On his way to tour with Doro in Europe, Chris Caffery, guitarist for Savatage, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and of course his own amazing solo albums, took some time out to talk with us here at the Steel Mill.
Chris, I have to say, I’ve found you very humble and down-to-earth. You don’t seem really bothered about putting on this big image. You have this wealth of material that you put out musically and you’re overflowing with all this musical energy!
Chris: I don’t believe the hype. I don’t consider myself any different than anybody else in the audience other than the fact I have a different job than them. I don’t get that. I’m pretty humble and pretty shy, I’m just me. I’m pretty honest. People get a chance to see me. I like to entertain, I like to create, I like making mistakes, doing something that may not be perfect. I think you’re truly not doing art if you don’t do that.
Kid Rock would come watch TSO. We met in our travels, and he would come see us when we played. He watched us come play the Palace in Detroit in his hometown and he asked me to go out to dinner with him after the show and he told me that night that I was one of the best arena front men he’s seen in his life. He told me I don’t do an easy job and that I did it really well. I thought that was one of the best compliments I ever had.
I thoroughly enjoyed your YouTube channel. It was really interesting. It was really fun to watch you coming on and talking about your projects and listening to you play.
Chris: It’s so funny, there’s so many different things! I’ve really not put that much effort into my YouTube channel, and I know I need to do more, it’s just that it’s so hard because all these things are different and all of them have different things that you can do as far as time and stuff like that, what you can add and what you cant add. YouTube has gotten so much bigger as time goes but now people are doing the Tik Tok thing. It’s just so freaking confusing!
I thought it was pretty interesting about the hats. Every time I saw you in a video you always had a disguise. Is that just you being relaxed or are they disguises?
Chris: You know what’s funny? I’m not a huge fan of photos and I’m not a huge fan of selfies and that whole world so I kind of do hide behind them especially as I get older. I think where it kind of started was my friend took me one time to see Buckethead play and I just thought it was so funny because the guy had the bucket on his head. I was in my studio; it was wintertime, and I had a hat with a pom pom on it. I just covered my eyes and then I became Pom Pom head. That’s kind of where that was born out of, and people really liked it, so I just did it again because I thought it was really funny. But that’s kind of where that one was born was in the fact that there was a Buckethead and I was Pom Pom head.
Speaking of social media, where can everybody find you on social media? Do you have a website?
Chris: I have chriscaffery.com. My webmaster had actually passed away and his twin brother has been helping me with mine, but his twin brother has still not really gotten over the situation with his brother. His life is fine, but it always bothers him when he goes back and sees what we do and he thinks of his brother. I think my site has gone slow as far as developing further with that, so I run my stores through there. I do a lot of sea glass art and I sell some of my own personal merchandise like cd’s, shirts, and stuff like that through there.
On chriscaffery.com there’s a store and if you go to where the Metalphant stuff is , where that little elephant is, that’s where my sea glass art is. Then my other stuff is under Chris Caffery. Then I have Chris Caffery Music on Facebook. I have Chris Caffery Official on Instagram and I have my own Christopher Caffery that’s on Facebook so I just kind of bounce around all of them, and people can find me if you’re looking.
You can also find me at https://linktr.ee/chriscaffery?utm_source
Let’s talk about your new single “May Day” that came out on May 1. Who released it? What label?
Chris: The label that I did my last two solo records with. It’s called MetalVille Records. They’re out of Germany. I have some videos and things so I’m excited about that. I really didn’t have the actual time or energy at the moment to want to do an entire new record so when I wrote this song, I finished it and just decided I wanted to get it out there. I really like it. It’s a pretty unique piece of music. It goes through a lot of different moods, my voice timbers, and my styles of writing so it’s a pretty unique piece of music that I’m pretty happy about. That’s why I just wanted to release it as a single. I thought that was something that was pretty unique, to get a song out on May Day that was called “May Day”. I don’t think anyone has ever done that, so I wanted to try something different.
So this is something that isn’t a part of any other solo album or future solo album?
Chris: No, its just an individual single. Brian Tichy played drums on it, who I’ve used on my last couple of solo records. Sean McNabb plays the bass on it. It was a lot of fun to create this song. I’m pretty excited about it. It’s a cool song. I never know what to expect nowadays with any of that stuff. I just want people to hear my song.
