For the best part of the last two decades, US metal band SAVATAGE have remained a consistent force to be reckoned with in the roller coaster world of metal. With a career spanning a dozen albums and countless live shows, they’ve steadily grown into genre definitive cultural icons. With the recent release of their critically acclaimed ‘The Wake Of Magellan’ album, the band is poised to reach new heights in terms of market penetration. Long time guitarist Chris Caffery took time to talk to Dave Cockett

Over the years Savatage have had their fair share of life’s rough and tumble. Numerous line up changes, a well documented drugs problem, and then to cap it all the tragic, premature death of founding member Criss Oliva at the hands of a drunk driver. With the weight of fate seemingly stacked against them, most bands would have called it quits years ago, yet the band remain as strong and fresh as ever, something that they attribute to the dedication and loyalty of their fans. ‘I still get surprised sometimes when I see just how important this band is and its music is to the fans,’ admits Chris. ‘I mean, at the times when you figure out that most normal bands would seriously consider calling it a day, that was when we’d get the most mail from people telling us they did not want us to stop. When Jon (Oliva) first stopped singing, there were a lot of people connected with the band who wondered how we’re gonna continue with him; and then when Criss was killed it was like ‘Oh my God, the basic core and foundation of the band is gone, where do we go from here’, it’s like how do you continue under those circumstances. But it’s basically been the love that the fans and the band itself have for the music that’s kept it going. It’s been really encouraging to see how receptive everybody’s been to the fact that the band has kept going. ‘It’s not a new group of fans either. It isn’t like we ignored everybody who were fans before and used the name to launch and sell something new. We’ve had fans come to our shows on recent tours who’ve brought their kids with ‘em, and they’re telling us that they’ve been fans of the band since the beginning. These people are saying that right now, this is their favourite version of the live band, so it kinda makes you believe that you must be doing something right at least. It’s weird really when you consider what’s the band’s been through, but if you could see the mails we receive from the fans, you’d start to understand why we’re still doing this.’

Chris has been with the band on and off for about ten years now. Having initially quit after the ‘Gutter Ballet’ world tour finished back in 1990, he rejoined the band in 1995 in time for the ‘Dead Winter Dead’ album. Obviously over the moon at being given a second bite at the cherry, Chris explains the circumstances behind his original decision to quit. ‘I suppose I was very young and a little misguided at that time,’ he says frankly. ‘My brother was a drummer, and we’d previously worked together in a band. When I joined Savatage he got very jealous and when we went on the road he used to lay a lot of heavy guilt trips on me, you know, threatening to take his own life and how he couldn’t handle his day job, and how he wanted me to quit so that we could work together on the band again. I did want to play more lead guitar than I was doing with Savatage at that time, and in retrospect the biggest mistake I made was leaving the band completely instead of working at things with my brother on the side. ‘As soon as I left I kinda found out that the band I really wanted to put together was the band I’d just been in. The thing I really regret is the time that I missed with Criss, because obviously I’ll never get that back, but there were some good things that came out of it. I got to spend a few years putting my guitar playing together. I’m not necessarily saying that anyone in a million years could ever replace Criss, but if I’d stay with the band back then, I don’t think that I would have been able to reproduce that same kind of feel we generate on stage right now. In the end what really convinced me to come back was the fans. Me and Jon had been working together on the Dr. Butcher stuff and were just about to go in and record it when Criss got killed. After that, Jon didn’t really know what he wanted to do, so he just buried himself into the ‘Handful Of Rain’ record. When he’d finally finished, we released the Dr. Butcher material, and a lot of fans who listened to me and Jon on that record were saying, nothing against Alex Skolnick, but why isn’t Chris back in the band; and in the end that’s what it came down to. I think it just felt right at that time. I felt that I needed to come back, to represent Criss and to play the old songs in the way they were meant to be played.’

The feedback from the fans seems to be that, live at least, that is the best version of Savatage yet to emerge. In reality though, Savatage way back then, was a different animal on stage, as well as on record. Chris agrees. ‘Yeah, it’s a completely different band now. As far as Heavy Metal bands go, and I’m not just saying this because I was a part of it, but the band with Jon singing and Criss playing lead was one of the best metal bands to be around. In this band now, we have al lot more vocals, we’ve got five musicians who are playing all the time so we’re able to do a lot more musically speaking than we ever could before. The fact that people can always see Jon play with this band and hear the old music again, and that we really go out of our way to recreate that old feeling – it kinda gives them a little bit of the past, yet also gives a great representation of what’s going on on record right now. So the band we have now is a lot more musical, and a lot more professional; but as far as a Heavy Metal band goes, for obvious reasons the Savatage of old will never be able to be recreated.’

