover, he’s tied to a chair with barb wire, and he’s got spikes holding his eyes open, so it’s kind of like he’s been beat up by the evil around him. That kind of coincides with the whole record, songs like “Evil Beside You”, “Timeless Flight” and “End Times”, it ties the whole album together. To me that was the vision I saw when I was thinking of the album cover. The first thing that came to my mind was an angel, strapped down onto a chair having to look and watch all this violence and all this evil in the world and not being able to get away. Have you ever watched the movie “Clockwork Orange”? This is where I took the idea from – the guy’s in the chair, and they’re showing him all these wild films, and they’re putting eye drops in his eyes to keep his eyes from popping out of his head. (laughs) I just wanted something that evoked the tension. The cover itself is a real photo, it’s not a painting, it’s a real model they found and shot in a room. The only thing that’s airbrushed is the spirits floating around on the side, which is supposed to symbolize certain things from songs on the album. If you look at them close enough you may see a witch or something like that.

In the song “Playing God” you sing, “Global war is on the horizon”…

Oh absolutely! You ought to be pretty blind not to see that it’s coming soon. With all the stuff that’s going on now in Korea, in Iran, in America, everywhere, it’s inevitable that some wacko’s just gonna make a move. And once he does that, everybody else’s gotta retaliate, don’t they? From what I’ve seen and heard, I don’t put anything past any of these guys. To sit there and say, “Oh, they’ll never push the button,” to me that would be kind of stupid. They’ve shown all the sings that it’s closer than we think. That’s another reason why I end the album with “End Times” – people know that this is going on and they try to take advantage of other people when they can. They’re trying to thrive during the end of the world, people are still trying to rip others off, steal their money, and lie to them about god – “God’s gonna save you if only you give me $50,000 a year.” (laughs) It’s just so ridiculous, and unfortunately we’re all gonna have to pay the price one day.

Do you think than the mankind is doomed, or is there still a chance for the world to change for the better?

I think there’s always a chance, but I’d say this is not a very good chance. From what I see, a lot of these people have so many followers. I even see that here in America, the country is totally divided right now. Half the country doesn’t think that we should be in Iraq at all, and the other half of the country does. It’s causing great tension even within our own country. Wars have never solved anything, all they’ve done is keeping the world’s population down a little bit by killing people. But we’ve never cured cancer or AIDS over a war, we haven’t cured hunger over a war, all they’re fighting over is religious beliefs and land. That’s what it’s all about – “if you don’t believe what I believe in, you must die!” And I think that’s just insane! (laughs bitterly) Believe me, the world’s big enough for everybody, I’ve been around the world 25 times. Everybody should just mind their own business, do their own thing, live in peace and be done with it. We’re gonna die soon enough, believe me. No sense in escalating the situation.

There are a lot of references to god, religion and Jesus on this album, much more than you had before. Everybody knows that you already had songs like “Believe”, but what made you talk about god and faith so much this time?

I don’t know, maybe it’s just something that’s grown in me. I had had the song “The Answer” for a couple of years, and I was afraid to put it out, because I thought people would get the wrong idea about me saying, “Jesus show me the answer / Your picture is faded, your image is gone.” But I’m saying what’s been done to him in my eyes – all the bad things that have gone on have made his picture fade, and the image of god has been tarnished. I guess I’m just venting, I’m letting out things that are inside me, that I feel I have to say. I don’t really sit there and say, “Well, I’m gonna write a song about asking God to show me something.” Those are the words that came out, and I just wrote them down. (laughs) I didn’t really think anything about it until after I read them back. That’s when I went, “Wow, this is pretty heavy!” It took me a couple of years to get the confidence to release it. And I’m glad I did now, because it is a deep song. Again, a lot of people have commented to me that this song stands out, that they understand what I’m saying. I was afraid that they wouldn’t understand, that they would think that I doubted my faith and what I believe in. A song like “End Times” is, as I was saying before, about attacking the people who are using religion as a means to advance their own financial situations, who are taking advantage of the people and using religion as an excuse. There are so many old people here in America that have lost
Jon Oliva's Pain
their entire life savings over these people who say that they’re doing all this work for god. “I’m working for God! We’re gonna give money to the poor and the hungry!” But then you turn around and look, and all these guys all have seven houses, each one worth $20 million dollars. If you had one house that was worth $20 million and sold the other six, took the money and gave it to the poor and the homeless, I would say, “OK, maybe you’re doing something for God.” But to just take people’s money and lie to them, while living in the lap of luxury with private jets and mansions all over America, that to me is just disgusting. That’s why I’m saying in this song, “You’re trying hard to steal another life.” That’s all they’re doing – taking these old people’s money and stealing their life away from them. It’s just very sad to me.

