A few days ago, Jon Oliva’s Pain, were in Trezzo Sull’adda just outside Milan in Italy as a part of their European “Hall Of The Mountain King Tour”. A couple of hours before the show, Rock Overdose and Apostolos Pantazoglou had the chance to talk with the Mountain King himself, Jon Oliva, about Jon Oliva’s Pain, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Savatage and much more. You can read the interview below.
Rockoverdose.gr: Hello Jon and welcome to RockOverdose.gr. It’s a great honor.
Oliva: Thank you. Honored to talk to you sir.
Rockoverdose.gr: Let’s start with what you are doing right now. You are playing the whole album “Hall Of The Mountain King”. How did you came up with this idea?
Oliva: It was actually Chris Kinder’s (drums) idea. It was the 25th anniversary, I was thinking about it and I said that it could be a good idea. I said maybe it was something that the fans would enjoy. It was something I have never done before. At my age and my experience I’ve done a lot of shit. So to do something that I have never done before was cool. The fans get a special treat and I get some fun.
Rockoverdose.gr: Do you think that you could do it with other albums as well?
Oliva: Very possible. I would almost say guaranteed yes but I don’t want to jinx it so I will say that we are in the planning stages.
Rockoverdose.gr: When you were recording “HOTMK” did you think that it would have such a big impact on the fans and it would change you so much as a band?
Oliva: Not at the time. At that time we were just desperate to do something and make it up for what we did the year before. So with that in mind I don’t think that we gave thought to anything else. To me it wasn’t my favorite Savatage album. I was more disappointed that “Streets” didn’t go as good as “HOTMK” did, but there so many other instances at that time, with the changing of the music and “Streets” got caught up by that. “HOTMLK” was the turning point for the band. We started up at a high point and by the time “Fight For The Rock” came out we were at the basement, we were underneath the front yard and we were broke. So “HOTMK” was the point where we started going up again until the “Streets” time when everything started going weird. I never thought back then that it would have such a big impact.
Rockoverdose.gr: The man behind this and the man that helped you the most is Paul O’ Neill. Do you think that if you had his guiding hand from the beginning, things would be totally different?
Oliva: Yeah I don’t think he would have ripped me off 3 million dollars. Maybe a million (laughs). Yes I think it would have been different. Because he’s not a criminal like the other guys we had. They were criminals and they were really good at it. He didn’t even know who we were. The first thing he did was to give me and my brother 50.000$ to pay our bills, to pay our rent, the child support, to buy new equipment etc. All he asked for in return was to write music with me and Criss. I and Criss look at each other asking “How much? 50.000$? Sure you can write music with us”. And it was a good decision. A lot of great stuff came out from this decision. But we never paid him back these 50.000$ (laughs).
Rockoverdose.gr: So it was a give and take relationship between the three of you.
Oliva: Yes. Well we definitely had to do some sacrifices. In the “HOTMK” we really banged our heads because there were certain songs that he didn’t like. He didn’t like “Devastation” and he hated “White Witch”. It is his least favorite Savatage song. He just hates it. And also “Beyond The Doors Of The Dark”. He didn’t like the lyrics for that. He was saying that people are going to think that we are satanic. And I was like “I am not satanic. It’s just about a guy that opens the door and finds Satan ready to eat his brains. What are you talking about? Read it.” But it all worked out for the best. We are all very happy.
Rockoverdose.gr: Let’s got to Jon Oliva’s Pain now. Do you have any plans after this tour?
Oliva: We got a lot of plans but we don’t know how we are going to do it yet. We got the new lineup for the band. It took sometime after we lost Matt (La Porte) for Chris and me to decide to do something besides studio work. But after a year since Matt passed away we decided that we wanted to do something. When the idea came to do something like what we do now, we called some friends instead of guys that we didn’t know. Jerry (Outlaw – guitar) has been around with us but Jason (Jennings – bass) and Joe (Diaz – guitar) are the new guys. Well we’ve known them; we’ve been friends for a long time. The first time I met Joe I drunk all his Jack Daniels and left him sitting in the hood of a car somewhere. And with Jason I was in various side projects like a Led Zeppelin cover band and he played in Criss Oliva memorial show. Technically Jason was the first bass player for JOP.
Now we got a lot of material, a lot of different ideas, and we just want to see how this thing will go on. It’s the first time that we play with the new lineup and the first time we play since Matt passed away. Except for his memorial show. We just had to make sure that everything feels alright. That’s why we’ve book 12-15 shows and not 25-30. I didn’t want to book a three-month tour and after the first shows to realize that we’re not doing it right, the fans don’t like etc. But that was eliminated even before we left Florida. We knew it was going to be good since we started the rehearsals. And so far everyone seems to like it. I am not into the facebook thing but from what I am told, everyone seems to really like it.
Rockoverdose.gr: I read in an interview that you are planning to do an album like the Avantasia ones. With many guests etc.
Oliva: Well not exactly like Avantasia. The only connection will be that we are going to have some friends coming in for some tracks. But the Avantasia thing is a whole concept, it’s very big. I don’t want to do it so extreme. I just want some good friends and do some songs with them. It’s going to be an album with an extra cd that will have songs with many different guys.
Rockoverdose.gr: Let’s go to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra thing. It has a huge success in the USA with many fans. Why do you think this is happening?
Oliva: Because they have the money and the connections to make it happen. In America we say this: if you have money, you can make money. If you want to put out the kind of show we put out and not charging the people 100$ for a ticket, which we don’t – we have the same prices the last 15 years, we’ve always stayed to the minimum that we can charge - people appreciate it and they come back and because it’s a good show. It’s still good. O’Neill did good business. You know he is out of his fucking mind. Sometimes if I work for him for 12 hours I feel like I’ve been on tour for a month. He is very fast but he has great business sense and he has the best lawyers and the best of what we can ask for. When it started to get popular and money started coming in instead of everyone taking the money, we re-invested the money to keep going. Because to start such a big tour you need millions. In the beginning he used to borrow money from the banks but now we are in a point that we don’t have to do that. The best thing about that for me is that it enables me to do what I am doing now which is what I really love to do. It’s not on the TSO level but I don’t really care. I think it’s not that fun as what we do now when it gets on that high level. TSO have 160 people in the crew and it’s crazy. I’ve been treated great but it must be misery for everybody else (laughs). It does good business, people love it, it provides a living to me, so I hope it will continue.
Rockoverdose.gr: Are there plans for a new album with TSO?
Oliva: Before we stop so I can do this tour, we were recording tracks for two projects. One is for the “Gutter Ballet” the original piece that Paul O’Neill wrote many years ago. It has some songs from the “Gutter Ballet” album, two songs from “Handful Of Rain” a lot from the “Streets” album. I redid the music; we changed the arrangement of the songs to make it fit more to this type of show that he is looking for. And then we have the “Romanov” thing that we’re working on. We’ve been working this since 1994. It’s really good, but his ideas to do it live as a performance would be astronomically expensive. So we may do it as an animated thing or something else. But in this kind of stuff I stay out. My job is to write music and play on the albums. And let them do all the business stuff. Because so far they’ve been right so I’ll just shut up and collect my paycheck (laughs).
Rockoverdose.gr: I hope we will see you in Europe again and with this show this time.
Oliva: Yes. I was supposed to come last year but my wife got sick and I could not leave. I was disappointed because I really wanted to come but you know…. There will be other times.
Read the second part of the interview in the following link: http://rockoverdose.gr/news_details.php?id=13623
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