...was born in the Bronx, New York on July 22, 1960. He was one of four children (Jo Ann, Tony and Christopher being the others). It was at a very early age that he got interested in music. According to a Conversation Piece interview, Jon states the following:

"My dad is a piano player, and we always had a piano in the house, so I started messing around with that. I was probably like 11 or 12. I was very impatient, so I kind of blew that by. There were [also] guitars around the house. It was just a gradual thing - a little bit of everything here and there. We bought a bass, because we had guitars, piano and drums - the one thing we didn't have was a bass. So we went out and bought this shitty, teardrop-shaped, green bass, probably the ugliest bass in the whole world. It had black nylon strings - it was really awful. The strings [were] like six inches off the fretboard, but we had a bass, and I started dabbling with that. It was just a little bit of everything at one time."

It was when the Oliva family made the move to California when Jon was a teenager that he started to become serious about music. The Oliva family remained in California for four years before moving to Dunedin, Florida in 1976.

Together with his brother Criss, they played their first public performance at a block party. Jon remembers the event well.

"We played all the Kiss songs we could play. We played like 20 Kiss songs-- like every song off the first three Kiss albums. Then we played two Black Sabbath songs, "Iron Man" and "War Pigs;" two Deep Purple songs, "Smoke On The Water" (of course... everybody played that) and "Space Truckin';" and then we played "Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers" by ZZ Top. I remember getting electrocuted, holding a guitar and touching a microphone at the same time, and I got zapped pretty good. I remember driving up there in my parents' station wagon with all the gear falling out of the window. Criss was playing bass at that gig. He played bass when we started playing in a band for real-- he played bass and I played guitar. Gradually, as we started getting a little bit older, he just got better at guitar than I was, so we switched, and I played bass."

In 1977, shortly after he got kicked out of high school, Jon found himself in need of a job. He answered an ad in a local music paper from a band that advertised playing five nights a week. This was just what he was looking for. Soon he found himself as an 18-year-old kid making over $400 a week. The band, known as Metropolis, featured Jon on guitar and keyboards. They played mostly cover songs from bands like Bad Company, Kiss and Alice Cooper.

In 1978, Metropolis went into the studio and recorded a 45, a record with one track on each side. The songs, "Take Off With The Crowd" and "Let's Get Rowdy," would be Jon's first experience recording in a studio. The 45's were sold at gigs played throughout Florida. Playing bars in areas such as Tampa, Ft. Myers and Ft. Lauderdale helped Jon gain a lot of experience performing live in front of an audience. In late 1978, Metropolis came to an end when Jon "got tired of doing the bar thing." At this point, Jon and his brother Criss realized they wanted to do something on their own.

For a short time, Jon and Criss went their separate ways. Criss was involved with his own project called Tower, while Jon got involved with a group called Alien. He was very excited about this project because he was finally involved with a band that was into writing its own music. Because of conflicts with other Tower members due to writing styles, Criss eventually hooked up with the band, which changed its name to Avatar.

Avatar in its earliest form was a five-member band led by Jon (drums/vocals) and Criss (guitar). Jon recalls it being a "kick-ass band" because it had the best equipment of any other band in Florida. Criss and Jon started receiving a lot of attention on the local music scene. This eventually caused the band to start drifting apart from what Jon claims could have been jealousy from the other three members.

Criss and Jon were once again by themselves when the band 's members decided to go their separate ways. They both got regular jobs and would meet up together late in the day at a place called "The Pit" to practice and write songs. "The Pit" was also used as rehearsal space by a band that included a drummer named Steve Wacholz. Wacholz was very familiar with the Oliva brothers, who he first met 1977. He saw Criss play at alocal high school and was blown away. Very soon after, he auditioned for Jon's band, Alien. When he got to the audition, Wacholz recognized Criss and Jon as part of the band who had impressed him so much at the high school show.

Steve auditioned for Jon, and although he made the mistake of playing "'Rock and Roll' on the ride cymbal instead of the hi-hat," it went well and he began to rehearse with Alien. Other drummers came and went, and Steve continued to hang around, and even when he wasn't playing with the Oliva's and their bands, he would go out to see their shows. Steve would eventually join Jon and Criss to form a new version of Avatar.

