SAVATAGE TRIVIA
Trivia
"Shotgun Innocence", the last song Criss Oliva recorded, first came out as a bonus track, alongside "Forever After", on the Japanese edition of Edge of Thorns (AMCY-545) on 25 May 1993. In 2001 it was added as a bonus track to the American edition of Poets and Madmen.
Live in Japan, the band's first live album, was recorded at Club Citta' in Kawasaki on 12 November 1994. Alex Skolnick recalled in 2024 that there were four shows in Japan that time and that the last of them became the album, and that the crowd that night was livelier than any he had seen in Japan; on an earlier visit with Testament, the audience had stayed in their seats. The CD came out first in Japan, on 25 January 1995, as Japan Live '94.
The band first played Japan in March 1992: Kawasaki on the 12th, and on the 14th they opened for Yngwie Malmsteen in Tokyo. In 2013 Jon Oliva named that support slot as his fondest memory of his brother: after a cool reception backstage, Criss stretched his short guitar solo on "City Beneath the Surface" to about two minutes.
The band was called Avatar until the debut Sirens was about to go to the pressing plant, when they were warned that a European band of the same name might sue. As Jon Oliva tells it, they wrote AVATAR on a sheet of paper, put a big Kiss-style S at the front on Criss's suggestion to make SAVATAR, and then, at one of the wives' suggestion, dropped the R and added GE. Jon later explained that "sava" came from savage and "tage" was there for something mystical.
The debut Sirens and the EP The Dungeons Are Calling came out of a single session at Morrisound in Tampa. Jon Oliva has recalled cutting fifteen songs in two days on $3,000 put up by Dan Johnson of Par Records; the old official FAQ says two days of recording and a third for the mix. Guitar World notes that Sirens is often named as the first heavy metal album recorded at Morrisound.
The credits of Sirens and The Dungeons Are Calling give the players joke titles instead of instruments: Jon Oliva is "Shrieks of Terror", Criss Oliva "Metalaxe", Keith Collins "The Bottom End" and Steve "Dr. Killdrums" Wacholz "Barbaric Cannon". Hall of the Mountain King did it again in 1987, with Jon as "The Grit" and Criss as "The Crunch".
Badfinger's "Day After Day" ended up on Fight for the Rock (1986) by chance. According to the old official FAQ, the piano Badfinger had used on their hit was in the London studio, and Jon Oliva started playing the song on it. Free's "Wishing Well", on the same album, was chosen because it was the favourite song of someone at the label.
The voice trading lines with Jon Oliva at the end of "Strange Wings" on Hall of the Mountain King is Ray Gillen, later of Badlands. According to the old official FAQ, Gillen, who had just sung with Black Sabbath on tour, was brought in by Paul O'Neill, who knew him, and did it in one take.
The video for "Hall of the Mountain King" was the band's first. Jon Oliva has recalled that it was shot at Howe Caverns from a script by Paul O'Neill. It was played often on MTV's Headbangers Ball, Prog magazine notes, and in 1988 the band guest-hosted the show, as the old official timeline records.
Gutter Ballet (1989) went by other names while it was being made. According to the old official FAQ, the working title was first "Temptation Revelation" and then "Hounds of Zaroff", the latter Steve "Doc" Wacholz's idea. The final title was borrowed from a rock opera Paul O'Neill had written and set aside, the story that became Streets in 1991, as Prog magazine tells it.
The woman on the sleeve of Edge of Thorns is Criss Oliva's wife, Dawn. According to the old official FAQ, it was painted by Gary Smith, who also airbrushed Criss's guitars, and Criss said in 1993 that the picture is about good and evil.
The credits of Handful of Rain list Steve "Doc" Wacholz on drums and Johnny Lee Middleton on bass, but according to the old official FAQ it was Jon Oliva who played the drums, the bass on seven songs and the rhythm guitars. Wacholz took part only in the photo session and the title song's video, and when asked in Minneapolis in October 1994 whether Wacholz had played, Jon answered: "No, he didn't. I did."
