Savatage is dead.

Seriously.

The band’s music is alive and well thanks to the existence of Jon Oliva’s Pain, Circle II Circle and guitarist Chris Caffery’s solo career, but as a recording / touring entity Savatage will only ever exist from this point on as a pipe dream. For vocalist / founder Jon Oliva it’s an ongoing battle trying to convince the diehards that the band won’t be making a return in spite of the fact he’s released four albums with Jon Oliva’s Pain in six years. The release of a Savatage compilation entitled Still The Orchestra Plays, issued earlier this year, hasn’t helped matters. So it goes that as Oliva settles in to discuss his new JOP album, Festival, he’s forced yet again to snuff the rekindled rumours of an impending Savatage comeback.

“That compilation is something Paul (O’Neill / producer, Trans-Siberian Orchestra director) helped put together, I didn’t have much control over it,” says Oliva. “I just wanted to get something out there to kind of cap things off because I’ve moved on. Those reunion rumours… some people have been saying things they probably shouldn’t have. There was talk about doing a show to kind of give Savatage a send-off but the logistics of doing so just made it impossible. The guys have the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, I have my JOP stuff, there’s a lot of other things keeping us busy. It’s pretty aggravating, though, with people always asking about when it’s going to happen and pushing to have one. I mean, Savatage hasn’t done anything in almost 10 years! It’s just a small group of people, but they just won’t let it go and I can’t figure out why. You have the Savatage guys in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which was spawned from the Dead Winter Dead (1995) and Wake Of Magellan (1997) era of the band, you have Jon Oliva’s Pain doing a lot of the old Savatage material, what more do you want?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I love Savatage and it’ll always be dear to my heart because that was my start, man. I still play the songs, I love playing those songs, but I’ve got a whole new career now. I’m on my fourth record with JOP for crying out loud! It’s like, to the people that keep pushing for a Savatage reunion, just let it go. I’ve got the rights back for the Sirens and Dungeons albums, so I might do something with those in a few years, but JOP is my focus now and I’m hoping people will finally catch on that I have a new band (laughs).”

Ironically, that “new” band’s latest album Festival – their fourth – is reminiscent of early Savatage, the Gutter Ballet record from 1989 in particular. The albums share a similar vibe, they are equally as dark, and they sink in slowly rather than making an immediate impact on the listener.

“Yeah, I definitely hear that,” Oliva agrees. “A lot of people have said there’s a certain Gutter Ballet / Hall Of The Mountain King atmosphere on the album, but that was never planned. None of it was by design. After playing together for six years there’s a comfort zone that we go about in production and the whole way we get into writing a record. It’s very reminiscent of how we used to make records.”

“On the last record I wanted to do something different just to see what would happen,” he continues. “I called it my grand experiment because it was so big, so dense, and we tried so many different things. On this record there was more of a focus on trying to blend a little bit more of the old school Oliva brothers and Maniacal Renderings sound and attitude. There are more rockers on Festival than there are on Global Warning. We kind of knew when we started doing pre-production and mapping things out where the songs were going to go. We knew it wasn’t going to be for the AC/DC rock crowd (laughs), but had the plan to put out a record that people can put on 10 years from now and it’ll still sound as fresh and interesting as it did when they bought it.”

Festival’s atmosphere can be credited in part to Oliva once again using old Savatage rehearsal cassette tapes featuring his brother and original guitarist Criss, who was killed in a car accident in 1993. Discovered accidentally prior to the recordings for JOP’s second album, Maniacal Renderings in 2006, the tapes have been part of the songwriting process ever since, effectively making Criss Oliva a member of the Jon Oliva’s Pain line-up.

“Which makes me wonder why people bitch so much about a Savatage reunion,” Oliva says. “I mean, come on, we’ve had this conversation before, that Jon Oliva’s Pain is more Savatage than Savatage was as of Dead Winter Dead (in 1995). Criss is a part of this band; you’d think it would make those people happy.”

“Criss is on four songs on the new album,” he adds. “The song ‘Now’ is actually an old, old song we wrote when we were teenagers. And the song ‘Lies’, that’s classic Criss Oliva; we built the songs around his verses. Unfortunately we’re running out of material on those tapes. There might be a 45 minute tape and only 30 seconds or a minute or two of new material we can actually use. Hopefully we’ll get at least one more album out of them.”

