Chris Caffery says a Jon Oliva interview sparked Savatage‘s return, and that the band never should have stopped playing.
Chris Caffery has traced Savatage‘s comeback back to a single conversation his bandmate gave to a magazine, and says the group should never have stepped away from the stage in the first place. The guitarist, who has spent years fielding questions about whether the band would ever play again, told Blabbermouth‘s Clay Marshall that the momentum built from a remark Jon Oliva made without any plan behind it.
Caffery said he had always been ready to go, and that the demand became obvious overnight once Oliva spoke publicly about wanting to make one more record.
“I always wanted to do it. I wouldn’t have stopped if it was my decision only. Whenever anybody asked me about it, my only answer was, ‘I am hoping, and if it happens, I’ll be there.’ Basically what happened was [Jon] Oliva did an interview with Rock Hard magazine in Greece. He opened up about wanting to do one last Savatage record and this and that. The next day, my messages, my DMs, my e-mail, everything is like, ‘Savatage is doing another record? Oh my God, that’s great news!’ I was like, ‘We are?’ It was one of those things where [Jon] was giving, like, his honest wish list about what he wanted to happen. But the thing that happened from that was all those festivals, they wanted Savatage back so bad, and they knew that our following was actually growing in kind of the way that Pantera‘s did even 20 years after the Abbotts [Darrell and Vinnie Paul] had passed. Younger kids that were 16 [who] were not alive [when the band was previously active] wanted to see this band that they’d been listening to. It was like, ‘Holy s**t, we’re gonna play.'”
He went on: “I didn’t want another band. I never tried to join another band. I helped out Doro and I helped out Metal Church and I did Spirits Of Fire, but eventually, that became less fun than my solo records, and I kind of just wandered away into the sunset on that. I was like, ‘All right, my band is back’ — and I’m not saying ‘my band’ like Savatage is my band, but when you have a band that next year, it’ll be 40 years since I started playing in, it’s like, I always think of Savatage as my band, you know? You don’t say it as if you own the band, but that’s your band. TSO, I’ve been in since day one, but Savatage had a little bit more of a personal connection to me, because of the music style and the history and how emotionally connected I was with that band throughout the years, so it was, like, the best news I’d ever heard.”
The band returned on 19 April 2025 at the Monsters Of Rock festival at Allianz Parque in São Paulo, their first show since Wacken Open Air in 2015 and their first proper headline run since live work stopped in 2002. Caffery described the moment it started.
He said: “I was nervous until I got onstage. It just felt right, and like it was the place we were supposed to be. It was the place that we never should have left, but, you know, things happen. Unfortunately, Jon‘s health wasn’t there to marry the occasion at that particular time, but Jon was the one that spearheaded everything, and he put the setlist together and worked with us really closely on it. It’s still Jon‘s band. Kind of the same thing that Pantera was doing for the Abbotts, we were doing for the Olivas.”
Oliva has not toured since fracturing his T7 vertebra in three places in a 2023 fall, an injury compounded by diagnoses of multiple sclerosis and Ménière’s disease. He appeared on screen during “Believe” at the São Paulo show. The touring lineup is Caffery and Al Pitrelli on guitars, Zak Stevens on vocals, Johnny Lee Middleton on bass and Jeff Plate on drums, with Paulo Cuevas and Shawn McNair handling keyboards.
Caffery pushed back at the theory that Trans-Siberian Orchestra had crowded Savatage out, and pointed instead to the death of producer and lyricist Paul O’Neill in April 2017.
“One thing that would always get on my nerves — people were like, ‘They’ve got TSO. They don’t want to do Savatage.’ It’s not true,” he continued. “We were just about there, and then [longtime producer and lyricist Paul] O’Neill passed. Then COVID happened — not like it would have happened [during] the COVID year, but we were getting TSO back to the point where we were emotionally and mentally able to get up there and represent Paul. That was difficult, so we weren’t thinking about Savatage at that point in time. We were just like, ‘What the hell are we gonna do? We lost our guy.’ He was our mentor. He was everything — the visionary and the one who put it all together. We waited for the O’Neill family to give their blessing, but there was never a time where we hadn’t talked about it. It just never happened — we just never really got there.”
Savatage played 19 European dates this summer, including a Pompeii show recorded for a live album. That runs alongside the belated release of Madness Reigns From The Gutter (1990), a Hollywood concert from the Gutter Ballet tour that sat unreleased for 36 years before entering the German chart at number 14 this summer.
Asked what follows, Caffery deferred to Oliva while listing the places he wants to reach.
“I’ve gotten to that point where I let Jon say what Jon wants to say, and from there, I will be like, ‘Oh, okay, great. That’s what’s going on.’ For now, look at it this way — we played Chile and Argentina last year. We’d never played there before. Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland — we’d never played there before [this year]. I’d love to go and play every single city in America that we used to play, but I’d also love to go play Australia, New Zealand, the Far East. [There are] so many places that we’ve never done a show,” he concluded.
