How the Trans-Siberian Orchestra Became a Holiday Hit Machine
Behind the transformation from struggling metal band to touring juggernaut
By Neil Shah | Photography by Ryan Henriksen for The Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-trans-siberian-orchestra-became-a-holiday-hit-machine-1449170491
In a previous incarnation, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra was a bombastic metal band struggling to get on the radio. Now it is the music industry’s most unlikely holiday juggernaut, the group that figured out how to bring rock ’n’ roll to Christmas.
The band’s transformation began 20 years ago with some surprising airplay from a couple of radio programmers. Hard-rock producer Paul O’Neill, with the help of record executive Jason Flom, rebranded the group for the holidays, eventually turning it into one of the top touring acts in the music business. Today, Mr. O’Neill is its impresario and top manager; Mr. Flom’s record label releases the music.
TSO, as it is known, routinely fills large indoor arenas across the country, often with two shows a day (unlike the Rolling Stones, they play matinees). In 2014, TSO generated more ticket revenue than the Zac Brown Band, Mötley Crüe, Elton John and Lady Gaga, according to Pollstar.
The Trans-Siberian Orchestra will play 100 shows this holiday season. How is that possible? WSJ’s Neil Shah reports. Photo: Ryan Henriksen for The Wall Street Journal
The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is a holiday show for modern ears, a kind of metal “Nutcracker” that uses loud electric guitars to restore the power that traditional Christmas music used to have. Part narrated Dickensian tale, part 1970s Pink Floyd concert, the show mixes over-the-top heavy-metal guitar solos, soaring strings and pyrotechnics with the orchestration and operatic singing of Broadway to tell stories, mostly about a family reuniting on Christmas Eve.
“It’s a touring Christmas rock opera,” says Barry Gabel, senior vice president of marketing and sponsorship sales at promoter Live Nation Entertainment. “They created their own genre.”
Last Friday at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., TSO played to a sold-out crowd for 2½ hours as 18 full-color lasers danced to the music, 750 pyrotechnics exploded and more than 3,000 video panels displayed images of dragons, snow scenes and dimly-lit castle corridors. Decked out in formal wear and striking heroic poses with guitars and violins, the show’s 18 performers ran through a narrated Christmas rock opera, then the rock-and-lights show, which included both Christmas and nonholiday material.
Some 2,700 miles away, at the Spokane Arena in eastern Washington, a second Trans-Siberian team performed for nearly 6,500 fans. The second show is crucial. Last year, the two shows together grossed almost $52 million in 52 days during the holiday season, more than double its $19 million in sales in 2004. Mega-bands which play football stadiums in warm weather, before 50,000 fans at higher prices, can generate a bigger take per show. But TSO’s cloned troupes—one east of the Mississippi, one mostly west, using 40 trucks in all—maximizes revenue in the seven-week seasonal window when the operation is on the road. There’s a backup crew of core musicians in case of sickness; TSO has never canceled a performance.
TSO’s holiday show has managed to win a broad fan base by carefully calibrating its brand. Its producers aren’t reluctant to appeal to fans of Christian rock music, but the show leans toward subjects like family and homecoming rather than overtly religious themes. Producers also carefully monitor and limit volume levels to avoid discomfiting older fans and young children.
TSO’s West team performs its opening show of the 2015 winter tour. Combined, TSO’s two touring units will play 100 shows in 59 cities, including 41 days with two shows. The teams will traverse more than 19,000 miles.
Lighting and set designer Bryan Hartley and Trans-Siberian Orchestra founder Paul O’Neill (both seated) watch rehearsals for the group’s 2015 winter tour in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mr. Hartley, who has worked with Kiss and Aerosmith, has won numerous awards.
Guitarist Chris Caffery, a master of ceremonies of sorts for TSO’s East touring unit, plays in the middle of the Mid-America Center, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which TSO uses every year to rehearse. The band erects two stages on opposite ends of the arena; on one stage, performers run through the show; on the other, technicians test out pyrotechnics.
TSO impresario Paul O’Neill, 57, on stage with performers. Mr. O’Neill says he was ‘blindsided’ by TSO’s success as a holiday act. ‘In the entertainment industry, Christmas is the holy grail,’ he says.
TSO released its first album in 1996, but founder Paul O’Neill had been tinkering with it long before that. A fan of the Who, Yes and Pink Floyd, he started off as a musician in a progressive-rock band called Slowburn, before becoming a hard-rock producer and promoter, working with acts such as Aerosmith and Madonna.
TSO’s $20 million-plus stage show is the responsibility of touring and production chief Elliot Saltzman, who also works with Joan Jett. TSO spends $90,000 on color-coded T-shirts for local stagehands to make their ‘load-out,’ or exit from a venue, quicker. ‘It’s efficient, and old-school,’ he says.
