From: Aardschok America Aug./Sept. 1987
Author: Leece Lee
AA: "Tell me what you guys are doing right now?"
J.O.: "It's pretty heavy stuff. I'm sure a lot of people are going to like that and maybe some others won't. But it's coming out so that's what we're going to do. We're also going to hit the road kind of early this year, right after we're done with the album. We're going everywhere, all 50 states, Canada, Puerto Rico and go back overseas again. We're also going to do some festivals this year. So things are going to be pretty hapenning. I like playing outdoors anyway. There's more of a paranoid feeling outdoors. Yeah, I like paranoia. It keeps people on their toes, doesn't it? It's evident in the music. A lot of our music is very paranoid. Uncertainty, questions."
AA: "I heard that the new stuff is really wild."
J.O.: "It's insane. I've got some titles if you want some."
AA: "Yeah, yeah."
J.O.: "The heaviest SAVATAGE song ever done is on this album. It's called 'Beyond the Doors of the Dark' and it's like 'Sirens' and 'Dungeons Are Calling' and 'Power of the Night' but far more intense. It's definitely sick. That's my personal favorite. 'White Witch,' that's a fast one, similar to 'Rage' on the first album. Then there's 'Devastion' which is the answer to the question on the first album Sirens, which is 'What will 2000 bring?' And this is what it brings. It's a real heavy tune. It's a good one. There's also 'Twenty-Four Hours Ago' which is like ZEPEPELIN/SABBATHish, real heavy. Lots of good stuff. Not anything really commercial or like what you would say is commercial rock. There's a ballad called 'This Is Where You Should Be.' It's heavier than 'In the Dream' which was on Power of the Night. It's about travelling in your dreams and meeting this weird chick that's in you dreams everytime you go to sleep. Sort of like 'Dreamscape' or 'Nightmare on Elm Street' except it's not vicious. It's more sexual."
A.A.: "One of my favorite works that you guys have done is 'Hyde' because it's just wicked sounding."
J.O.: "That's one of my favorites also. On this album, like I was telling you, 'Beyond the Doors of the Dark' will just flip you out, it's that over the top. It's so much more intense than 'Hyde,' it's unbelievable."
AA: "Did you pull any songs out of the past for this?"
J.O.: "No, they're all new material. All fresh, brand new. As a matter of fact, half the album we just wrote less than two months ago, right before we left. Actually we were coming up here with only half the material and were going to write the rest of it when we got here and we wrote it the last week before we left to come to New York to record. We hit a hot streak and it just started coming out."
AA: "Some wild vocal stuff?
J.O.: "Yeah, this is definitely a sick one. I'm really proud of this one. This stuff is really out there."
AA: "Did you do anything different than you've done in the past as far as your own vocals?"
J.O.: "I think I've taken a little bit more of an experimental approach in delivery as far as trying to create a picture. Like having an attitude about each song and trying to get that across vocally to where when you're listening to it you can almost see the picture of what this person's dealing with. It's difficult. It takes a lot of weird things. You have to be really in touch with yourself and be able to let yourself go but then I do a lot of weird things when I cut vocal tracks. I have all the lights off and candles burning all over the place in a circle or on podiums and stuff. Sometimes I'll make the room real cold so it's like a dungeon almost if I want that effect of being a little bit on edge. Sometimes I'll have it really hot with heaters brought in if I want the sound of being on stage sweaty and raw. So I do a lot of weird things like that. Just weird things. For different songs we'll try to set a different mood in the room. Because if you're not in the right frame of mind, then it's going to come across as being uninteresting."
AA: "Who does the keyboard work?"
J.O.: "I do some, play piano and everything. We hired a friend of ours, Bob Kinkle to come in and play some of the keyboard parts, some of the orchestration parts. He's worked out really well, he's a good friend. We all have our little quirks. Steve never does any overdubs since he's the drummer. And Johnny rarely does overdubs because they lay all their parts down on the basic tracks, but Criss does some weird things too sometimes. He likes to have a lot of people around. Like he'll play in the control room right behind the board. So it's weird. I don't mind either having people watching sometimes. But a lot of people get weirded out because I do a lot of weird shit when I'm back in there."
AA.: "Is there some wild guitar stuff to be expected on this album?"
J.O.: "This is really Criss's album, I think, as far as guitar playing. Of all the records we've done, I think this album really features Criss's guitar playing the best of any. The intro to the title track 'Hall of the Mountain King' is a battle between Criss and a hundred piece orchestra just racing through. It's a minute and a half long of just trading licks and licks and Criss really just gets to - he sets a mood. It's a big guitar piece. They set up the story of the song itself 'Hall of the Mountain King' which is also a very heavy song sort of in the Sirens vein. We're telling a story about this Mountain King, this legend. It's based on an opera written back in the early 1400s, 1500s something like that. So we just went ahead and we're doing our own story like we did with 'Sirens.' It's like us telling the story ourselves of what we envision the story to be."
AA: "Then who or what does the Mountain King represent?"
J.O.: "He was this big mighty king, far, far away in a land caught between time and space, which is a line from the song. The Books of Life - If you've ever heard of the Books of Life, supposedly far, far away many, many miles away, this mountian has this giant hall in it and inside the Books of Life are kept: The books are of every single human person that lives, your whole life and when you lived and when you died. How many times you've lived before and how many times you're going to live again. The Mountain King is the guardian of these books. The story we're telling is about a little invader type of guy who is just a curious guy on what you might call a mountain hike some long time ago. It's about how he stumbles upon this cave. The story describes this hall and about the Mountain King and what he's like. He's half human and half beast. It's really intense. I think you'll love it."
AA: "Obviously the record company isn't saying let's produce hits."
J.O.: "They never did though. People could never understand the fact that the record we did last year was a departure for us from the sound that people were accustomed to hearing. For us, we were together a lot longer than people know. They know us from when Sirens came out, which was '83, but three of us were together since '79. That's a long time of writing nothing but heavy, heavy, heavy rock. We started getting stale writing it, so we altered our style a little bit for an album and went in a couple of different directions, a couple of experiments on a few songs. I still think Fight for the Rock was basically a hard rock album, I don't think we drifted too far. A lot of people just took it the wrong way. With this record, obviously some of the people who like the lighter stuff aren't going to like this one as much as the last one, but we're just who we are, we write what we write, what comes out comes out."
AA: "I was just a little curious what sort of reaction you've gotten from the record company?"
J.O.: "Very positive. They like the material very much. They think it's very heavy but it's very strong. There's uniqueness about it and the way that we're doing it that's going to differentiate it from any of the other heavy metal albums that have come out over the past year or are going to come out over the next 6-8 months. It's our sound and we feel that we're working on developing a new type of sound for that music to go to. So we'll see what happens."
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