'Tis the season for Trans-Siberian spectacle

By Mitchell Peters

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - It's easy to spot Trans-Siberian Orchestra musical director/guitarist Al Pitrelli backstage after the band's late-November concert at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. He's the one wearing a bulky knee brace and hopping around on metal crutches.

Earlier in the evening, Pitrelli -- a seasoned guitarist who has also toured with Alice Cooper and Megadeth -- had to sit onstage during the symphonic rock band's nearly three-hour Christmas-themed show. Dressed in a black coat, a white-collared shirt and black slacks, the longhaired musician was "a little overconfident" during the band's tour-opening concert November 1, according to Paul O'Neill, the wizard behind the curtain of TSO's rock operas and effects-filled shows.

"He took a huge jump from stage left onto the main deck, locked his knees and tore his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) right off," O'Neill says.

Pitrelli remembers it differently. "The true story is that I didn't want to do one of O'Neill's arrangements, so he came up and kneecapped me," he jokes.

O'Neill attempted to hire a temporary replacement guitarist, but Pitrelli wouldn't have it. "He said, 'Paul, I'll leave the tour when I'm dead,'" O'Neill says.

AVID FOLLOWING

Pitrelli and O'Neill have been friends for 25 years. During the past decade, they've watched TSO grow from theater gigs to a reliable fixture on Billboard's yearly list of the 25 highest-grossing tours. In 2007, the act ranked 15th among Billboard's most profitable tours, grossing $49.3 million and drawing more than 1.1 million people to 128 concerts reported to Billboard Boxscore. This year, the group will rank 12th with $47.3 million in grosses from 120 shows.

TSO's albums have collectively sold 6.7 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The act has charted five albums on the Billboard 200, and it has racked up three top 10 sets on the Top Pop Catalog list, with two of those hitting No. 1 ("Christmas Eve and Other Stories" and "The Lost Christmas Eve").

This success is all the more impressive considering that TSO defies categorization.

"The only way to describe Trans-Siberian Orchestra is 'Phantom of the Opera' meets the Who, with Pink Floyd's light show," says lyricist/composer/producer O'Neill, who founded the group more than 10 years ago with creative partners Robert Kinkel and Jon Oliva. "This thing has grown so fast and taken off beyond our wildest expectations."

Before they joined forces in TSO, the three musicians were involved with the heavy metal group Savatage, which signed with Atlantic Records in 1983 and released such albums as "Hall of the Mountain King" and "Streets: A Rock Opera." (O'Neill wasn't an official member of Savatage, but he produced and wrote much of the music and lyrics.) It was an obscure cut from the band's 1995 album "Dead Winter Dead" -- a rock opera about the Balkan War -- that led to the creation of TSO.

Former Atlantic executive Jason Flom (now president of Lava Records) says that Savatage was on its last legs at the label when the band delivered "Dead Winter Dead."

The album received little notice. But the band's situation changed in December 1996 when Flom received a phone call from the band's attorney, who told him that the influential radio station WPLJ New York was going to add an obscure instrumental cut from the album called "Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)."

After WPLJ program director Scott Shannon read part of the album's liner notes on-air, "the phones melted down and every store in New York sold out of the record," Flom says. By January, other stations around the country had caught wind of the song, and "we had sold an additional 45,000 units," he says.

After thinking about the success of traditional Christmas act Mannheim Steamroller, Flom asked O'Neill if he would be interested in writing a whole album of symphonic rock songs about Christmas.