The buzz on the heels of Festival’s release was news of an exclusive DVD shoot in Tilburg, Holland due to take place on October 15th during the band’s European tour. In our interview for Global Warning back in 2008, Oliva mentioned that some Savatage songs would eventually be retired from the JOP set, and the DVD seems like a good way to say goodbye to them.

“That’s a small part of it,” Oliva admits. “I’m not trying to run away from my past, because we play a lot of that stuff at every show and we love doing it. We’ll continue to do that long after the DVD is done, but there’s no real live video release featuring music from when Criss was still alive. I’d like to document that era somehow because it’s never been done and this seems to be the best way. It’s also an introduction for people who never saw Savatage and might have discovered the music through Jon Oliva’s Pain. I mean, in spite of the bitching and complaining about Savatage there are actually a few people that discovered JOP first (laughs).”

In a separate interview, drummer / producer Chris Kinder offered some more details on the upcoming DVD shoot.

“The way the DVD shoot initially got set up is that we would have been doing it in March. We thought about it and the record would have only been out for a couple of weeks, and we plan on playing six or seven songs off it at every show on the tour. The last thing we wanted to do was have a DVD locked into 40 minutes of new material and seeing a lot of blank faces in the crowd. It’s important to have it done right, especially since the label has to pony up the cash to get it done. The whole thing seemed rushed, I was having problems with the pyro company, so we couldn’t bring it all together . In the end we decided to push it back and I’m glad we did.”

Kinder is particularly proud of Festival because he played a large role as co-producer once again alongside Oliva and veteran producer / engineer Tom Morris. He says making the new album was a much different experience from the Global Warning sessions due to the entire band being able to contribute to the music this time out.

“On the last record a lot of that was a timing issue. The way our tour schedule went and how it mixed with the Jon’s schedule working with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra stuff, we didn’t have the time to sit around and jam on the songs like we did for Maniacal Renderings. We had more time to do Festival so there was more of a balance. Jon was the main composer but he tried to get the demos done early enough so that the guys were able to take them home and bring their own ideas to the table. Matt (Laporte / guitars) has a lot more influence on this record, for instance, like that whole Pink Floyd-ish breakdown in ‘Evil Within’. There are a number of different parts that everybody was brought in on. There was a total ping-pong thing going on, with ideas going back and forth all the time.”

“If you can get to a point where you’re open to listening to intelligent music and you can tell it took a lot of time and a lot of thought to put it together, you’ll have more appreciation for the people that made it. That’s the kind of record where you put it on and it’s a show. That’s what we were really trying to go for on Festival.”

“The thing that’s a real shame is we don’t have the budget to have a camera following us around and filming our recording sessions because we could easily put together the funniest reality TV show ever (laughs). It’s absolutely fucking hysterical, the shit that goes on around here.”

Beyond Oliva’s trademark maniacal vocal performance, the guitar work on Festival provided by Matt Laporte has been getting a great deal of attention. The previously mentioned Gutter Ballet / Hall Of The Mountain vibe is in large part due to his playing, which is reminiscent of Criss Oliva in places right down to the guitar tones.

“For people that don’t really understand guitar players, Matt is one of the really good ones,” says Kinder. “You can pretty much plug him into and reasonable-sounding decent sounding amp, and 90% of that tone comes from his fingers. It was the same with Criss; he had a very distinctive guitar tone that nobody else really had. Matt doesn’t focus a lot on his guitar processing or trying to get that perfectly awesome amp sound because he realizes that you can put just about any guitar in his hands and he’s going to get that Matt Laporte sound. And yeah, that sound is strikingly reminiscent of Criss.”

“What’s really funny is that a lot of what you hear on Festival, believe it or not, is Jon. His guitar skills over the last couple years… it’s absolutely astonishing how well that guy plays guitar. He plays a lot of guitar on this record. There are moments where you might think it’s Matt and it’s Jon (laughs). He plays rhythm guitar on three songs, I think, and even played lead on one song. Jon and Criss were basically identical rhythm players. Same style, everything. So as Jon becomes a better guitar player he starts to sound more and more like his brother. And then there’s Matt on the other side, so when he gets tired he just passes the guitar over (laughs). It’s really great.”

