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I had a wonderful interview with the mastermind behind the holiday touring phenomenon known as Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Paul O'Neill.

Doug Van Pelt: What are some of the biggest rewards you receive from TSO?
Paul O'Neill: Ah, not having to get a real job and wake up in the morning (laughs) – which is my biggest fear in life. Honestly, it’s uh… I mean, we’ve been in the business since the 70s and TSO is basically my idea of the ultimate rock band. It has no limits. It can go anywhere. It has more members than any other band, I think, that’s ever existed. And it was basically an amalgamation of all the other bands that I was inspired by. It’s the marriage of classical and rock. We’ve obviously got some bands like Queen and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The story-telling from, like, Pink Floyd and The Who – you know, adding that third dimension with a rock opera. The multiple lead singer idea I actually got when I saw a Motown show. I think it was The Four Tops and The Temptations.

Really?
Yeah, they were on one bill. And then at the end of the show both bands came out together and they all sang together. And I was thinking, ‘Wow! I’d love to have, like, ten lead singers onstage at one time.’ And it also just gave the band the ability to go anywhere musically. We can go from Rhythm and Blues to Symphonic to Hard Rock to Metal to Gospel to Folk Rock, you know, all within the space of one album. The other thing was to try and break the corporate pigeon-holing, which has kind of happened to music. We’re the only arts that do that to ourselves. Like a painter paints with every color available... If he paints something in black and white, that’s what he wants to do. If you go see a movie, you see a little drama, then you see a little action, then a little comedy, then a romance, then a car chase scene. And you have all these different emotions you play with. Music, for some reason, we’ve started to really pigeon-hole everybody. It’s like, ‘This band can only do pop music for prepubescent girls. This one can only do it for heavy metal guys from 14 to 21. This one for adults 21 to 35…’ And it’s... you’ll never see the Boston Symphony kicking into a Reggae song. You’ll never see a Reggae group kick into a Strauss waltz. And the industry acts as if people just like one type of thing. When in actuality, human beings by their very nature, love variation. With Trans-Siberian Orchestra, we’re able to do that. The negative of the band is it’s incredibly expensive to maintain. But the positive about it is basically we can go anywhere and we can do anything to make the music have more impact. Are you aware that the band splits in half in the winter?

Yeah. I had a question about that later on…
Okay, we can attack it now. It was one of those things. When we tour Beethoven’s Last Night or when we finish Night Castle, the new album, those tours can go out and stay out for as long as it takes – 6 months, 9 months, 12 months – it doesn’t matter. But one of the founding ideals of TSO is that we would do anything, pay any expense, look under any rock, peek around any corner to make the music have more emotional impact. And we realized, with the holiday rock operas, there was such a demand for them that our agents basically wanted us to start in October something and finish in late January, and it just didn’t feel right to us. It’s A Wonderful Life is a great movie whenever you see it; but if you see it in November, which is a Thanksgiving month, or December, which is a Christmas month, it has a little bit more impact. Christmas Carol by Dickens – great story whenever you read it. You read it in June, May, it’s still a great story; but if you read it in November, which has the Thanksgiving, the holiday deal or December, it cuts a little bit deeper. So what we decided to do was to split the band in half. ‘Cause we have 60 members – 30 core members, 30 revolving members. So, with the band split in half, this way we can cover twice as many cities in November/December. We still have basically 30 band members onstage, which is still 5 times bigger than your average band. The average group probably has four or five. In the beginning we were really nervous about it, but the bands seem to accept it, and I think that was just because it works. They understand what we’re doing and it just played into the way the band was set up – anything the band could imagine, the band could do.

Cool. I saw the 2004 and 2005 shows in Austin, which I loved. I was curious as to why I saw the same traveling group. Was that intentional? Or why is that?
No, it’s just the band splits in half and pretty much we let the band the band figure it out: ‘Who wants to go East? Who wants to go West?’ And it works out. The band, again, has tons of fire power. The band has 4 lead guitar players, which we kind of stole from, you know, Lynyrd Skynyrd or The Outlaws – bands that had multiple lead guitar players and had these unbelievable guitar duels. I wanted to bring that back into music. You know, the double drummers – from bands like The Doobie Brothers, The Grateful Dead… Basically everybody in the group can sing. So it gives us a lot of power vocally, not to mention all the singers we carry with us, including the background singers.

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