It happens every December. People are listening to snoozy, familiar Christmas songs on the radio; old crooners of yore singing about Frosty the Snowman or drunkenly imploring Mother Nature to let it snow when they’re jarred awake by something resembling a full-blown airstrike assaulting the senses with a carols reimagined as 100 decibel rock music. Or is it classical? It’s hard to put Trans-Siberian Orchestra into any musical box… other than the one marked “different”!
Or “popular”. This month Billboard put out lists of the most popular Christmas songs(singles) and albums of all-time. Trans-Siberian Orchestra – TSO for short – just missed the top 10 on both; registering the 11th most popular Christmas album (Christmas Eve and Other Stories) and 11th most popular Christmas song (“Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12-24”). They assuredly are the “one of these things is not like the other” when put next to the Mariah Careys, Burl Ives and Michael Bubles also populating the top of those charts. But what exactly is TSO?
That’s a good question without a simple answer. Allmusic describes it as “session orchestras assembled for a number of symphonic-rock crossover albums” and shows. Others have defined it as a “symphonic metal” group. Or groups, because the membership is quite changeable and around this time of year there are often two different TSOs touring, playing the same music to the same stage shows. Such is the case this year apparently.
It was created by Paul O’Neill (not the baseball star.) O’Neill was a talented guitarist and in fact, multi-instrumentalist. He says he grew up on hard rock but also “Broadway musicals, Motown and singer-songwriters like Jim Croce and Harry Chapin.” He got work in Broadway orchestras for runs of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. In the ’80s he got into music production and promoting, producing a couple of Aerosmith records plus ones from lesser-known hard rock acts like Omen, and Savatage. He was an unofficial member of that speed metal-crossed-with-prog rock act through much of the ’90s, writing a good portion of their material and producing albums for them. Around 1996, he signed to Atlantic Records who told him to form his own band. To do that, he called on a trio of the guys from Savatage – Jon Oliva, Al Pitrelli and Robert Kinkel. But he had no intention of making them just another four-piece hard rock outfit.
O’Neill wanted to merge classical music and rock (something that the Moody Blues and E.L.O. had cited as a basis for some of their music as well) and make it BIG. Big sounds, big shows. He had an idea of doing a couple of rock operas as well as a trio of Christmas-themed records. He picked the name after visiting Russia, and specifically Siberia in the eastern end of the country. He found it “incredibly beautiful but incredibly harsh as well”… rather like the music he was setting out to make. That vast area was linked by the Trans-Siberian Railway, from which he drew the name’s inspiration.
Their first album was the first of their Christmas ones, and still their most popular. Christmas Eve and other Stories came out in fall 1996, sounding very little like anything else at the time. Although it did have some songs with vocals, its best-known works were all instrumentals derived from traditional Christmas carols (“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”) played like an orchestra doing The Who. Or maybe The Who doing Beethoven – who was the theme for another one of their albums, Beethoven’s Last Night. O’Neill described him as “the world’s first heavy metal rock star.” The first album’s best-known track though is instantly recognizable by ear, if not by name – “Christmas Eve/Sarjevo 12-24”.
That one with all its time changes and huge dynamic range blends in bits of “Carol of the Bells”, other Christmas standards and a quiet repose of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on cello. O’Neill got the idea from a story of a world-class cellist who returned to his homeland of Sarajevo to find the Bosnian War wreaking havoc on the once beautiful city. The rocker said the cellist was heart-broken to see the destruction and know it was caused by his fellow countrymen, so he went out for several nights before Christmas, playing his cello in the town square, often as bombs fell around the city. “The orchestra represents one side, the rock band the other, the single cello, that single individual…the spark of hope.” The single instantly found a home on holiday playlists and sold to gold levels and helped the album itself go triple-platinum in the States.
But more than their records, TSO are renowned for their highly impressive, and theatrical shows. Although they occasionally play in the first ten months of the year (for example, in 2015 they headlined a heavy metal festival in Germany in front of almost 90 000 fans, taking along two stages, a TSO signature) they are widely known for their Christmas music tours, an annual event (except for the pandemic-stopped 2020) that in the words of O’Neill was designed to be “as over the top as we can make it. We have two stages, with pyro, lights, lasers, on both sides of the arena… the best sound we can find. We want people to walk out of our shows speechless.” They also set out to help the communities they play in, donating some of the ticket proceeds for every show to local charities, usually ones helping children if they can. So far it’s donated over $16M in total.
Although sadly O’Neill passed away in 2017, his orchestra(s) continue on. This year’s tour began Nov. 17 in both Green Bay.WI and Council Bluffs, IA and fans today in Greenville, SC and San Antonio will have a chance to see if it leaves them speechless. It continues on til Dec. 23rd in Chicago, then resumes on Dec. 26, playing various Midwestern cities until year’s end.