In the nineties, when most of the arena headliners can’t even get a major deal, it’s somewhat refreshing to find that Atlantic have stood firmly by the band for so many years, or at least in the States. After 93’s ‘Edge Of Thorns’ album, the band parted way with Atlantic worldwide, a decision which wasn’t taken lightly, but a decision which they felt had to be made for their long term benefit. ‘It’s very hard to keep a whole planet of business people on the same page,’ affirms Chris, ‘you know the same marketing strategy, the same way of presenting things to the audiences in different countries. We found out, especially with Europe and America, that there was such a difference in what we could do to promote the music, that we weren’t getting the best deal. I mean, the European company were relying on marketing it the same way the American’s were, and at that time metal was just dying on its feet, so we felt we needed a way to push the band that Atlantic wasn’t latching onto. Now, I think it’s a lot healthier for us because we tend to find that we’ve three different budgets for the three main markets (being Europe, the Far East and America), and we can now concentrate on those markets individually, so it’s really worked to our advantage. ‘The Wake Of Magellan hasn’t been released in the US yet. It’s not coming out here until April because the record company didn’t think that the timing was right, but they’re still very excited about it. I suppose after all this time they must still see something in this band.’

With the band playing an absolute blinder everywhere they go, it would seem that a renewed sense of purpose has had a focusing effect, clarifying where the band should go and what they want to achieve. ‘You know what, I think that right now there’s a really good feeling in the band. A lot of the questions have been answered, I mean, for the first time since ‘Fight For The Rock’ and ‘Hall Of The Mountain King’ we’ve had the same band line up for two consecutive albums. In interviews now, instead of answering questions like ‘why’s such and such left the band’ or ‘ tell us about the new guy, we’re finding that the emphasis has oriented back to the music again, and that’s important. I think we’re definitely more focused now; I mean, through the last three European tours we’ve done, the band just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. This is really exciting for us because we can start to get a feel for where we can actually take this thing now. I think in the long run it’s just gonna make us challenge ourselves more musically, both as writers and performers. It’s really funny, it was ten years ago in December that I first joined the band, and yet it still seems new for us in a lot of ways. I mean, we’re going to South America for the first time in March, so we’re consistently pushing back the frontiers.’

The band’s relentless enthusiasm and appetite for the challenge of exploring new markets would seem insatiable, and I wondered it this is what keeps the band fresh after all these years. ‘Yeah, I think a lot of the time it does,’ offers Chris, ‘but Europe, Europe’s is the one that’s really been keeping us fresh and hungry, and that’s one of our strongest and oldest markets. I think that the fact that the European Community is opening up and we’re thus able to find out where more of our fans are, where more of the product is available, and that’s what really makes it exciting. I’ve got no idea what to expect out of South America, because ‘The Wake Of Magellan’ is the first album that which has been officially released there, but I’ve been doing interviews with people down there and they’ve been telling me that Savatage coming to Brazil is something that, in the Heavy Metal world, is really historically significant. I keep thinking back to the first time we played Greece back in 1996. We’d never been there either, yet it was the most people we played to at one show, bar the Dynamo Festival, and they were the wildest fans I’ve ever played to in my life. If South America’s able to have that kind of energy, it should be exciting.’

After the ‘Streets’ world tour finished in 1992, Jon Oliva quit the road to pursue other projects. Although still an integral part of the writing team behind the band, it seemed like he’d hung up his touring shoes for good. Happily however, a couple of years later he returned to the fold for the ‘Handful Of Rain’ tour. ‘Jon loves the road,’ explains Chris, ‘and after Criss died, I think he realised the importance of making sure that there was at least one Oliva on tour with band. He went on tour playing keyboards and rhythm guitar for ‘Handful Of Rain’, but he wasn’t allowed to appear as a member of the band on ‘Dead Winter Dead’ for business reasons. Now he’s back in the band for everybody to see, but basically he never really left. Even with ‘Edge Of Thorns’ he was still in the studio everyday to produce that record, so he’s never stopped being involved.’

