1977/78 (Steve age15) The first time I ever saw the Oliva brothers: My guitar player at the time, Tim Grounds, who I played in a band called 'Blaze' and 'Paradox' with, called me up and said there's a band playing at Dunedin High School, and we had to go see this band. So of course, being curious we went. The band was called Tower, never heard of them, or anything about them. From behind the curtain I saw this guitar player peek out and he had like a white "neckerchief" on, kind of an aviator's scarf, and he looked like he was wearing all white. He was doing "the horse race" on his guitar and stuff, and next thing you know the curtain opens and there's this three piece band. The drum riser had to be 8, 10 feet off the ground, it was like... stupid... The guitar player literally blew me away. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know if it was a kid, or a man, all I know was he had hair about down to mid-shoulder, and just blew me away. The drummer sang, which was kind of interesting too, and the bass player looked kind of guido-ish. But it worked. They played stuff from Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak, Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin. It was a lot of cover songs, obviously. After the show, that was basically it. We were just blown away, so we went and cruised. I do remember the next day was Saturday. and WFSO, 57 AM was having a guitar contest, the best guitar player in the Bay. My guitar player, Tim, was a decent guitar player, and so he went to go do this guitar contest. When he came back he said, "Man, you're not gonna believe this! I saw the guitar player for Tower there." And I was like, "Wow that's cool." I didn't think much of it. Later on that afternoon, I get a call from this guy, and he wants me to audition for his band. I'm said, "Well, okay I guess I could audition. I'm playing in a band now and I'm not real happy and I could audition." His name was Jon. I said "What's the name of your band?" He said, "we're called Alien." I said, "well that's a cool name." He said, "we have tons of equipment, we've got a wall of PA, a wall of guitar amps, so equipment's not a problem." I said, "okay, I'll come down and check you out. I'll bring my drums." I told him what I had for drums, and it was semi-impressive for a 15 year old-- a big brand new Ludwig kit, a few cymbals... I asked him where he lived and he said Wall Springs. I go, "well that's weird, I live right up the road from you! I live right out here on Bee Pond road, where the big cow pasture is. I live probably 3/4 of a mile away, if that." I said, "okay well, I'll just see you over there 2 o'clock." So I get there, I had my dad drive me over. They had to open the fence to let my dad pull around the back. I didn't have my driver permit then. We unload the drums, and as I'm unloading them, I see this guitar player from Tower. I'm like, "HEY! You're the guitar player from Tower!" He said, "yeah." I go, "I'm steve." He said, "well, I'm Criss." I said, "Wow! You guys are great man! I saw you guys last night, what a trip!" Jon introduced himself and said, "I was the drummer, but I'm really in this band Alien. Tower is my brother's band with Tony Ciula on the bass, and I was just filling in because they didn't have a drummer." I was just kinda blown away, and like 'wow this is cool'. At the time, Jon was playing keyboards and guitar. He actually played some stuff and I played and I guess I passed the audition, except I remember playing "Rock and Roll" on the ride cymbal instead of the hi hat, so that wasn't a good thing. They said, "Okay man, well let's jam." Jon said, "you don't have to bring a drum set the next time cuz we have a drum set for you here." There was a big what they call an octoplus Ludwig kit, every size tom known to man on this kit, double bass, and I was like 'all right, I'll play this kit.' I went and rehearsed with them a few times, but then there was no rehearsal schedule set up after that, which was kind of weird. I was like hmm... Well, they started rehearsing with another drummer who had a really ugly, green drum kit. He was older and obviously he probably played "Rock and Roll" on the hi hat, unlike me on the ride cymbal. They were going to play at a halloween party. It was going to be a combination of Alien and Tower playing, both bands. I was invited to the party and I was kinda bummed out. But it rained, and so the party really didn't happen that big, and I was kinda laughing inside. After that, the green drum kit guy didn't last too long. Whether he had an attitude, I don't remember who he was or anything like that . In any case, the next thing I kind of really remember is hanging out in 'THE PIT'. That was what we called the rehearsal room. It was about a 20 x 20 chicken coop converted into a jam room, with egg cartons on the wall and stuff. It always leaked, and always had rats. The next thing I can remember is Jon and Criss playing together, with Tony on bass. They brought this new drummer in called Joe Conn. Joe was a little bit older and a lot better drummer than me but I used to go over there to the rehearsals and just watch and learn. In the meantime, I was back with my band again, Paradox. We were gigging, doing our thing. It wasn't as exciting as what was going on with the talent inside THE PIT, because Jon and Criss were just amazing. Their songs back then (which I do have tapes of if I can find them) were amazing. Some of them were like 'City Beneath the Surface', 'Devastation', that we brought into future albums. (I have a song list too from way back then). I used to just go and hang out and watch these guys practice all the time. That was my main focus--just