I just want to say I thoroughly enjoyed your solo music. I really thought Doctor Butcher was… Wow!. Out of the solo albums that you’ve done my favorite is “W.A.R.P.E.D.” It’s really dark and heavy. It was war-themed, about the Iraq War right?
Chris: Yeah, that was written at that point in time. I happen to agree with you. I really enjoyed that record and actually one of my managers that I worked with for a very long time, he loved that record to the point where he wanted me to get out there and tour that in the format that TSO did because the whole story line inside of it was very powerful too.
It’s a pretty unique piece and every song basically has a different character that sings each song. If you listen through and read it, the song “Home Is Where The Hell Is”, is sung by the Devil. In “God Damn War”, the song is sung by War itself. In “Edge Of Darkness” the missiles are singing. The “Beat Me, You’ll Never Beat Me” song is Mother Earth talking about what human beings do at the end of the day. That’s the boss and we’re seeing more and more of that lately with the way the weather is changing and stuff. She’s starting to spank us for being irresponsible. That whole record goes through in that way where every song is kind of sung by a different character.
Listening to your work with Savatage, my favorite was “Poets And Madmen”. My favorite TSO-album you’ve done is “Beethoven’s Last Night”. When you make music for Savatage and TSO, is there a certain structure that you have to follow? Is somebody in charge or do you all work together?’
Chris: With Savatage, we were all writing songs. So, the band, we would all write…myself, Jon Oliva, Al Pitrelli. We would all get together and we would write music. Paul O’Neill, our producer, wrote a majority of the lyrics for these songs. There’s always a little formula you have when you think “ok we need a ballad, we need a fast song, we need a slow song, we need a song that has a lot of harmony”, so you always look to piece those things together.
I think we all just wrote little things. “Poets And Madmen” was a record that I did a lot of music on. It was one of the few Savatage records that I did a tremendous amount of music writing on. I think I wrote on eight of the songs on that record and some of the ones like “Drive” and “Awaken”, the music was completely mine. So, it was like the first time where I had a chance to have actual music pieces that were all mine. The lyrics and melodies, those were Paul and Jon’s. With the music, I had a chance to actually have big pieces on that record and that was fun.
With TSO, that was Paul O’Neill’s baby, so he would write the stories, the songs with Jon and Al. He would look for things and I just had a couple that he really liked, like “Father, Son & Holy Ghost” and then “The Dark”. With those, I just had some stuff that Paul was like “hey I’d love to use this on a TSO record, can you not use it on something else?” That’s kind of how those songs got used for that. They just wound up being the ones that fit the pieces he was looking for, for TSO.
“Poets And Madmen” to me was a little bit heavier than the other Savatage albums that you were on so that explains it for me because your solo albums are so much heavier. I feel you’re just able to let it all out when you’re making the music for your own solo albums, you don’t have to do things a certain way. You can just do whatever you want, and it really shows. Also, with your solo albums I hear so many different sounds, like you’re exploring all different elements of the musical spectrum. I’m hearing maybe hints and little tinges of thrash, maybe some eighties style hair metal, some rock. Maybe TSO and Savatage have signature sounds. I don’t really hear a signature sound in your solo albums. Maybe the fact that there is no signature sound IS your signature sound! It’s kind of like you’re freestyle, this big kaleidoscope of different styles and sounds.
Chris: Ha ha, that’s more like what it is with my solo records. I wanted to do all the things, you know, instead of looking for things to be on other projects or other bands I was in. I was just filling up both holes myself. As far as where you mentioned something like thrash…when I was a little kid it was when the birth of the whole thrash thing was going on. A lot of the same roots that were in people like Dave Mustaine, James Hetfield, Scott Ian, and people like that, were in me. We were all learning how to play guitar at the same time so I had all those roots in myself as far as how I may have written.
Then of course, I was a child of the eighties scene so it’s like I can naturally write that music just basically without even having to listen for it out of what’s inside myself. I grew up listening to the Beatles and Black Sabbath, then I was a kid in the eighties, and it was kind of one of these things where they all combine together. I think that’s what you hear in my solo stuff; the Queen and Beatles-like harmonies, the heavier stuff of the writing of Sabbath and the playing of Randy Rhoads and that kind of thing.
