Hail to The Mountain King

Jeff Buckley
Chris Cornell
King Diamond
Bruce Dickinson
Tony Harnell
Maynard James Keenan
Freddie Mercury
Jon Oliva

What do all of the above singers have in common? They all have a four-octave vocal range. And how do we pare the list down further? Well, I'm only in love with two of them. And I've already written an article about Maynard James Keenan. Guess whose turn it is?

Dear Jon Oliva,

not my tape, but an incredible likeness

I've been in love with you since I was 17 years old. Or maybe I was 18. Anyway, my love for you was cemented one Saturday night at approximately 11:53pm as MTV's Headbanger's Ball was wrapping up yet another mediocre three hour show. I was hanging out with my friends Tony and Jim in a Northern California living room scattered with empty pizza boxes and soda bottles, each of us taking turns lamenting the lack of "good" metal presented on MTV and possibly discussing what would be watched once the Ball had concluded: The Evil Dead or ReAnimator? Then the final video of the evening began and we quieted, hopes stoked, because the last video of the night was usually always the best one, something dark and heavy and serious as a deep fried, butter drowned heart attack.

Distant thunder. Ancient trees. A forgotten cemetery. A far off church bell, sonorous and foreboding. Then a flash of lightening and the sharp sound of an obsidian guitar shattering the gloom. All three of us sat up. Who the hell was this? Why had we never heard this band before? How could they possibly bear the extraordinary burden of being so awesome?

The very next day, I went down to the local record store. Not a chain store at the mall, a fucking record store right out on the street. I bought two cassette tapes, both by the band I'd heard for the first time just the night before: Savatage. Indeed, I bought the only two Savatage tapes that the store had in stock: Sirens and Hall of the Mountain King. A week or so later, I returned to the store and bought a cassette copy of Fight for the Rock. I played all three to shreds.

Fast forward two years. I was now living just outside Philadelphia. I was 19 years old. Gutter Ballet had just come out and, along with the cassette, I had also bought the T-shirt and a poster for my bedroom. I was a South Street regular and took the subway there nearly every weekend, walking alone down Jeweler's Row, buying carnations for the homeless and frequenting such stores as Blaxx, Garden Of Enchantment and Zipperhead's.  At one small store - I forget the name of it - the owner had hung photographs of the many famous rock stars who had come into the store and posed with him.

One of the pics was of you, Jon Oliva. It was autographed. It was recent.

I haunted South Street every chance I got, hoping I'd meet you, hoping you'd spot me walking down the street and somehow know that I was a fan, somehow sense that your music and lyrics had reached inside of me and shined a light on a long dormant crystal battery embedded deep inside of my heart chakra, sending refracted rainbow reflections up into the abandoned lighthouse of my skull and illuminating ancient memories I never even knew were mine. You cleaned a window in my head attic and let in new light. Because of you, I immersed myself in classical music and discovered new inspirations. Because of you, I read poetry and bought long lacy skirts and knew I would never marry a man who couldn't play the piano. I took up drawing again, even though I was convinced that I sucked at it and had abandoned it in middle school.

I went home and drew a picture of you, sitting at a piano in an empty concert hall. I drew myself, sitting in the shadows behind the stage curtains, looking at you, listening to you play. The picture was terrible - cartoonish and painfully, even soppily, romantic. I found a large envelope and mailed it to your fan club. We didn't have internet or scanners back then. There was no "uploading" or "tagging" or "Tweeting" in 1989. I have no idea if you ever received it. I kept no copy. Even admitting to this now, at the age of 46, embarrasses the shit out of me.

And now here we are in 2016. My cassettes have turned into audio files, but I still listen to you. And I'm still in love with you. I know you got fat. I don't care. Seriously, you could blow up to the size of a Macy's Day Parade balloon and I would still call you beautiful. You were and are and always will be a knight in my eyes, handsome and shining. You are a fucking John Keats poem in the flesh. I'd like to weave small purple flowers into your dark hair. I would gift you with endless reams of red velvet and carve your life-sized likeness out of a million abandoned ivory piano keys.

Your voice is a golden shrike, a chrome banshee, a blood red river of silk. I wish I could put your voice into a green glass bottle and drink it on hot summer nights; it would taste like fireflies and water lilies and a thousand copper bells hanging in a willow tree. I know how drippy dumbass girly-squishy fangirl ridiculous this sounds, but thank god for age. The older I get, the less I care what anyone thinks. Your birthday is coming up, and I want to give this to you. No one but you. Thank you for singing like a ghost in a centuries old catacomb. Thank you for playing piano like rain ringing on a golden Buddha. Thank you for having a soul like a stained glass window. Thank you for reigning like a King on a steel throne.

PS - Incidentally, I ran into Dave Mustaine about five years back. We were in the same room alone together for maybe two minutes and neither of us said a single word to one another. I was dying to ask him how you were, but I couldn't make myself do it. He seemed kind of cranky anyway, and probably wouldn't have appreciated the query.

Dave < Jon