Jon Oliva

He was producing a sabotage record called Dead Winter Dead.

And And John Oliva's brother, Chris Oliva, was a guitar player in the band who unfortunately passed away.

And they were kind of going through a replacement guitar player, replacement guitar player.

And he got to this Dead Winter Dead record.

There's a lot of folks, a lot of producers, you know, in the shoes that Paul O'Neill was in.

There's a lot of producers or folks or record labels that wouldn't necessarily know what to do with John Oliva.

But it's just like, certainly after Hall of the Mountain King, you know, fans start calling John Mountain King.

So he was and is a character.

And we really hear that with this live record, what that kind of translated to in the live setting.

But it's just like, you know, at the core, I think of something like the, the, the, the relationship that like meatloaf and Jim Steinman had, and it's like, Jim knew what he could do with, you know, meatloaf, you know? So it's like, it seems like with John, similarly, uh, You had a whole run of possibilities with that guy that had to be pretty fascinating to watch how this guy evolves as a character.

Because on paper, John Oliva... should not work.

Like it should just be something that like the record label say, guys, this is great.

Yeah.

Well, and again, you know, it was, we were writing, or Paul, excuse me, Paul had written a soundtrack with Jon Oliva, his partner, you know, the, this, from Savatage.

Here, a movie called Dead Winter Dead, about the war in Sarajevo.

Mm.

So I was getting in there.

I'd, you know, John Oliva be hanging out there or whatever, you know, Keith Collins.

And I met Ben Meyer there.

And actually, the first time I met Mike, was in person was the Morbid Angel Massacre show that was in Brandon, Florida.

Uh, they were going through a lot of problems.

Jon Oliva initially, um, I don't know what happened.

He kind of let, uh, Zach take over on vocals during I think the Edge of Thorns album, like, the mid-'90s.

Um, but Sirens is, like, one of their first albums.

But then he started doing his own thing.

You know, during the 2000s he started doing, like, Dr.

Butcher, he started doing, uh, Jon Oliva's Pain.

Uh, he started doing other projects, and then he was talking about, uh, "Oh yeah, we're gonna do Savatage again," or whatever.