The “Pins And Needles” -record was really experimental. The producer I worked with on that, was the guy who engineered “W.A.R.P.E.D” and “Faces” and he was like “let’s try to do something different with them”. That record was actually really cool. Every individual song has a huge amount of production amongst itself. When that came out it just went over everybody’s heads and people were like “what are you doing?” And I’m like “just trying to be an artist that what I’m doing”. Some of those songs like “Walls” and “The Time”, they’re albums within a song. I think in time my solo records keep getting played and people keep listening and saying “wow I never knew anything about this”.
“Pins And Needles” is still good! It’s still great, it’s amazing. It’s chaotic in a good way, you can hear the good chaos. “The Jester’s Court” is great, it’s nice and heavy. I love that too. “Music Man” is good. I thought I heard hints of eighties hair metal. “Mold” has hints of thrash or heavy rock but one thing I noticed on your solo albums was some of them have your likeness. Is that you on the cover of them?
Chris: Most of them are images of me. With “The Jester’s Court”, a Russian artist did all the interior artwork of that record. I got a hold of him, and we became good friends. Unfortunately, the war with Ukraine and Russia has really messed up the way you’re able to communicate with people in the country nowadays. We don’t speak the same language. He was in a pretty remote area in Russia and the communication with the United States is not the same as it was when I was first talking to him.
Have you ever done tours or shows for your solo albums?
Chris: Yeah, actually in the first few years of the records being out I toured Europe a couple of times and I toured US a couple of times. It just got to be a little bit draining and it was just one of these things where it was a little hard for me because festivals wanted to hire me, but they wanted Savatage music. Some of them were bringing in Jon Oliva’s Pain and Zak Stevens’ Circle II Circle and those guys were doing tremendously large amounts of Savatage songs in their solo set and I was just kind of doing my solo music and maybe one or two Savatage songs. I never really wanted to weigh in on it, so the festival offers were not being thrown to me because of that reason.
Were you on the road in ’86 for Savatage?
Chris: Yeah, it started with Savatage and other things but for the most part it was Savatage and TSO. That was what took over my life at that point. You know, I started working with Paul O’Neill when I was 18 years old actually. I was playing in a band called Heaven that was on Columbia Records that he produced. Then he produced Savatage and he kind of made their sound bigger in the studio. He was like “I need to add another guitar player to the band” so that position was kind of added for me. It was to help Paul and the band meet the sound he wanted in the studio with the record “Hall Of The Mountain King”. Then from there everything just kind of went down in history. I’ve been pretty active on the road since then.
We can’t talk to you without talking about TSO or Savatage. Can we talk about Criss (Oliva) for a minute?
Chris: I always like talking about him. He was very close to me, and he actually created a position in his band for me. When I wound up on the very first Savatage tour he wasn’t thrilled that Paul wanted another guitar player in the band; but me, the Oliva brothers and the Savatage band got along very well. We were very similar in a lot of ways as people besides being musicians, so they created that position in that band for me. Savatage was something very special and when I left working with Criss at that time I was really close to getting back into the band or working with him.
Criss used to talk about how he would have fun working with his brother and me in Doctor Butcher as well as Savatage. When they found Zak, Criss was able to focus on doing “Edge Of Thorns”. Before then, I was living down in Florida with Jon and we talked a lot. It was one of those things where we were always kind of close. Savatage was Savatage and he wanted to continue it. They got Zak and that made a big difference in what that band did at that period of time with “Edge Of Thorns” and that’s how that had gone.
I almost came back into the band on that “Edge Of Thorns” -tour. Criss wanted me to join the band at that time and I was like “I’m not going to leave Jon” so I stayed with Jon in Doctor Butcher. There were a few different reasons why. That only went to one album, but that record was a really special metal album. That Doctor Butcher -album is probably one of the most respected heavy metal albums in the history of metal – not just my catalog.
I want to get it straight about what record that we’re talking about here. I really, really liked that Doctor Butcher -record. It sounds completely unique and different from any of the music I’ve heard from you, even your solo albums. It’s its own entity.