learning the songs, watching them practice. I used to go out and see them play out at the Redeye, out at the Sandpiper, Old Joe's Lounge... I used to go out locally and watch them play all the time. At this time, now, I was probably 16, I used to get into clubs back then because the drinking age was 18. So I'd go and check them out all the time as much as I could. And now they're going under the names Metropolis and Avatar, always kind of mixing up. And they had another show playing for Dunedin High School. Now they were a 4 piece band-- Tony, Joe on drums, Jon, and Criss. Well, all I can remember is like the second or third song in, they're playing "The Immigrant Song" and Jon's fronting the band now with guitar and singing and stuff, and he blows up! A flash pod goes off prematurely, and he blows up and falls to the stage, smoking. And I was kind of laughing, thinking it was part of the show, but it wasn't. You know, the band is still playing, and these roadies are coming out, Jon's dazed and confused, and I was like, "Wow, what a trip." But of course, he was okay, and he finished the show, and no problems except his ears were ringing a little bit. I'm sure the roadies, whoever blew it up, got fired or kicked in the ass.... In the meantime again, I'm going to practices, shows, then my band starts rehearsing in THE PIT too, we play after school, they play at night, because we lost our place to play. So one afternoon, we're stopping for the night, and Jon asks me, "hey, why don't you come back after dinner and play with us?" My drums were there now, and I went back, and they said "you sound great." I'd gotten a lot better, and he wanted to form a band. At this time now, I'm 17... it's 1979 now. We decided to keep the band named Avatar, and we put a show together at Tarpon Springs High School within a week or two of being together. We sold tickets in the cafeteria before the show for a dollar. The show was a sell-out, it's packed. Jon's running late, his rambler was broken down somewhere, or something crazy. We had Tony Oliva doing the lights, and we borrowed a PA system from this guy Reggie Hall, who used to manage a band called BOOT at the time, which was really famous locally. We had a great show, but we're running a little late cuz Jon's late getting there. We get to near the end of the show, we have like one or two songs left, and the guidance counselor comes out on the stage and stops the whole show. He's like, "Stop, stop!!!" waving his hands, he has the lights turned on, and we're still playing the song. It must have been 9 o'clock and we're hitting curfew but instead of letting us finish and telling us from the side of the stage, this idiot gets on the stage. Well, next thing you know, chairs start flying, there's a riot erupting. This was where the riots began. We were infamous for riots. I guess we finished the song, or maybe almost finished it, and I'm walking off the stage. Well, Criss walks to the back of the stage, and there's a curtain there behind the amps. He punches the curtain, not knowing there was a wall behind the curtain, and he breaks two or three fingers. Needless to say, the next day, he's got a cast on his hand and he was pretty aching. Well, that cast actually helped write Sirens. It was part of it. It helped write Sirens because the cast was leaning up against the strings. At this point in the band Jon's playing bass, keyboard and singing, I'm obviously playing drums, and of course Criss is playing guitar. We did some recordings together, in St. Pete. One was called Operator Zero. I don't think anybody has that anymore. Another recording was Elephant Forest. It had 6-10 songs on it, but they're lost tapes. Jon desired to be more of a frontman and not be stuck playing the bass, so here comes the onslaught of bass players: We had this guy named Roach (Steve something). He played in the band for a period of time, and it just didn't work out. Bass player #2--Brian Belenin, who was in Paradox, my band. He played with the band, we did photo shoots, and it just didn't work out, there was an attitude problem, whatever. Then comes Andy Gimelin. He didn't work out, he was like a devil-worshipper. But when we had Andy we picked up the guitar player from Paradox, Pat Dubbs. So now we had a rhythm guitar player and Andy playing bass, Jon singing, and I'm playing drums and Criss is playing guitar, so now we've got a five piece band happening (and I've got pictures!). At this point in time, we had a Halloween party out in Criss and Jon's backyard. They put a sign out by the overpass so everybody would see it--"FREE BEER, ROCK N ROLL, HALLOWEEN. $1." The property was fenced off, and he had 3000 people there in his backyard! We'd constructed this stage and had massive PA, brought in and lights. We had a big bon fire going. We'd only bought 2 kegs of beer for 3000 people. Needless to say the natives are getting restless. The cars are lined up all the way up the street, for a mile. It's amazing how many people were in this backyard, which was probably only 3/4 of an acre. We did the show, it was fun. The cops came probably around 10, 11 o'clock. and said to shut it down. All Jon did was say, "okay, shut it down," and everybody just left. That was it. There were no problems, no stragglers, nothing. Everybody just left. Of course the grass was dead, matted, garbage everywhere and we spent the next week cleaning up. I don't know what happened to the money. Mark Holland probably took off with it. So Pat and Gimelin leave, and at that point in the game, I started getting frustrated, and I left the band. I started playing with a local band called Imagine, who had a record out, and I thought it was a step in