Prior to the release of ‘ The Wake Of Magellan’, the vast majority of the material was conceived and written by Jon, and long time producer Paul O’Neill. This time though, there seems to be more of a band flavour as both Chris, and Al Pitrelli, get a co-writing namecheck. ‘Yeah, I co-wrote about four numbers with Jon and Paul. There’s a little bit more guitarists approach on this album. I mean, Jon’s a really good guitar player, so he’ll write the melodies and music behind it, but he doesn’t necessarily write riffs like a guitar player would. It’s kinda hard to explain, but guitar players, sometimes we like to hear something that sounds really neat, and if you’re just sad there writing music, you tend to concentrate more on the overall song than just the guitar parts, so with us involved this time it became sorta more guitar oriented. We started writing back in September of ’96. Jon, me and Johnny Lee (Middleton) were down forever, and we got into a rehearsal room with the drummer from Dr. Butcher because Savatage’s drummer was busy here in New York, and we just started writing some stuff. Basically that’s where the songs ‘Wake Of Magellan’, ‘Morning Sun’, ‘Complaint In The System’ and ‘Blackjack’ came from, they were all sorta written in the rehearsal room down there. Without the lyrics and melodies of course because that’s where Paul and Jon get involved. We took the tapes up to New York, and Al brought his tapes in, and in January and February we started piecing the pre production tapes together. By the end of June the whole record was finished.’

The core story behind the record is both interesting and thought provoking. As Chris explains, the idea came together after Paul read a couple of articles. ‘Paul is always reading even when we’re working in the studio. I’ll be playing some guitar part and he’s there with his head buried in Time Magazine or something, and I’ll go something like ‘Hey Paul, what did you think of that?’ and he’ll be like ‘Huh? What, roll that back again’, because he’s just burying himself in his reading. He’d read a couple of these articles, in particular the one about Veronica Guerin and the one about the Taiwanese freight ship (both reproduced in the CD booklet accompanying ‘The Wake Of Magellan’), and he just pieced together this whole story behind the story. It’s a fictional story, but based on real life characters, and I think even more so than ‘Dead Winter Dead’, it reads like a book, like a short story. It’s great fun to follow with the music. When Paul first told me the title, I thought it was really cool, it has a kind of retro Heavy Metal feel to it. I think that everybody’s kinda afraid to go near that now, but if you present it in a classy way and represent it well, metal was a very cool thing and I don’t think that it’s anything to be ashamed of. I mean Led Zeppelin were Heavy Metal when they came out, and so were Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, and there’s nothing embarrassing or dated about being compared to those bands.’

On the face of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was harder to put together sixty minutes of music within a single theme, than it was to come up with ten or twelve separate songs, but for Savatage the opposite would seem true. ‘To be honest, I think it’s easier this way,’ confirms Chris, ‘ because after eighteen years, especially for Jon with all these records with the band, it gets difficult to think of ten different little ideas to write about. You know, you write about your car, you write about your girlfriend, you write about drugs, but there’s only so many things you can go through in one lifetime before you start repeating yourself. Then you start doing what we’re doing which is to pick up on mews items and stuff like that, things that bother you, and so you end up with a little theme as opposed to an album full of unrelated ideas. And the easy part about it is that you’re obviously gonna have your intense moments, your sad moments, your happy moments, and that’s easier than having to write ten songs. It’s like, one’s gotta be a ballad, one’s gotta be heavy, I think it should be this, I think it should be that and it kinda gets out of hand. Instead you write music to create a certain feeling, or for a certain part, so you tend to write from your emotions, and then it actually becomes easier. We give all the ideas to Paul and he’ll piece them together, you know, this bit sounds good for that part about the heroin addict and so on, and then if you have a little bit missing it becomes a lot easier to fill in the gaps.’

Having stuck a seemingly rich vein, I asked Chris whether it was a direction he saw the band continuing to pursue with future releases. ‘Yeah, I think it’s kind of getting expected from us now,’ he agrees, ‘which is good because it gives us a direction to aim at. I’m not saying that we wouldn’t turn around one day and do a record that might not be a concept record, we could still do an album with ten different ideas, but then again, I’m sure that Paul would find someway to tie them all together in the end anyway! It’s good to have an identity, especially at a time when, at least here in America, people are saying that Heavy Metal/Heavy Rock is ‘dead’. So, it’s like if you’ve got an identity as a band that’s not doing something that’s already been readily worn out by metal in the past, it kinda makes you feel better about what you’re doing. Which is great, because the new record has sold more than any of the others everywhere else, and it’s not even out here yet. We’ve always been on a constant climb really saleswise, and our gig attendances and fan club membership is growing too. After all this time, to be in a band that hasn’t really experienced any kind of a downswing is great. It may take us a little longer than anybody else, but I really see an exciting time ahead of the band.’