TSO performers run the gamut when it comes to age. Kayla Reeves, far left, is 23 years old and one of TSO’s lead singers; she started performing with the group several years ago. Also pictured are Lisa Lavie, Autumn Guzzardi and Georgia Napolitano.
TSO’s Derek Wieland during rehearsals. TSO’s two touring units have 18 performers each (Mr. Wieland is the music director of the East team). In each city, there is also a seven-piece string section of local musicians.
TSO’s Dustin Brayley flexing his vocal chords. Behind him is the band’s custom-made red Austrian curtain, which is 175 feet wide and 77 feet long.
TSO’s stage show—lights, lasers, pyrotechnics, flames on stage, or shooting from the ceiling—can’t be done in all venues. To have more choices among venues when playing Europe, TSO scaled down its show, production chief Elliot Saltzman says.
Guitarist Bill Hudson practicing. Mr. Hudson is from Brazil, and one of TSO’s several international performers; others hail from Korea and the Netherlands.
When they’re not rehearsing on stage, TSO performers fine-tune songs in small off-stage practice rooms. Here, TSO’s West team works out a part of a song, led by guitarist and music director Al Pitrelli, far right, who has worked with Alice Cooper. Both teams play the same show, but the East team has a little more classic rock in its sound; the West, a little more R&B.
Bassist John Lee Middleton, of TSO’s West team, getting ready for the opening show of TSO’s 2015 tour in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Guitarist Angus Clark, of TSO’s West team, taking the stage for the opening show of TSO’s tour.
TSO’s West team performs its opening show of the 2015 winter tour. Combined, TSO’s two touring units will play 100 shows in 59 cities, including 41 days with two shows. The teams will traverse more than 19,000 miles.
Lighting and set designer Bryan Hartley and Trans-Siberian Orchestra founder Paul O’Neill (both seated) watch rehearsals for the group’s 2015 winter tour in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mr. Hartley, who has worked with Kiss and Aerosmith, has won numerous awards.
The show generally doesn’t perform in New York City but its suburbs, and doesn’t target college towns. This year’s tour opened in Erie, Pa., and is hitting Wichita, Kan., and Fort Wayne, Ind., as well as San Diego and Detroit.
“It’s certainly not your Pat Boone Christmas special,” says Jeff Scott Soto, a longtime TSO singer. “It’s very rock-laced—but it’s not metal-infused to the point where it’s going to scare somebody coming for a holiday show.”
Since it began touring in 1999, the band has sold more than 11 million tickets, grossing roughly $500 million from concert sales. Many fans are repeat customers during the holiday season: People who have seen the show before comprise roughly 50% of TSO’s audience, says Mr. Gabel of Live Nation, who works with TSO and other acts such as Bruce Springsteen, Janet Jackson and Kiss.
TSO also sells records: Three of its albums are among the top 25 Christmas records since Nielsen Music began tracking sales in 1991. Its latest album, the non-Christmas-themed “Letters from the Labyrinth,” made its debut at No. 1 last week on the Billboard rock albums chart. The band has sold over 10 million albums.
TSO’s transformation began in 1986 with discussions between two up-and-coming industry players. Mr. O’Neill, fond of quoting historical figures from Seneca to Lincoln, had made his name working for a management company that nurtured Aerosmith, AC/DC and Joan Jett. Jason Flom, son of prominent New York attorney Joseph Flom, was a music executive who had helped launch Twisted Sister and later, Katy Perry and Lorde.
Mr. Flom, then at Atlantic Records, had signed a metal group called Savatage a few years earlier, but despite praise early on from the metal community, the band’s latest album had flopped, and Atlantic dropped them. Mr. Flom called Mr. O’Neill, who had long wanted to launch his own band, and by the end of the discussion, they’d agreed that Savatage could be re-signed if Mr. O’Neill would produce them.
“We were playing our last show,” says Jon Oliva, Savatage’s singer, keyboardist and composer. “And then Paul O’Neill showed up.” He and Mr. O’Neill now write much of TSO’s music.
Under Mr. O’Neill, Savatage released a string of well-regarded records, including 1987’s “Hall of the Mountain King”—which metalized part of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt”—and a 1991 rock opera “Streets.” In addition to its classical bent, their music blended metal, the progressive rock of bands like Yes and Broadway storytelling.
Despite some popularity in Europe, they still didn’t take off. Mr. Oliva burned out his voice during the tour for “Streets.” His brother, Criss Oliva, Savatage’s lead guitarist, was killed in a car accident in 1993. “We never found our niche,” Mr. Oliva says.