"Chance", from Handful of Rain (1994), is about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Kaunas, Lithuania, who in 1940, during the Second World War, went against his government's instructions and kept issuing Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees. Paul O'Neill wrote the words, and the song ends with several vocal lines over one another: O'Neill called that five-part countermelody a first in rock, and Prog magazine describes the voices as Sugihara's warring thoughts. Trans-Siberian Orchestra took the song into its set on its 2018 tour.
Dead Winter Dead (1995) is set in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, and its story includes an old man who plays the cello every night among the ruins. The credits carry Mikhail Evstafiev's photograph of Vedran Smailović, "the Cellist of Sarajevo". Classical music runs through it: "Mozart and Madness" draws on Mozart's Symphony No. 25, and the title song uses passages of Beethoven.
The Wake of Magellan (1997) weaves two real events into its story. One is the murder of Veronica Guerin, the Irish journalist who took on the drug trade, whose name is attached to the title of "Complaint in the System". The other is the case of the Maersk Dubai: according to the band's old official site, when this Taiwanese freighter docked at Halifax, Canada, in May 1996, a Filipino crewman reported that stowaways had been thrown overboard on the captain's orders, and that he had hidden another one until he could hand him over to the Canadian authorities.
Poets and Madmen (2001) tells of teenagers who break into an abandoned asylum and find a patient's file; the patient is Kevin Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer. The old official FAQ says that everything apart from what concerns Carter is fiction. Jon Oliva explained the title by saying that Paul was the poet and he was the madman.
Savatage's albums have charted higher in Germany than at home. On the official German chart The Wake of Magellan (1997) reached number 11 and Poets and Madmen (2001) number 7, and the 2022 vinyl reissues of Gutter Ballet and Streets went to 7 and 9. Their best album placing in the United States is number 116 on the Billboard 200, for Hall of the Mountain King.
"Prelude to Madness" on Hall of the Mountain King (1987) is Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt, played by the band. The old official site says the idea of recording it was Paul O'Neill's and that the band were unsure at first. Prog magazine calls it the band's first instrumental, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra later recorded it again as "The Mountain".
"Hall of the Mountain King" is on the soundtrack of the 2009 game Brütal Legend; it is in the full track list EA Denmark published ahead of the game's release.
Jon Oliva says the piano intro of "Gutter Ballet" came while he was noodling on a covered piano at the Record Plant in New York that turned out to be John Lennon's, with "John and Yoko" scratched inside it. The song itself came last: Jon wrote it after going back to the studio at three in the morning from a performance of The Phantom of the Opera, and said that two weeks later it would never have made the album, as the old official FAQ records.
"Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)" unexpectedly began getting played on American radio over the 1995 holiday season. As Jon Oliva tells it, stations first ignored it as the work of "an '80s metal band", and as a Savatage song it sold about thirty thousand copies; the next year the same recording, released under the name Trans-Siberian Orchestra with a Christmas cover, went to number one on some five hundred stations. Guitar World notes that every Trans-Siberian Orchestra release has gone at least gold, something no Savatage album ever did.
At Wacken Open Air on 30 July 2015 Savatage played their first official concert in thirteen years. After forty-minute sets by Savatage and by Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the two bands played the same songs at the same time on two neighbouring main stages from 11 p.m., for an hour, before more than eighty thousand people.
On 27 July 2026 Savatage played the ancient amphitheatre of Pompeii in Italy with an orchestra of about forty. It was one night of their "Prelude To Madness" European tour, and the members had said beforehand that the show would be filmed and recorded.
Of the 2026 live album Madness Reigns From The Gutter (1990), Johnny Lee Middleton has said he did not know the whole show had been recorded on multitrack; he had thought the Record Plant mobile truck only mixed a radio broadcast. The date of the show can be confirmed from the band's 1990 tour history, which lists the Hollywood show of 29 June with the same nineteen songs in the same order as the album.