One more very trivial question – why did you quit SPV Records and sign with AFM? SPV seems to us a bigger label, and they worked with Savatage for a long time.

I got to meet AFM by working on Zak’s first record, and I just liked the guys a lot. SPV’s gonna do Savatage, and I wanted my stuff to be on a different label.

Speaking about SPV, they re-released a lot of Savatage albums in the “Nice Price” series a few years ago. What do you think of those re-releases? On the one hand, they contain liner notes and bonus tracks, but on the other hand, there is no more poetry in the booklet of “The Wake Of Magellan” (1997) anymore…

I don’t know, I haven’t seen any of the re-releases. (laughs) I’ve got the originals, but I haven’t received any of the reissues. That’s something that happens when you sign with a label on a long-term basis, they have the option to be able to do things like that. Savatage hasn’t really done a lot of work over the past five or six years, we haven’t really done anything except compiling video footage for the eventual 25th anniversary DVD. Other than that there hasn’t been any Savatage activity at all because of all the work we’ve done with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and that’s why labels go for re-releasing old stuff. I haven’t seen these re-releases, so I cannot comment. I only hope they are nice.

In a recent interview you said that you hate the “Poets And Madmen” album (2001). What makes you feel so bad about it?

The way it was done was different to the way we had done Savatage albums in the past. We were in the middle of a Trans-Siberian Orchestra album, so we were kind of doing two albums at the same time, and when you do that, something’s gonna suffer for it. You can’t do two projects at the same time and not have one of them get less attention than the other, it’s just impossible. I just felt that “Poets And Madmen” didn’t get the attention it needed from everybody. And Zak quit the band a week before he was supposed to start singing, but we had no chance to rearrange everything, because we had already recorded all the songs. I had to go and sing the songs that were not really recorded in my key, that I was not comfortable singing. Otherwise I would have had to record the whole album all over again. I wasn’t really happy, it was the first album with me back singing, and it was kind of annoying to me that I had to rush through five or six songs. If I had had a chance, I would have sung them in a different key to better suit my voice. That record wasn’t very enjoyable for me, though I think there are some great songs on it. It takes more than just great songs to make an album great. Everything’s gotta be right. Making an album is like making a dinner – you cannot have a great steak and have everything else taste like shit. (everybody laughs) That’s the same thing with the album – you can have great songs, but you’d better make sure that everything else is great, too, or those great songs will suffer for it. Unfortunately this didn’t happen to a good half of that album. Half of that record was designed for me to sing, and half was designed for Zak to sing, that was the original plan for that album. Zak was gonna be the poet and I was gonna be the madman, I was gonna sing the heavier tracks. But he just got freaked out on us before he had to do this tracks and decided that he didn’t wanna be in Savatage anymore. He kind of just left me holding the bag in a way. I did the best I could, I think it’s an OK album, but of all the Savatage albums it’s my second least favorite after “Fight For The Rock” (1985).

You mentioned the upcoming 25th anniversary DVD. Can you tell us a bit about it? When will it come out, and what footage will it contain?

I don’t know, it was supposed to be done this coming summer, but it’s not gonna happen. We’re hoping for the summer of 2008 now. It’s very difficult because everybody that’s involved with Savatage is a member of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which is now one of the biggest bands in the world, at least definitely in America. It’s become a full-time band, and it’s hard for me to convince people to stop working in one of the biggest bands in the country to do a Savatage album. I won’t do a three-week Savatage album, where I’m gonna grab everybody for two weeks, throw something together real fast and put it out. I would rather just not do anything at all if I’m gonna do that. A proper Savatage album takes six or seven months to do, that’s how we’ve always done it, all our best albums have been done that way. I wouldn’t wanna do a Savatage record just to make everybody happy and have it come out and be another “Fight For The Rock” or “Poets And Madmen”. I could have very easily done that, I could have very easily called Jon Oliva’s Pain Jon Oliva’s Savatage, but I didn’t wanna do that either. When everybody’s got the time to do it in the right way, we’re gonna do it. When exactly it’s gonna be, I can’t say. I can only say it will be in the next couple of years.

And what do you think about recording a live DVD with Jon Oliva’s Pain?

We are planning on doing that. There are a lot of bootleg recordings, you can probably get some off the Internet by now. (laughs) That’s always the best place to go if you wanna see the band live, I’m sure there’s plenty of that stuff out there. But we plan on doing a real one, probably on this next tour, now that I’ve got enough material. I didn’t wanna do one and have it all full of Savatage material, and I only had one album with these guys. Now that I’ve got two albums, I can do a full show and only have three or four Savatage songs in there instead of having eight or nine, which is how I have done it in the past. If I can put this together for this year, we will probably film some stuff in the springtime, when we come back over Europe.

