SAVATAGE have been back for two years and have still not played a single American show. Bassist Johnny Lee Middleton has now given the closest thing to a date the band has offered.
"You'll probably see us next year," he said, meaning 2027.
Middleton also framed the reunion in longer terms than most people had assumed. "We have a 10-year plan, so we're on year two. So we've still got some time left." That is a notably unhurried timeline for a band whose members are all well into their careers, and it reframes the absence of U.S. dates as sequencing rather than reluctance.
The obstacle he named is arithmetic. "The problem is we never did get to the point of drawing enough people in the United States to warrant the money that we need to pay the 18 guys that I gotta pay to do a gig."
Eighteen people is the crux. SAVATAGE were never a straightforward club act, but the reunited version travels with a professional crew drawn from Trans-Siberian Orchestra — the organisation that absorbed most of this band's members for two decades and set a production standard that is expensive to walk back from. In the band's earlier life, Middleton noted, the crew were friends who happened to be musicians. That is no longer how it works, and the cost difference is what keeps the American routing stuck.
Europe has not had the same problem. The band's 2026 "Prelude To Madness" run went ahead with vocalist Zak Stevens, guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, Middleton and drummer Jeff Plate, the latter replaced by Blas Elias for two June festival dates for medical reasons. It also produced the Pompeii show, where SAVATAGE played the ancient Roman amphitheatre with a 40-piece orchestra in July.
For 2027 the plan is South America and Europe again, with the U.S. approached either through package deals — sharing the cost across a bill — or standalone shows in the markets that can carry it.
Chris Caffery said much the same thing in April, but without a year attached. Middleton has now attached one.
Source: blabbermouth.net