Back in 1996, Trans-Siberian Orchestra introduced itself to the world with “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24),” a bombastic hard rock instrumental that’s become a holiday standard during the past 27 years.
But before that it was recorded and released by Savatage, a band from Florida that would become the launch pad for TSO and has, in recent years, become more intertwined into and embraced as part of that group’s annual touring spectacle and repertoire.
“It’s hard not to,” says drummer Jeff Plate, who joined Savatage in 1994 and has been part of TSO since its inception, now as part of the East company that plays every December in Detroit. “(Savatage) is what TSO was born from. If you listen to that band you can hear and see hints of what (TSO founder) Paul O’Neill was thinking and…how it turned into (TS0).”
More Savatage becoming part of the TSO show, too, during the past few years. “Christmas Eve,” recorded first for Savatage’s 1995 album “Dead Winter Dead,” has been a mainstay, of course. But since 2018 TSO has dropped other Savatage songs into the shows — “Chance” in 2018, “A Handful of Rain” and “Believe in 2021, and “If I Go Away” (dedicated to O’Neill, who died during 2017) last year.
The nod to the past is even more pronounced this year as TSO opens with Savatage’s “Hourglass” and in addition to “Christmas Eve” has also been playing the band’s “Temptation Revelation” and “This Isn’t What We Meant.”
“Fans kind of know, at this point, the story of TSO and where these things came from,” says Plate, 61. “So it makes sense to put some of this music in the show.”
Al Pitrelli, a Savatage member since 1994 and an original TSO member who’s the musical director of TSO’s West company, agrees that, “The music is cut from the same cloth, the same sensibility. The same people wrote (TSO)’s songs. It’s not the same band but they’re certainly related.” And Chris Caffrey, another Savatage guitarist and the emcee of TSO’s East company, adds that, “‘Christmas Eve’ was a starting point and (O’Neill) built Trans-Siberian Orchestra from that. I think those (Savatage) songs belong to (TSO) too, in a way.”
The lineage of it all is fairly clear.
Savatage formed as Avatar during 1979 by brothers Jon and Chris Oliva, with modest success in the heavy rock world during the 80s. O’Neill — who’d worked with Aerosmith and others — came on board during 1987 to co-produced “Hall of the Mountain King,” a more conceptual, symphonic work that gave Savatage its highest chart position to date (albeit just 116 on the Billboard 200). O’Neill worked with the band for the rest of his life, on eight studio albums total. But with “Dead Winter Dead” — another concept album, this time set during the Bosnian War of the early 90s — and “Christmas Eve,” he found the root of what would become TSO.
“I loved the Who’s ‘Tommy’ and things like that,” O’Neill explained during the early days of TSO. “I was really taken with the idea of using an album to tell a full story. I wanted Trans-Siberian Orchestra to be everything I loved about rock music — big, bombastic, over the top. It was rock, but on a grand scale.”
That vision was not hidden from the Savatage crew, either. “(O’Neill) was looking down the road and dreaming of putting together this Trans-Siberian Orchestra thing,” drummer Pate recalls. “There’s a lot of hints in TSO of the later Savatage music. The idea for TSO and that kind of music — the big, epic songs, the orchestrations — started to show up in Savatage’s discography.”
The musicians didn’t need much convincing to go along with O’Neill’s ideas, either. “It got to a point where I didn’t doubt things,” Caffrey, 56, says. “I never thought Paul was off his rocker; I thought he was romantically crazy. You’d just love what it was he had to say, you’d listen to it and follow along. I remember by the third (TSO) tour we had two arena shows and they were sold out, and Paul was there with me and he gave me that look of, ‘I told you so…’ And then the next year we headlined at the (Madison Square) Garden.
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"He just made a lot of wonderful, magical things that happened to us."
TSO, of course, has grown into a force that's eclipsed Savatage -- though the two played a joint concert at Germany's Wacken Open Air Festival during 2015. To date TSO and its extravagant annual stage shows -- O'Neill was a self-confessed "pyro whore" -- has played to more than 18 million fans since 1999. Last year its 98 shows attracted more than 914,000, with ticket sales north of $66.5 million. (TSO also donated $1 per ticket to local charities.)
Savatage, however, is still a going concern, now in its third incarnation. The group's last album came out in 2001 but it's worked on some new material this year, according to Jon Oliva. But TSO's schedule, taking several members away for four months or so, it's a challenge.
And there are also unrecorded TSO works that O'Neill left behind -- among them "Romanov: When Kings Must Whisper," about the 1917 Russian Revolution, "The Path of the Fairytale Moon" and an expanded, rewritten version of Savatage's "Gutter Ballet" -- that are waiting to join a discography whose most recent title, "Letters From the Labyrinth," came out back in 2015. The group did perform a new song called "Christmas Carousels," (an expansion of a track from 2004's "The Lost Christmas Eve," last year, and Pitrelli, 61, says that there are intentions to make more new music.
"(O'Neill) left us a huge body of unfinished work that we need to get to," he confirms, "but we got blind-sided when we lost Paul six years ago and we're still kind of licking our wounds a little bit. It's just extremely daunting."
But Caffrey, for one, is holding out hope it will happen soon. "'Romanov' is one of my favorite pieces of TSO music; the music on there is just incredible," the guitarist says. "I'd love to see TSO just get the rest of the Paul material the world hasn't heard on their playlist -- just for selfish reasons. I think our fans will love it."
Trans-Siberian Orchestra performs at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 23 at Little Caesars Arena, 2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit. 313-471-7000 or 313Presents.com.
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