Wrapping things up, Kinder offers his thoughts on Jon Oliva’s Pain carrying on the Savatage legacy. They are not a Savatage cover band, and the message is simple: Fans who whine about the lack of a reunion would do well to simply shut up and listen to what Jon Oliva’s Pain has to offer.

“We all grew up with Savatage, I used to rehearse two warehouses down from them when I was playing in other bands, so the music and the mindset and the history of the band is firmly entrenched in our heads. It’s an honour for us to get up and play that stuff every night. Jon wants to make his brother proud, he wants Criss’ music to carry on. There’s no doubt about it, Jon misses his brother terribly, so Jon Oliva’s Pain is the right way to keep Criss in the forefront of people’s minds.”

– live Jon Oliva photo by of Carl Begai.
– live Chris Kinder and Matt Laporte photo snatched from the band’s official MySpace page.

Go to this location to pick up a copy of Festival.

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News that guitarist / vocalist Chris Caffery had signed with AFM Records for the European release of his new album, House Of Insanity, came as no surprise to the diehard fans. With his Savatage bandmates in Circle II Circle and Jon Oliva’s Pain having called the German record label home for the last several years it was considered a move long overdue. So it goes that while the focus is on House Of Insanity as far as Caffery and the label are concerned, Savatage fans clamouring for a reunion believe his signing with AFM is another step towards that goal. And while Caffery has gone on record saying he’d take part in a Savatage reunion without hesitation, his primary goal is to remind people he has his shit together as a solo artist. By all accounts the fans are enjoying what they hear. Reactions to House Of Insanity since its 2008 digital release have been positive for the most part, which has added up to bigger sales in comparison to Caffery’s last outing, Pins And Needles. He isn’t rolling in money (yet), but pushing the album more or less on his own has definitely paid off.

“My digital sales, the internet sales, I’ve practically doubled what I did with Locomotive for Pins And Needles, and I haven’t even started radio yet. Locomotive was supposedly trying to do the best they could, but when I go to the mall in every single city I’m playing a show in (with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra) and there’s no CD in the stores, and then they blame me because the record’s not selling… you can’t do that. With TSO behind me it shouldn’t matter if I burp and fart on a record, I should be able to sell a certain amount of albums, and I didn’t want to see what happened with Pins And Needles to happen to House Of Insanity. If the thing isn’t going to sell then I want to earn my own blame.”

“Some people were telling me that if I sold the album through my website I wouldn’t be able to show people SoundScan figures, but I don’t care about what people think,” he adds. “At the end of the day I care about making sure people have the records and I’m able to afford to make another one. If I’m SoundScanning a million records, fine, but if you’re talking about a difference of 1,000 or 4,000 sold I don’t really care about that. Business is so bad that it’s not going to change my life that much to have a little bit better SoundScan news.”

Caffery’s efforts and the resulting success have proven that unless an artist is signed to a major label in this day and age, one is probably better off doing things independently. There’s more work involved, absolutely, but you also have complete control of how the album in question is marketed.

“That was the biggest problem last time, because Pins And Needles was so different that it needed a major push,” says Caffery. “It needed me to get to a different audience, and without that it was kind of a waste of the record. It was thrown out there by some people as ‘If you love Savatage you’re going to love this…’ and it was nothing like Savatage. I wasn’t expecting anybody to think it was like Savatage. I think Pins And Needles will one day get the attention it deserves. I listen to it once in a while and it’s so… odd. It was a really different record, but I definitely think it won a few people over.”

“The thing I look for is the fan feedback, and that’s what’s been the best. With Pins And Needles some people liked it, some people liked some of it, but on this record the majority of the fans like all of it. To me that’s the most important thing. The feedback has been amazing, and that’s why I did this record. It’s me being a fan of the bands I was in and the album is something I can listen to and really enjoy. I’m really proud of it and I think the Savatage fans are going to listen to it and love it.”