Jon, who was playing bass at the time, decided he would prefer to front the band and not have to be restricted by a guitar. As a result, Avatar was in the market for a bassist, a number of whom came and soon left for various reasons. The band rented their PA system from a guy named Keith Collins, a guitarist playing in a band called Solar. He agreed to play bass for the Olivas, so he joined Avatar in 1981.

Later that year, WYNF, a local radio station in the area, was looking for local talent to put on an album. They held a contest with the prize being a spot on the LP. Hundreds of bands sent in tapes, and hundreds of them were disappointed when it was Avatar who opened not one, but both sides of the record (known as The Pirate Album). The songs, "Rock Me" and "Minus Love," were included on the album, and in support the band got a huge amount of airplay from the radio station and played several shows sponsored by WYNF.

Around this time, Jon's writing was starting to take a different turn. The boy-wants-girl lyrics of earlier songs like the ones that appeared on the WYNF album began to mutate into retellings of strange dreams and nightmares he was having. And as things began to change with the music, they also changed for the band. Avatar was approached by Dan Johnson of Par Records. Together, they recorded and distributed approximately 1000 copies of the City Beneath the Surface 45. Shortly after, Dan Johnson put up another $3,000 and Avatar was back in the studio working on a full-length album. This recording session lasted all of two days and saw them come up with 15 songs, which would be split up into two different albums. The night before the first, Sirens, was to go to the presses, the Olivas got a phone call from Johnson. Jon recalls the night:

"We changed our name the night before the record was to go to press. (Dan) called... I think it was around 11 o'clock at night, (with) me, my wife, Criss and his wife sitting around the kitchen table playing cards. We're sitting there and all of a sudden I get a phone call and the guy says, 'Listen, we have a problem. There's a band in Europe called Avatar and there gonna sue you if you guys release the album. You need to change the name, and you need to do it right now cause we're gonna make the record tomorrow.'

"So we were like, 'Great.' So, we had to sit there. We wrote out Avatar on a big piece of poster paper... and Criss said, 'Put a big S (like Kiss) in front of Avatar,' and it was like, 'SAVATAR.' I was like, 'That sounds like a really bad dinosaur,' but we liked the way it looked. So then finally, out of nowhere, I don't remember who it was-- it might have been Criss' wife or my wife-- somebody said, 'Take the R out and put a GE,' and we did, and it was 'SAVATAGE.' I was like, 'That was cool,' not 'SA-VA-TAGE,' but 'SAVATAGE,' like 'SAVA' for Savage and 'TAGE' for mystical or whatever. From that moment on we were Savatage."

Sirens was officially released under the new name of Savatage. Because of the album's great reviews from all over the world, the band was asked to open for Atlantic Records band Zebra at a showcase at the Mahaffey Theatre. Robert Zemsky heard Savatage play at that show and told the band he had to introduce them to his friend at Atlantic, Jason Flom. Flom asked Savatage to do a show for him, and he flew in from New York to see the band. He was blown away-- he'd never seen kids banging their heads up against the stage-- and was mesmerized by the whole show. He immediately got money from Atlantic to fly Rick Derringer down to Morrisound Studios to record with the band.

Par agreed to release Savatage from its contract so they could record with Atlantic, but not before it released The Dungeons Are Calling to finish out the deal. Atlantic fixed up the Derringer tapes and in late '83 finally signed Savatage with Robert Zemsky as their manager. In November of '84, the band went to Bearsville Studios to record Power of the Night with noted producer Max Norman.

During the 1985 "Monsters of the Universe" tour, the band made the first of many line-up changes. Because of musical differences, bassist Keith Collins was replaced by another Florida native, Johnny Lee Middleton. They found Johnny in a band called Lefty, and he joined Savatage just in time to go to London with the band to record Fight for the Rock. The album was recorded in late '85-early '86 at Triden Studios on St. Anne's Court. They (Johnny, Steve, Criss and Jon, their wives, Jon's baby Nicholas and the band's guitar tech) had a rough Christmas, having to be in London during the holidays and living together in a flat on Baker Street. The way Jon tells it, the managers weren't completely trustworthy, either, which made things more difficult for the band and the recordi