What are your most favorite tracks to play live nowadays?

It’s weird – I love doing “Hounds”. I started doing that live again on this last tour, and it’s a great song to do live. But in general, it depends on where you’re at and how the crowd’s reacting. “Gutter Ballet” is always a great song to do live, because the fans all know it and they go crazy when we play it, so we get adrenaline rush. “Believe” is always a special moment in the show. I love doing “The Dark” from the first Jon Oliva’s Pain album. But that’s all different. Some nights I love doing “Hall Of The Mountain Kings”, some nights I hate doing it, because I might not feel good, and it’s a hard song to sing. A lot of it just depends on how you feel that day. Some days I like doing the ballads more than doing heavier stuff, and some days when it’s a real heavy crowd, I wanna get into the heavier stuff. It depends on the atmosphere of the place that you’re playing.

Whose idea was it to bring Jon Oliva’s Pain and Chris Caffery’s Faces together on tour? How did you like those shows?

That was just one of Chris’ cuckoo ideas. I just did it for a week, and it didn’t work at all. (laughs) We called it Tragical Misery Tour actually, it was awful. (laughs) We were supposed to go to Canada, and they wouldn’t let us in over the border, because certain people that were involved in the organization had drug and criminal records. We got turned away at the border, we lost three big shows in Canada, and it was just one tragedy after another, hence the name Tragical Misery Tour. (laughs)

Do you plan to continue collaboration with Chris in any format? Will there be another Doctor Butcher record one day?

I don’t think so, there is no time for it. I did a couple of tracks with him a year or so ago for the re-release thing that they did, but I don’t have the time to do anymore. Trans-Siberian Orchestra takes up a lot of time, and the only spare time I have I devote to Jon Oliva’s Pain. To try and fit another thing there will be an absolute professional suicide. I’m just gonna stick with the two things right now and do that until I start to get crazy again. (laughs)

When shall we expect a new record from Trans-Siberian Orchestra?

In the springtime, I think it’s scheduled to come out at the end of May. It’s called “Night Castle,” and it’s really good.

By the way, what does Paul O’Neill think about your solo records?

Oh, he likes the new record a lot. He told me he thought it was brilliant, and coming from Paul, I think it’s a great compliment. Paul is a very tough guy, it’s hard to impress Paul O’Neill, believe me!

Do you miss working with Paul in the studio sometimes, or are you more comfortable on your own now?

I love working with Paul, because I’ve worked with him for many years, and we definitely have a chemistry. Paul’s a lot more on the mellower side than I am. He’s more into theatrical music, while I’m still more into rock and hard rock, that’s kind of my thing. I’m comfortable working on my own, but I’m also very comfortable working with him. It’s good because I get to do enough stuff on my own to satisfy what I’d love to do, and I love the stuff that I do with him as well. I kind of get the best of both worlds, as Van Halen once sang.

It’s an interesting thing – Savatage are from Florida, and Paul is a New Yorker. How big is the difference between you on the mental and cultural level?

Metal is metal, whether you’re in New York or Florida. People that are into heavy metal are pretty much the same all around the world. Europe has a bigger following for it than America does at this point in time. America is a very unclear market, I have no idea what they like. I know they like Trans-Siberian Orchestra (laughs), but metal is difficult here, because it doesn’t get the exposure that it once got. In Europe everything gets equal exposure, you still have a lot of die-hard heavy metal fans there who love going to see the shows. Here in America it’s more of a hassle to go see a concert, people don’t wanna go there anymore, because they’ve made it so miserable here. It costs a fortune to get tickets, you can’t drink because you gotta drive, and if you’re caught drunk driving you’ll be put in jail. If two people buy tickets and some merchandize at a show here, you’re probably gonna spend $400 or 500. A lot of people cannot afford to take $400 or 500 out of their pockets just to go see a concert, when you can just go down to a local blockbuster video and buy a live DVD of the band for $40. Then you can go home in the privacy of your own house, drink as much as you want, smoke whatever and watch the concert on TV. That’s what I think really hurts live concerts here in America.

Last year you received a prize called Lifetime Achievement Award. But what kind of
Jon Oliva's Pain
award are you still missing? And what kind of achievement do you still want to make in life?


(laughs) Oh, I don’t know. A Grammy would be nice, I guess. That’s probably the ultimate award you can get in music, maybe for a movie song or something like that it would be nice to have it.


Special thanks to Irina Ivanova (CD-Maximum) for arranging this interview.

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov, Natalie “Lynx” Khorina
October 13, 2006
8 äåê 2006
the End


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