With the European release of House Of Insanity a done deal Caffery is looking into touring possibilities. The popular view amongst Savatage fans seems to be that, if the band isn’t going to reunite, having a Chris Caffery / Jon Oliva’s Pain / Circle To Circle package on the road would be the next best thing. A distinct possibility with the AFM deal now in place. Or not…

“Yeah, but I think people would be expecting to see something very Savatage, and it’s gotten to the point where I’d like to go out and do something that’s not directly related to Savatage. I could sell to the Savatage audience, but I think I could also sell to the people who aren’t into the band. I think Savatage is eventually going to play together one day regardless of what people say or don’t say, so a part of me doesn’t want to take away from that.”

Caffery reveals that writing for the follow-up to House Of Insanity will begin this summer, barring any tour opportunities that come his way.

“I actually want to write three instrumentals for the next record which is something I haven’t done,” he reveals. “I’m looking forward to it because I think I’ll be in a really good frame of mind when I do it. I’ve got to tweak my studio a little more because I know what I need to make it sound a little better than House Of Insanity and to improve my writing. I think it’ll be a much more relaxed process.”

Begging the question of whether or not he intends to use the same “me, myself and I” recording technique when he’s ready to get down to it. Meaning Caffery, his gear and the cat locked in the studio for months on end, surfacing only to record drums in a different location and grab the occasional ray of sunlight.

“I’ll probably stay with doing it by myself because I just liked doing it that way. As much as it was a pain in the ass I enjoyed it because it gave me the ability to correct my mistakes and not be looking at a bank account the whole time. When you’re in a studio and you’re paying for everything you have a tendency to sit there and go ‘Oh Jesus, if I don’t finish this I’m going to go over budget…’ and I didn’t have that at all with House Of Insanity. The only frustration I had was going back and fixing something I didn’t like.”

For now, however, Caffery is focused on continuing the independent promotion and sales in motion at home while AFM takes care of things overseas. A situation that sounds potentially chaotic, but Caffery prefers it this way.

“You know what? That’s the beauty of having an independent record. You don’t have to sell it instantly. That whole idea was ridiculous to me. I mean, why does a record have to get everything done that it needs to do in the first month of release? I mean, Guns N’ Roses released their first record and after a year it was ‘only’ Gold. And the next year it sold 25 million records because some things take time to develop. Your cards have to fall in the right place and I didn’t want to not have the record out during the last TSO tour. I told people they were going to be able to listen to it by October 2008 and I wanted to hold true to that. The actual release is happening now, which is fine because sales have been good so far. Things are definitely moving forward, which is a great feeling.”

Click here for a review of House Of Insanity. Go to this location for more discussion with Caffery on the album, and click here for an interview with JON OLIVA’S PAIN drummer Chris Kinder, who mastered the record.

- All photos of Chris Caffery by Carl Begai.

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Once again, a big thanks to those of you stopping by to check out my playground. And to those of you posting comments, thanks for keeping it clean and being pretty damn articulate and intelligent when you set off on an overview, commentary or critique. I enjoy the feedback, positive and not, and it’s definitely of worth. Keep ‘em coming.

Currently up and running elsewhere (because it’s no fun staying in only one spot), I recently posted the larger portion of my recent interview with THE ALMIGHTY frontman Ricky Warwick on the BW&BK site here. He was a cool interview as always, discussing the here-and-not status of The Almighty, the death of his other band CIRCUS DIABLO, and being a folk artist. The folk-oriented portion of the interview is still available via Suite101.

I also supplied Suite101 with a review of DANKO JONES’ kick-ass B-Sides compilation, released earlier this year. You can find it here.

I’ll be posting stories on the BW&BK site in the coming weeks featuring THE NEW BLACK, German doom gods AHAB, Dutch / Mexican (yes, really) gothsters STREAM PASSION, and SONATA ARCTICA guitarist Elias Viljanen. Very cool stuff. As for this site, watch for a Retro Fit of CRIMSON GLORY’s classic Transcendence album, stories on TENET, NERVECELL and SAVATAGE / TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA guitarist Chris Caffery.

In addition, I recently did an interview with author / musician Joel Gausten. The man not only boasts his own growing empire of published works, he has played and (inadvertently) recorded with a little band called the MISFITS and recently released a book on Satanism. All three subjects are covered in the interview we did, which will be spread out over a month in three installments. A very interesting and inspiring read, one definitely worth your time when it his this page.