A particular low point was their 1995 release, “Dead Winter Dead,” about the Bosnian War. The album wasn’t even getting airplay on metal radio stations. But during the 1995 holiday season, a local radio-program director in Florida, where the band was from, started playing a quirky song from the album. He contacted an old colleague with whom he sometimes exchanged notes, Scott Shannon of the influential New York radio station WPLJ, and persuaded him to sample them. On Dec. 11, WPLJ started playing “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24),” an instrumental heavy-metal medley of “Carol of the Bells” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
“It became the No. 1 request on the station,” Mr. Shannon says.
The song was part of a broader rock opera about love and war, not a bid for holiday-song stardom. “This is an instrumental Christmas song, from an obscure heavy metal band being played on arguably the biggest radio station in the country—which mainly plays mainstream superstars,” Mr. Flom says. “It’s crazy.”
Mr. Flom’s phone started ringing. Record stores and radio people wanted copies of the album, but Atlantic “didn’t have promo singles to send, so we made copies and started sending them out,” Mr. Flom says. At the same time, despite the song’s popularity on adult-contemporary radio stations, female listeners in particular weren’t as enamored of Savatage in general and weren’t buying the album.
Mr. Flom then had a brainstorm: He asked Mr. O’Neill to take the Savatage song and build a Christmas album around it. Mr. O’Neill had already been considering a rock opera about a young girl reuniting with her family on Christmas Eve thanks to a stranger’s generosity. He and Mr. Flom signed a multialbum deal in January 1996, giving the project a different name but using Savatage’s musicians. Mr. O’Neill called the act “Trans-Siberian Orchestra,” after the railroad in Siberia, a symbol of hope in a harsh, unforgiving place, he says.
Success wasn’t immediate, but record-label support in those days was often stronger than it is today. TSO was one of the last acts to have what Mr. O’Neill calls “blank-check artist development from the label system, where [Atlantic] just kept writing check after check after check until we exploded.”
A few years later, TSO began touring for the first time. Mr. O’Neill and TSO’s early concert promoters found that demand for the show was far outstripping what they could do in the holiday season—but they were reluctant to extend the tour beyond the holidays. It was then that they formed two separate teams.
Watch the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s East Group rehearse five songs for their winter tour. Photo: Ryan Henriksen for The Wall Street Journal
TSO’s broad audience reflects a demographic reality: Rock music, while no longer cutting-edge, has become America’s background soundtrack.
“For the first time, every generation has rock in common,” says Mr. O’Neill. “In the past, you couldn’t bring a grandmother to a rock show, or a young kid.”
Amanda Basteen, a 30-year-old wedding photographer in Des Moines, Iowa, has seen the show five times and says she prefers it to other holiday shows because “it’s more rock ‘n’ roll.”
On Nov. 19, she and her husband brought their two children, ages seven and nine, to see TSO in Des Moines for the first time. They were awed. “We want to make it a tradition,” she says. “It’s something amazing to do that my kids can look back upon and remember, ‘This is something we did every year with Mom and Dad.’”
With so many repeat customers, the $20 million-plus production tries to wow audiences with fresh tricks year after year. “If there’s a new light, a new laser, a new pyro effect, we’ve got to be the ones to use it,” says Elliot Saltzman, TSO’s director of touring and production.
Its extravagant production—especially its pyrotechnics—means TSO can’t play just any venue. Several times TSO has blown out the power in a concert building, says Mr. Saltzman. “I’ve said to them, your show is so spectacular, maybe you can save on a couple of explosives, on a little bit of pyro and the audience wouldn’t know,” Live Nation’s Mr. Gabel says. “And Paul’s answer is, I would know.”
The band’s 240 singers, musicians and concert technicians, many of whom have known each other for years, often give up other gigs to return to TSO. The two teams also tap about 140 local stagehands in each city. In early November, they all rehearse together in an empty arena in Council Bluffs, Iowa, taking turns fine-tuning songs in studios and practicing the show onstage. This winter’s tour kicked off Nov. 18.
TSO’s business runs counter to many industry practices. Despite its hefty production costs, ticket prices are relatively low compared with other major rock concerts—they range from about $30 to $75. (Lady Gaga’s average ticket price last year was over $82, Pollstar says.) There is no VIP seating to pump up revenues. Even when TSO has guest appearances from stars such as Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler or the Who’s Roger Daltrey, Mr. O’Neill doesn’t announce them in advance to boost sales. The band sometimes has to compensate venues for the fact that the show has no intermission, which hurts concession sales.
By now, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is an improbable part of the holiday mainstream. Fans synchronize elaborate Christmas light-shows at their homes to songs like “Christmas Eve Sarajevo,” and YouTube videos give tips on how to do it. In Yucaipa, Calif., neighbors connected 16 homes in a Trans-Siberian network of lights to “Wizards in Winter.” The Hallmark Channel, which has a sponsorship agreement with TSO, recently featured the display on a “Home and Family” TV special.