Chris: It was tongue and cheek, really heavy metal with a sense of humor and attitude and it was something I think had we stuck with it could have been really, really big. We were doing the Alice Cooper style stage stuff; it was even before Marilyn Manson and people like that had came out of Florida. It was like we were all kind of lurking at the same time. That’s kind of what we wanted to do, we wanted to have the crazy stage show and the tongue and cheek sense of humor, and the metal tunes. It had its own thing.
We did the one record like I said for a few different reasons. Criss had died and like me, Jon wasn’t working with his brother the last couple years his brother was alive. With the touring, with “Edge Of Thorns”, he worked with him but didn’t travel. It hit us both pretty hard when Criss died so Jon escaped into the studio and did “Handful Of Rain” and we finished the Butcher record. He went out onto the “Handful Of Rain” -tour and then it just became one of these things where we decided to go back to Savatage together. I don’t like to go into too many things from the past, but we definitely had something that was pretty unique and very special and I do think that if Butcher had its proper chance at that time it could have been something that was very big.
How did you come up with the Doctor Butcher name? I love the whole Doctor Butcher thing!
Chris: I wanted to use that name because I was a big horror movie fan and there was a bad horror movie called Doctor Butcher MD so that’s where that came from. It’s a bad horror movie lol. When I left Savatage to work with my brother I was actually doing something that was called Witch Doctor. I just kind of kept the Doctor and turned it into Doctor Butcher.
When we did the stage show we had one of Jon’s friends, this guy who’s like six foot ten, come out on stage with a cleaver chasing Jon. We started the show with a buffet table on stage. There was a silver tray. The butcher came out and lifted the tray and Jon’s head was there. He busted out of the table; it was all supposed to be fun. He tied Jon to the electric chair for the song.
So you guys actually did shows because I’ve never heard of Doctor Butcher live gigs?
Chris: We did a couple of shows in Florida. We were trying to work on getting things together and even had a deal with Atlantic Records for the project at the time. Then we had a decision between Savatage and Doctor Butcher. They chose Savatage at the time over us and we had to sit there and re-evaluate where we were going business wise. It was a unique time in my life, and I was still only 22-23 years old. I was still trying to figure out what to do as a human being, never mind in the music business so there was just a lot going on at that point in time. It was definitely a really cool record.
What’s “The Good, The Bad, And The Butchered”?
Chris: That was supposed to be a follow up that never happened. There was supposed to be a second record. The “Reach Out And Torment Again” -song I had on the “Pins And Needles” -album – that was supposed to be on the second Doctor Butcher -record. “Iraq Attack” was actually one of the first songs me and Jon wrote for Butcher, so was “Inspector Highway”. I released that as a bonus track on the Doctor Butcher releases but “Iraq Attack” on my “W.A.R.P.E.D” -record, that Jon was singing on, was originally a Butcher song.
Are the other songs on “The Good, The Bad, And The Butchered” ever going to see the light of day?
Chris: Me and Jon actually talked about doing another Butcher record and I worked on re-recording the very first Butcher-song that we ever wrote which is called “Live Die Kill”. I’ve recorded some of that so yeah there’s a lot of stuff around. We had a song called “Psycho” that nobody’s heard and there were little live recordings we had of stuff like a song called “A Living Hell”. Part of the music from that song ended up in the Savatage-song “Taunting Cobras”. Hopefully one day.
It was amazing! So, wait a minute…Criss wasn’t a part of Doctor Butcher then right?
Chris: No. He was around when we were doing it and listening to what we were doing. Savatage had not found Zak yet. Criss had heard the way Jon was sounding on these Butcher demos and he thought it would be fun to do it with us. It was something we added in daily chat. I would see Criss every day at that time. I was down in Florida staying with his brother at the time, so I was a lot closer to the Oliva family that I think a lot of people realize. I saw them almost every day of my life even when I wasn’t in the band, so I just became really close to all of them.
That was something we talked about but like I said when they found Zak they had a good formula with that for him with “Edge Of Thorns”. That was actually becoming very successful before the accident that took Criss’s life, so Savatage was kind of going to a new audience with Zak. It was going to the hair metal audience a little. Everything kind of hit a really bad wall when Criss was killed. They had a lot of success on the radio with the song “Edge Of Thorns” and things were just really starting to build with them in a different way.
If you could say something to Criss right now what would you say to him?