Paul O’Neill is now such an integral part of the band, such a vital cog in the songwriting process, that it would be difficult to see the band working with anyone else, something with which Chris agrees. ‘At this moment, I don’t think I could envisage a time with the band working without Paul. With him so involved in the writing, he’s so pivotal and really he’s the one who keeps pushing us to do things on a different level. As far as the term ‘Producer’ goes, yeah we might be able to go with someone who could get a good drum sound, or someone who could capture a particular guitar or vocal performance, but then again, I don’t think we’d be able to find anybody who could make the band sound like Savatage if Paul wasn’t involved. He’s almost like a member of the band, so if he were to quit working with us, it would have exactly the same effect as one of the other guys leaving.’

Savatage has recently undertaken a rather extensive European tour, but, surprise surprise, there were no UK dates. However, the band does plan to come over when the tour rolls back through Europe later this year. ‘Oh sure we’re definitely planning to come to the UK,’ he offers defensively. ‘Right now, I’m not sure what our plans are, we’ve got a couple of options, we’re not sure whether we’re gonna go back as headliners, or hook up with a festival tour, or maybe get a support slot with a really big band, but ass far as I can tell, each option gives us at least one full week of shows in the UK. One of the main things we discussed last year was if there was anywhere we could go where there are fans we haven’t seen. We’re not really sure what’s happening with Japan right now because they’re in such trouble economically, but we’ve been there with ‘Dead Winter Dead’ and ‘Handful Of Rain’ , so if we don’t get to go back for another year that’s fine. Now we hadn’t toured America with ‘ Dead Winter Dead’ so we’re gonna concentrate our efforts here for a while before we go back to Europe.’

Recently the band has been involved with the ‘Trans Siberian Orchestra’ project, a Christmas thing put together by Paul O’Neill. ‘That all came out of the song ‘Christmas Eve 12/24’ on the ‘Dead Winter Dead’ album,’ laughs Chris. ‘That song got so much airplay in America that it took Atlantic completely by surprise, I mean there was no record in the stores and we were just selling out of everything we had instantly. There’s this radio station here in New York which is like the biggest station in America and the thing went to number one. It was getting requested like crazy, and it was even being played at American Football games during the half time shows. So the next year, Atlantic were like ‘we want to re release that song again, will Savatage do a Christmas album?,’ and were like ‘Yeah you gotta be kiddin’ me! Jon Oliva in a Santa hat, yeah right! No, I don’t think so!’. Anyway, Paul always had this idea to do a project where he could bring more orchestration and symphonic rock in. He knew it was the perfect opportunity to do the TSO thing, so he persuaded us to go in the studios and do it. It’s been released for the last couple of years now, and that single, the Savatage song, is still the one who gets all the attention. So I suppose in a way in a way it’s helped us. It’s sold about 496,000 copies now which is just short of 4,000 copies here in the States, and that’s probably helped us with Atlantic because they could see something with Savatage could appeal to a mass audience. Maybe it’s making them go a little bit more on a limb for us right now.’

The band has one of the biggest web sites on the Internet, which gets around 2,000 hits everyday. ‘It actually started with a couple of college kids,’ admits Chris ‘It’s actually quite funny because we had somebody working for the band in the past who’d get this room mate in college with the computer with was hooked up on the net. Anyway, he used to roadie for the band so he we was able to get hold of quite a lot of rare and collectible stuff. Unbeknown to us, he started selling this through the Internet, but in the end he started cashing the cheques without sending out the merchandise, and we were getting letters to the fan club asking why we weren’t sending this stuff out to the people. So we borrowed a computer and checked out the web, which was when we discovered the actual size of the site. We wound up reimbursing some people who got fucked over, and now we maintain the site. Since the kids graduated from college it would cost them a lot to keep up the web space, so we pay for all that. I think that the web site is brilliant, even through Johnny Lee tricked me! You know we have a laptop that we take on tour with us, and Johnny was running the fan club from Florida, so he had the email address down there. He was getting killed with tons of email, so he said to me ‘Keep the laptop in New York, and maybe you cold help me answer some mail.’ So here I am, the kid in the candy shop, the new guy with the computer, and I start answering all these people. Next thing, I’m getting like thirty to fifty emails a day and he’s not getting anymore because the kids think that I’m answering everybody, so like I’m trapped! But I love it, yeah.’

Finally, after all these years, I wondered what it was that kept the band motivated to keep doing what they’re doing. ‘Oh that’s easy,’ says Chris, ‘the absolute fear of a day job! Ha!’