the right direction. But there was a re-formation taking place in Avatar, which would be Criss, Bob Boyer (who sang along with Jon), Rich Pagano who played guitar, and Jon on drums. Jon had this Slingerland drumset, 26" drums with copper hardware. It was the most absurd looking set, but it was typical late 70s/early 80s. So now there's this new re-formation taking place of these 5 guys. They start getting managed by a guy by the name of Mark Holland, who was a local cat, kind of in and out of the picture all through this in any case. I started working with Mark Holland and we book the band at this old Kiwanis Hut over near Tarpon Springs Golf Course. We booked the band there, did the fliers and everything, so now I'm more involved with the business side more than the playing side, but we're still all friends all through this. There were no hard feelings that I was doing my thing and they were doing theirs. They did a few shows, but I wasn't really following them that much then. Then something happened, the band dissolved and I came back into the picture, playing drums again. This now was around 1981. It was me, Jon and Criss, the three of us back again like old times. Now we wanted to find a bass player. There was this guy Keith Collins who we were renting a PA system from. He was a guitar player playing in a band called Solar City with a guy named Teddy and this chick singer. We asked him to play bass for us and he agreed. After he started playing bass for us, we started building up a reputation locally, over in Brandon, doing the Brandon Pub, playing all these metal shows out there, playing the Red Eye, Ron's Highway Lounge. We did a show with Stranger which we entitled MudFest. So we started playing out as a four piece with Keith Collins. I think the most infamous show was this YNF show we did in the K-Mart parking lot. Jon came out with a cape, and it was just a ton of fun. That one is documented on video. We had recorded two tracks for a YNF Album--Rock Me and Minus Love. We really pissed off a lot of bands, because hundreds of them sent music in, and we got two tracks, opened both sides. About 1981, we were approached by Dan Johnson of Par Records, who wants to do a record with us. We did this 7 inch called City Beneath the Surface, which was sent out real widely, but very thinly; not a whole lot of copies, maybe 1000, of which there were a handful of limited yellow copies and a the rest were black that are out there. We were getting great reviews, but suddenly we were getting letters from others who said their band's name was Avatar, and they had registered trademarks. So we decided to change the name of the band. Jon, Criss, and Dawn (at the time, Hopkins... I gotta give her credit too, because she was there) came up with the new name, which was a cross between Avatar, drop the R and add the S, and GE to get Savatage, which was also very similar to 'sabotage,' which was the name of a Black Sabbath number that was popular at the time. Par asked us to do a second album. We recorded 10 or 11 songs, and called the album Sirens. Again, we didn't print very many copies. We printed some blue copies of which I think there are only 200 in existence, and the rest of them are black. The album got great reviews and so we're out, still playing the clubs. We were asked to open up for this band called Zebra, which was an Atlantic Records band. It was at the Bayfront Mahaffey Theatre. We went and opened up and it was a lot of fun. There were a lot of people there to see Zebra, as well as to see us. At the end of the show, this guy, in this real thick NY accent says to us, "You guys were great! You were huge! I've got this friend at Atlantic Records who has to hear about you." We had literally just released Sirens, had a couple records with us and gave him one. Randy Jackson from Zebra liked us too, and said something to an A&R rep at Atlantic, and so did the guy with the NY accent (Robert Zemsky). Soon after, we got a call from Jason Flom at Atlantic Records. Flom wanted us to do a show for him, and we agreed. Keith was handling a lot of the business of the band at this time, so he put the show together for a Sunday afternoon out in Brandon. Flom flew in from NY and we picked him up at the airport. He was just blown away at the show. All these kids were headbanging up against the stage and he's never seen that before, and he was just blown away by the band. He went back to NY and tells everybody he knows about this band down in FL called Savatage, and "things were huge." Flom starts thinking about putting some money into doing demo tapes with us. Atlantic flew Rick Derringer down to record Savatage. We went into Morrisound Studios with Rick Derringer and his engineer Tom Edmunds, and before he even listens to the room, he starts changing the EQ of the room before we'd even played a note. The guys at Morrisound, Jim and Tom Morris, start flipping out, they're just losing their minds. During this time period, Rick Derringer almost gets killed because Keith is driving him in his van, and slams on his brakes and Rick almost went through his windshield. During the Derringer sessions, Par Records is getting pissed because we are technically under contract with them. Par agreed to release us from our contract on the grounds that we'd go in and record more songs for Par. We let Atlantic know and that was okay. We went in and recorded Dungeons Are Calling, Midas Knight, Grace of the Witch... about five or six songs for Par records. Atlantic got the tapes that Derringer did, and they were just "God-awful." Tom, Rich and Jason went up to Bearsville Studios in NY to remix the 3 or 4 songs on the tapes. Atlantic called soon