It's Thursday, so lets once again whip this pony we call the ORotW. If you aren't readily faimiliar with a little band called Savatage, then you have clearly been living in a hole, on an asteroid, in a different, galaxy, that hasn't even passed through the milky way, with your fingers in your ears, and your mind closed to the psychic vibrations of the best rock of all time. For the rest of us, rocking out to Twisted Little Sister from the bands debut album Sirens, probably consumes between 78 and 83% of our day. I never understood the lyrics, but from the title we can only assume it might be about the sister of someone who may or may not be twisted, and the celebration of said entwistulation.
Enter todays ORotW spotlight....Jon Oliva. A founding member (HA I totally said member....but there's no time for that now!), of Savatage, Jon took the reigns of the bands Vocals, Keyboard and Pianist upon it's creation in 1981. At this point I have to ask all of you to please suspend your logic and just take what I'm about to say on faith, for it may well be the least believable thing you have ever heard. The gods of musical talent blessed Jon with such prodigious skill that at times he was know to both play his keyboard, and sing...AT THE SAME TIME!!! "But that's not possible The Flying V....You're clearly lying to us the Flying V....You're eating the mushrooms that grow in the back of your closet again The Flying V". Oh really fools....then maybe you would care to explain THIS.?!? Incontrovertible evidence that this man, this supernova of musical talent, did in fact at least once manage to pull off this seemingly magical feat. Can you imagine being in the crowd? "Dude...did he just sing AND play the keyboard"?!? If you could convince yourself that this wasn't some contact high induced hallucination, you would have the most cherished moment of rock history indelibly tattooed in your brain. You could go to that happy place any time you wanted like when your probation officer is totally bugging you for the five zillionth time about whether or not you did your 5 hours of community service at the retirement community for trying to steal beer from the 7-11 by drinking it before leaving the store thereby leaving no evidence of your crime except the beer cans on the floor and the surveillance tape of you drinking them while hiding behind the Street Fighter game that has your initials 5th from the top on the High Score page because of that time you were totally in the zone and no one could beat you and then you tried to bail through the back door when the guy working behind the counter saw you but it turns out there isn't a back door so they locked you in the stock room till the cops got there like 3 days later cause it was a holiday weekend....like then.
So where is Jon now? After the gig in which Jon blew the collective minds of the musical community with his multi musicalism, he had to disappear from society as we know it. A humble musician, Jon knew he was not ready to wear the mantle of glam-rock superstardom that destiny had appointed. OroTW fact checker and head rock sleuth, me, has a acquired a piece of underground rock knowledge that may shed a little more light on this story. The Hutu tribe of central Africa speaks of the existence of a "White Music God". It is alleged that this diety has the notable talent of being able to sing WHILE playing the Uhadi.....sound familiar anyone???
1 comment:
It's the stuff of legends. I'd have to see it to believe it.
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