Chris: If anything, I would just thank him. He gave me an opportunity to be a part of something that was very special and as time goes on, I think people realize that, more and more, Savatage is extremely unique and it’s a band that I’m really proud to have been a part of its history. Past the initial place I had in that band, where Paul wanted me to go on the road and create a studio sound live, my position in that band and Savatage even having a second guitar player, was created by him for me, for nobody else. They wouldn’t have had anybody else I don’t think ever go into that band. We liked each other, we were close friends, and he was basically a brother to me. I miss the guy and thank him for that. I wish our course was different, that he was still around.
What would you be doing if he were still here?
Chris: I think Savatage would probably be big as Metallica to be honest. As long as we all managed to stay alive, I think Savatage could have been stadium big. Even with the “Dead Winter Dead” band and without Criss, we still had something with Paul’s lyrics and the band’s music that was bringing us to a level that was festival headlining in a lot of these other countries around the world.
I think if Criss was alive that there was a chance that could have happened everywhere. Savatage may have wound up being one of the all-time biggest metal bands if he managed to still be a part. We came up with that formula and I think he would be intimidating guitar players all over the planet because he was that good. He was like Dimebag (Darrell), those people that only come around so often, so I think the band would have gotten very, very popular if he managed to not have that unfortunate accident.
Is Savatage going to do another album? What’s going on with all that?
Chris: We’ve been talking about doing one since we did the last one. I’m always there to do a Savatage record if it happens. I was trading some music with Jon in the last couple years, and I know that Jon had just done some interviews. I’m pleading the fifth on everything and saying, “look I want it to happen”. If it does, I will be there.
People come to me and say like “Savatage is getting back together” and I’m like “Savatage never broke up!” When people would say “Chris Caffery, ex-Savatage” I’m like “wait a second, we never broke up”.
We stopped playing but we never broke up, there’s a difference. There’s never been a breaking up of Savatage. I’m there and hopefully it does happen and I’m just going to leave it at that because I’ll just cross my fingers. When the time is right it will happen. Cards are falling into place. It would be a really good time for us to do something, something special. We’ll see what happens. I really don’t want to say much more than that right now. I’m just one voice in the machine here and I think everybody over the last 20 years knows exactly where I sit. I would love to play at any given second.
It’s like Savatage is kind of stuck in time right now.
Chris: I think in that sense we’ll still be us, the band. Our personalities and what we do. Savatage never did anything really for anybody other than Savatage. We were always kind of a little animal. If it does happen again, those people that never had a chance to see the band would be able to see what it was all about and why so many people liked it. It was just different. We had a distinct personality musically and as people. I think that chemistry came across when we played live.
What kind of audiences are you looking to attract with TSO? It’s like a metal symphony. It’s spectacular, it has amazing musicians and an amazing light show. It’s got a great positive vibe but what I really thought was interesting was how it has kind of a dark element when you watch the shows. You’ve got the gargoyles, the castles, the gothic cathedrals. But then you’ve got Charlie Brown and the lighthearted Christmas theme so it’s all mixed together.
Chris: Paul wrote stories like that. Life has its ups and downs, good times and bad times, light days and dark days. I think that was in a lot of the music especially in the “Beethoven’s Last Night” record where there’s a lot of the different characters that went through all different sides of life in that way.
With Paul he really loved production like pyro and lasers and lights. He loved gargoyles! Those things wound up there for us to be able to create the rock concert too because what we wanted people to do was go see a rock show like they’d never seen before. Give them the rock theatre element and go through the story that we had for the holidays but the biggest rock show they’ve ever seen at the same time so I think that’s what it is.
I really don’t think there is a target audience at all. We talk to anybody that goes to see that show. They say it’s like nothing they’ve ever seen but they also say they think its one of the best shows they’ve seen. We just want to give people the best possible show we can. I don’t think there really is a target. Just everybody. We want to do something that everybody enjoys, with a smile, and gets entertained and sees something that’s worth the money they spend to be there, is worth the time and be a memory for something that’s valuable for them.
So Paul is the one that came up with the idea of TSO?
Chris: When I first started working with him, he talked about wanting to do something that basically had limitless creative possibilities to where you could have one person or fifty people on the stage. He liked the idea of using multiple singers because while on tour if you lost one voice you had others. He liked the idea of people doing different characters, so you had a whole formula that he wanted to do and he loved the Broadway and rock theatre element of things. He just brought it all together. He took all the influences and things he had and put them all together into one thing. He just wanted to do this particular band and we all fell together at the same time to make things happen and we just watched him make all the visions that he had come to life.