We’re talking real Satanism, by the way, and not the Hollywood “wooga wooga evil hate death” bullshit we’ve had slapped into our brains since childhood. If I wanted that crap I’d focus on the Catholic church.

Check out Gausten’s official website here.

Kinder admits to being impressed by Caffery’s commitment House Of Insanity, and is possibly even slightly appalled by Caffery’s decision to do the bulk of the work without and hands-on outside assistance.

“Coming from the standpoint of being a single individual he really took on a massive responsibility. To be able to write the whole record himself, sing everything, play all the guitars and most of the bass on the record, record it, edit it, mix it… that’s an unbelievable feat that I can’t imagine anybody would want to take on. It’s almost kind of crazy in the sense that not only does it drive you nuts personally, but I can’t imagine he wasn’t thinking ‘Am I taking on way too much? Is the record going to suffer? Are the songs going to suffer in any way?’ at some point. At the end of it I told Chris the best thing he could do was walk away from it.”

Once inside, Kinder approached House Of Insanity with a Jon Oliva’s Pain mindset…

“There was a congnizant effort to make sure that all the nuances of the songs were able to translate through the speakers. We weren’t trying to make the typical metal record you hear these days where everything is crazy and louder than everything else. Much like when we were recording and mixing Global Warning at Morrisound, it was laid out so that Tom Morris would do all the tracking and Jim Morris was going to mix it, then we would take a big break, and then the three of us would sit together and master it collectively once we had enough time to get away from it. With Chris having absorbed all the responsibility for the record I think it was impossible for him to distance himself enough from it to where he could make the right decisions creatively when it came to the mastering.”

“What Chris wasn’t willing to do with the record, and I totally appreciate this, was let it fly blind,” he adds. “He had enough of an ear left that he felt we could bounce ideas back and forth, and we did. We made five, maybe six passes at the record, and since he had the ability to make certain adjustments to the instruments I made suggestions of what to fix in the mix. It was probably a four week process of bouncing files to one another to where I could give him fresh ear and he could adjust things while remaining true to his original ideas.”

Kinder offers his take on House Of Insanity versus Caffery’s previous solo outings. It comes as no surprise to learn he prefers the new one, but his accolades aren’t all-in-the-family ass kissing.

“While I was doing the mastering I tried to put myself in the position of somebody who wrote and played and did everything. The first record, I thought that was a really great introduction to what Chris is capable of doing. I wasn’t really a big fan of the Pins And Needles record, but that’s only because it was so experimental that things were bouncing off the page left and right. It was kind of hard to grasp for an album perspective. I think he got a little more grounded on House Of Insanity, and some of the guitar solos are simply amazing. His performance on the album is amazing, and I told him that I can’t give him enough praise for what he pulled off. I definitely enjoy it.”

That said, Kinder has moved onto the next Jon Oliva’s Pain album with, once again, a seat behind the drum kit and in the studio’s control room. He offers a taste of what’s on the horizon for the fans.

“We’re deep in the throes of it. We’ve got 13 songs that Jon and I have been working on for about three months, and there are half a dozen or more that are still on the plate. There’s a definite feeling with Jon, and I see this on a regular basis, of a renewed spirit of wanting to stuff the hardest material he can down everybody’s throats (laughs). I think it’s going to end up being a Global Warning meets Doctor Butcher thing. It’s really true, and now that I’m so deep into the record with him I can honestly say that’s probably the direction the new record is headed. We’re leaning off the ballads a bit and we have a couple epic songs, of course, but Jon really wants to get back to where its killer riffs, old school Criss Oliva stuff that we’re still digging out of the closet.”

“Jon is kind of on a mission, I think,” Kinder adds. “I don’t know if he’s going old school or whatever, but when we were getting into working on the demos we were sitting here at the house and he told me that he just wanted to punch everybody right in the face with the first five or six songs on the new record. Jon is going to be 50 this year, and the amount of energy he has for the music… I’m at a loss for words. To watch him sit and think about what’s going on as we try to record these songs, it’s interesting to say the least, and maybe even a bit scary (laughs).”

Soundboard and Chris Kinder “thumb” photo: Carl Begai
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