after, saying they were going to send some money for us to go in and record. We recorded a second demo tape for Atlantic and they finally, in late '83/early '84, decided to sign us, and Robert Zemsky was to be our manager. We signed a deal with attorney Mark Cristini, which later turned out to be pretty bogus, and we ended up having to get out of the deal. We flew up to NY in June to ink a ten record deal with Atlantic Records. I was 22 years old signing what was kind of like a multi-million dollar deal with one of the biggest record companies in the world, which was very cool. Right before this happened, right before we went to sign the deal (June of '84), Criss and Dawn got married. It was kind of coincidental timing, but, you know... maybe it was love. Who knows? In this same time period, we were talking to Max Norman who had just finished doing an Ozzy Osbourne album. We were trying to get Max Norman to do the album, and finally he committed. When we signed the deal with Atlantic, we knew that Max Norman was going to record us. Later that year, on my birthday of 1984, I found out my dad had cancer. Around the 12th, I told him I had to go to NY and he told me to go and that he'd be all right. We drove up to NY. I had a new set of drums taken out of the recording budget ($100,000, which we thought was a lot of money!). We went to Bearsville Studios, which was right next to Woodstock, a very famous area, with a lot of musicians. We were rehearsing in this house. Two or three days into the rehearsals for the recording of the album, I get a call that my dad has died. That was November 16th. I had to fly back down to FL, during the middle of rehearsals. I saw him buried, then went back up to NY. We continued rehearsals for a few more days, in a barn that had been converted into a rehearsal studio, recording on a 4-track with Max Norman. It was finally time to do the record so we went to Bearsville Studios up at the top of the hill, and we set up in this big room (big enough to play basketball, it was so big!), and we began recording Power of the Night. We were staying at Bearsville along with Keith and Scott Bellis, the guitar tech. All kinds of ghostly things were happening there, which I'm sure Jon will tell you about. In 1985, we decided we needed to be in NY, and we moved into an apartment that belonged to Jon's Uncle Joe or something. We had two apartments, one for Dawn and Criss and Jon and his wife, and the other for me, Scott and Keith. From there, we were 45 minutes to an hour from the city by train. We used to go out and deal with the business of the band on a daily basis, and we also used to fly out and do shows, sporadically, in Detroit, Rochester... Management was starting to get heavy because of Zemsky, so we brought in a team called A&I Management which was Rick Smith and Stephen Machat, who were managing New Edition and John Waite. They were helping Zemsky out, and we signed papers with them, but things weren't working out monetarily and we were getting behind in our rent. We were up there for five or six months, everybody's getting homesick, everybody's having a miserable time, hating NY. We're rehearsing, not playing out a whole lot, so all the sudden, Atlantic comes up with this tour idea for the Summer of '85--Monsters Of the Universe. It was a co-headline bill, which was Savatage, Rogue Male, and Illusion, all under the WEA (WarnerBros, Atlantic, Elektra) umbrella. We rented a big U-Haul RV and had the equipment for all the bands in one truck, and we headed on tour with one production manager named Rick Sales. We spent about two months on the road.playing all these shit- holes, playing all these places. We had good crowds. Illusion, which was a really good band (in fact, their drummer went on to play with Molly Hatchet for a while) always opened the show, and we were switching off with Rogue Male every night. Rogue Male would throw these records out into the crowd, and the kids were throwing the records back on stage. They didn't want any part of Rogue Male, they wanted to see Savatage. Some of the nights we were headlining and other nights we were opening for Rogue Male. Out on the road and touring a lot, we started to fight a lot. Keith Collins, who was a little older than the rest of us, was starting to be irritable. We started to fight amongst ourselves, more with Keith than between me, Jon and Criss. We came off the road and Keith decides to stay and visit this girl in Ohio. The three of us got together and decided, "look, he's got to go. He's just an irritable bastard..." We talked to the management and they said to get rid of him. So when Keith came back, Jon kind of said something to him, but I put the hammer on him. He wasn't a very happy man because he'd just been kicked out of a band he'd now been in for three or four years. He did Sirens with us, Dungeons, and Power of the Night. It was kind of unjust the way we did it. We just kind of brought out the axe, but it was also a necessary situation. Keith had the fan club going, and I underhandedly went and got everybodys addresses and all the fan club information from a girlfriend of his down here while he was up in Ohio visiting another girl. It was a sad thing, and he was pissed. There were problems from there on out, almost to this day, of Keith not liking me, resenting me, thinking we're always out to get him. There were times that he'd threatened my life or my mother's life and I had to file police reports. There was a lot of unjust going on between us, and it was sad because it didn't have to be that way, but he kind of chose it. I'm not really a malicious person, and he controlled his destiny on that when he threatened me. On to page 2