The Jon Oliva Story and a question · Rock Singing Success

The Jon Oliva Story and a question

Jon Oliva is one of the most underrated vocalists in metal. He fronted Savatage, which eventually metamorphosized into the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

Savatage never made any money and they were actually three million dollars in debt at some point during the 1980s. The band was either going to have to quit. They were a classic metal band at a time when glam metal ruled and thrash metal bands were the wild, rebellious upstarts who were going against the grain in a decidedly non-glam style.

Savatage didn't fit into the glam or the thrash scene. They had the songs, but they weren't what was trendy at the time and they never got radio play in the 80s when they were trying to break through.

They ascended as far as opening for Dio and Ronnie James was quite impressed by the way Jon Oliva sang, but Dio was skeptical that Oliva's voice would actually make it through the entire tour.

When Oliva was asked how he sang, he said: "You know how you yell when you're at a football team and then team you like scores a touchdown? That's how I sing."

Despite having no formal training or a solid understanding of what he was doing, the man was so damn talented that he developed into an amazingly versatile singer who had a knack for being able to imitate almost any vocalist.

Paul O'Neill was the man who stepped in when Atlantic Records was going to drop Savatage and said let me produce this band. I have a vision for them.

That was 1987 and the first Savatage album O'Neill produced was Hall Of The Mountain King from that year. Their successive albums showed a distinctly progressive metal direction to their sound, with many songs that transcended the metal sub-genre of rock and at times, went beyond what would even typically qualify as rock. They'd have a totally heavy metal song on an album that would be followed by a song that sounded like it belonged in a Broadway musical.

With each album, Savatage began to get closer to the project that Paul O'Neill had in mind for them - to turn them into the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. He was gradually getting that band acclimated to playing and writing in that style.

O'Neill's plan worked and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) was an overwhelming success with tours that often make it into the year's top ten highest grossing tours.

I've always found it odd that tours get rated by "highest-grossing:, when the fact of the matter is that if you gross $200 million and you costs are $200 million, you didn't actually make any money! You just broke even. TSO's shows are notoriously expensive to produce, as they rely on a tremendous amount of lights, pyro and special effects. So, how much do they actually make on one of these "highest grossing" tours? Nobody in the general public knows because when it comes to reporting the business side of the rock music business, coverage of the business is practically in the stone age.

There has never been anything like a "Wall Street Journal for the rock music business." It's bizarre that such a fascinating business hasn't inspired anybody to decide: "Hey, I see an opportunity here. There's nobody who covers the actual business of the rock music business. I see a market that isn't being served"!

That's how you get trained to think when you earn a Marketing degree.

If Oliva had chosen to go the thrash metal route in the early 80s when thrash was the "next big thing", it's my contention that he'd have gone down in history as the most gifted thrash metal singer ever.

His range was exceptional. He begins the song City Beneath The Surface with a piercing G5, at 1:18 into the video I linked and then at at 1:30 he does something even more impressive: He hits a D5 with heavy grit at 1:30 into the video on the word "Hi."

I didn't know it was possible to make a D5 sound so thick with so much grit! I've decided that he'd doing one of two ways:

Hardcore Bark

False Fold Scream

I'm guessing it might be a false fold scream because even as aggressive as Hardcore Bark is, to the best of my knowledge, nobody can do it even close to D5.

The D5 is not a fry scream because it has to much of a low, gritty sound and doesn't have the harmonics that get produced in a fry scream. Think of how Chester Bennington sounded when he did a fry scream and then listen to Oliva singing that D5 and you will hear far, far more bass in the sound then Chester ever got. Chester's screams, while highly distorted, never had that low, rumbling sound you get form heavy false fold engagement like you hear in Jon Oliva's grit. Oliva has a much more full, chesty sound than Bennington, who was never known for having a particularly chesty sound.

I'm including a live version from a 1990 Savatage show at The Ritz in NYC to show that Jon did it live as well as on the studio album. Jon Oliva was that rare type of vocalist who could really back up what he'd recorded in the studio when he had to perform it live. In some ways, his live versions are better!

In the second video I linked, the live version, the G5 takes place at 1:28 and the D5 takes place at 1:39. In the live version, it becomes clear that he is screaming the D5. I mean, if you don't call that a scream, then I don't what would qualify!

The thing is, Draven almost decided to put Hardcore Bark in the scream section of his excellent Extreme Singing course. He said that it could have qualified as a scream, but he put it in the grit section instead because you hear so much of the fundamental note, whereas, in most screams, the false fold action obscures the true fold engagement to where you hear very little or sometimes nothing that is produced by the true folds.

The studio version of the D5 has that phenomenon where the true folds become somewhat obscured and you don't hear that piercing sound of a typical D5 because the sound is so thick that it an illusion takes place where you think you're hearing a lower note than you really are and that's a result of the harmonics produced by the tremendous amount of false engagement, which is what prompted me to describe it as being possibly a false cord scream.

Matter of fact, the studio version sounds more like a false fold scream to me, while the live version sounds probably more like hardcore bark, but still, even on the live version, the amount of distortion on a note as high as a D5 is pretty incredible, especially when you consider that Savatage was not considered "extreme metal." They were a classic metal band that just happened to have such a gifted lead vocalist that he was able to intuitively do things that were ahead of his time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CggE9BJoTI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQIQwJehvpg

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