It was pretty spectacular for me to be a part of that. Every year we’re playing multiple shows a day in an arena and traveling around the country and the world. You walk into malls and turn on the television and you hear the music and its one of those things where you’re like “wow you’re part of something really special right from the start”.
That’s something that to me is really amazing about TSO is just being able to watch that happen. Sadly, I have to speak about Paul and Criss Oliva in the past tense because they are no longer with us but its another one of those things where I have to thank Paul. He was the one who got me in touch with Savatage. He was the one who made a lot of my dreams and things that I wanted to do as a little kid happen. I play in one of the biggest arena stages of all time every night and it’s my playground and it’s something he gave all of us to do through his vision. Same thing with Criss. I thank him for me being able to get with Savatage and Paul with TSO so fortunately I’m here carrying on what my angels brought us to.
How long have you been in TSO?
Chris: I’m the only person in TSO that’s played every show possible. We have East and West but I’m the only one since the first day that’s never missed a show. I can’t do West so I’m East. It started as one. We started on TV and other things so I’m the only person in the history of TSO that has played every show possible since day one. That’s my unique thing that I have.
There are two touring divisions. When we did the “Beethoven’s Last Night” -tour and we did Europe, we came together as one band. There are only so many places you can play between November and New Year’s and that’s when the season is, so to make that possible we split into two after the very first tour and it’s been that way since. Ive always been with the East side, but I’ve done all the Beethoven’s tours and all the European things, TV things since the very first day TSO started.
Is there a Savatage/TSO -connection?
Chris: Well, that song “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)”, was on our Savatage record “Dead Winter Dead” which was written about the war in Sarajevo. Paul wrote that story. That song got a tremendous amount of airplay in regular radio – not rock radio. It was like Adult Contemporary and other things.
Paul would always have his Christmas Trilogy written and people were really trying to come up with a way to get the world to hear more of that song because it was so well received on the radio. It was just the right time for TSO to come out and that song was included on the first Christmas record. That was the marriage of Savatage and TSO. That all became a part of Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
So, all the guys that were in Savatage then are in Savatage now and they are all in TSO as well?
Chris: Yes.
The sea glass you were talking about earlier, what got you into making things out of sea glass?
Chris: I have this little elephant that’s called Wilbur. I was in Florida doing some stuff with Jimmy Sterr and I was on the beach looking for some shark’s teeth. Somebody asked me if I ever look for sea glass and I was like “what’s sea glass?” I found out about the whole phenomena, and I’d seen those little pieces of glass on the beach when I was younger, but I never realized much about people looking for it.
So, I just started hunting it and making little elephant necklaces with pieces I found. I used Wilbur to sell them and give money to children’s cancer and elephant sanctuary charities. Then one year I started trying to make little Christmas ornaments from the glass pieces that were bigger, and one thing led to another.
I’ve probably made over a thousand pieces of sea glass art. When I sell them, they go onto Chriscaffery.com under the Metalphant section. Now I’m doing custom orders. I just did a squirrel for somebody which is really cool. I do a lot of little miniature guitars. Right at this moment, I’m working on an otter. Somebody also asked me if I could make one of their cats holding a guitar. Now, I get custom orders to make these things for people. I can’t really draw cartoons or people very well, but I can make these things out of glass. I use a dremel and I cut with a diamond point. I make the artwork and I put it together and it’s just something I’m really good at doing. It’s something I do for fun, but it’s gotten to be pretty busy for me.
So…has Savatage ever run into Judas Priest?
Chris: We did six weeks with Priest and Savatage when Tim Ripper Owens was singing for them. It was a long set that they were doing, and Ripper did every single night, and he never missed a note. It was very impressive to watch him do. Again, like an hour and forty-five minutes of Rob Halford and his vocals every night and never missed a note.
Did you meet K.K. Downing?
Chris: Yeah! The funny thing is I met K.K. when I was 12. I was a twelve-year-old kid. I saw Priest open for Kiss when I was 11. When I was 12, they had a contest in a record store to win backstage passes and a catalog of Priest records from a record store by me. I won. I got to meet the band as a twelve-year-old and when I met K.K. I remember him saying “What do you want to do when you get older?” and I said I wanted to be like him. So, it was like the long blond hair and the flying V, I stole it from him.
He was one of my biggest influences image wise without a doubt. When Savatage and Priest got to tour, it was just really cool to bring back that memory and to be sharing the stage. I was on his side of the stage every night going on before him and watching him play. That was always pretty surreal. He and the band remembered me from then. They actually, a couple of years following, would always get me passes because I was the youngest Priest fan at that time. Nobody had any twelve-year-old fans, it was pretty rare. They were really friendly to me.
I got to see the tours they did with Iron Maiden. I knew them and kind of lost contact with them until they were working with Ripper. I met K.K. and Ripper in Germany when I was doing press for a Savatage record and that was Ripper’s first year. I remember saying hello to K.K. and I had mentioned to them what I did. When we opened for them, they knew all about it.
Glenn Tipton and K.K. were very nice to me on that tour. They said if I needed anything I could use their dressing room. Once they went on stage, they were like “just go here and hang out”. They were so nice to me. K.K. has always been that way. K.K. even said to me on that tour, he was like “when I retire, I want you to take my place”. It’s probably something I should have taken him up on. That’s something I would have loved to have done. I really like K.K. a lot, he’s a great player.
It was kind of funny, on my tour he loved the sound that I had with Savatage. I was just playing straight through a Marshall head and using some floor pedals I didn’t really have anything digital. I know they were working through something digital at the time. He was complaining about his sound and asked me what I did with mine. I said that I just did what he used to do, playing through a Marshall head! He laughed. He remembered me being that little kid that won that contest.
That is surreal and supernatural to meet your idol as 12-year-old, and then share the stage with him on a music tour. What year was that when you and Savatage played with Priest?
Chris: That was in 2001 and Savatage toured with Priest in Europe.
You switch between rhythm and lead right? Which one are you strongest at? I feel both.
Chris: I enjoy playing rhythm because I really like getting the groove and the beat together with the band. Guitar is so bizarre. There are so many different levels you could be. I like playing lead stuff, I think it’s fun to go up there and do solos, but I do think it’s really fun and powerful to have that riff going and have the music behind you. I do enjoy both. I started as the lead player in my band, I went into Savatage playing rhythm, then I went into Doctor Butcher being the only guitar player. It doesn’t necessarily matter to me. I like to go and be the best Chris Caffery possible. That’s all I ever wanted. I don’t ever try to imitate anybody.
I feel like there are different brain functions that go into each of those. When you play lead do you feel your brain functioning differently that when you’re playing rhythm?
Chris: You talk through the guitar more when you’re playing lead. You’re being a part of that structure and song. Sometimes there’s a very known piece of lead work you need to play the same way. I like to play a different lead a lot of different times on a song live just to see what comes out. I’d rather throw one out there and see if it works.
Any favorite foods, books, or hobbies?
Chris: I like all food except liver. I probably like junk food more than I should. I try to eat healthier than I do but sometimes its just hard to avoid because I like pizza, cheese fries, and chili fries. I like old bad comedies. I like horror movies, but they have to be good. I don’t like fake monsters; they don’t scare me. I’m not a huge fan of remakes.
I wish I had time for a hobby. I have my pinball machines and I do my gardening. I’m outside talking to my trees a lot and I have a very active German shepherd that keeps me busy a lot of times. I go to the gym everyday if I can. I like to stay in shape because I feel it keeps me healthier. I think my immune system is stronger because of how active I stay; it keeps me from getting sick. I take care of my mom so the last thing I want to do is get her sick. It keeps me in shape on stage.
I just try to stay busy. I do what I can. I find that time seems to go by faster as I get older. I don’t know if it’s because I’m busy or just slower. I never seem to get everything done I want to in a single day, but I try my best.
I like watching sports. I can watch sports and do art and music and not have to miss too much. It’s not like watching a movie or the news where you’re zoomed in on something. I think sports is a good background thing to have on when you’re playing music or doing art. It can just be there.
Thank You Chris for the interview. Stay safe!
Interview: Heather Williams
Photos: Chris Caffery & Alex Kouvatsos
