Al Pitrelli stood on the stage in a tuxedo and draped his guitar around his neck. As he waited for the house lights to go down, he couldn’t help but wonder what kind of audience would greet the Trans-Siberian Orchestra on the other side of the curtain.
At that point, the band had released a couple of heavy metal Christmas-themed albums that people were buying. But now, a few years in, Pitrelli was about to be face-to-face with that fan base for the first time.
When the curtains rose for the sold-out show at Pennsylvania’s Tower Theater, a venue the guitarist had last played with Alice Cooper, Pitrelli played his first note and looked into the audience.
“I almost had a heart attack,” he said.
Pitrelli recalled seeing an older couple wearing crocheted Christmas sweaters with reindeers on them. Directly next to that couple sat a man in a Slayer hoodie. The guitarist said he did the sign of the cross and thought to himself, “This is either going to go really great or really bad.”
He didn’t know if he should expect flowers or tomatoes.
But all the uncertainties Pitrelli brought into the theater had completely dissipated by the end of the show.
“We got the biggest standing ovation that I’ve ever witnessed in my life,” he said.
And that warm reception has followed him tour after tour for the past 23 years — including the band’s current “Ghosts of Christmas Eve” tour, which stops for two shows at Salt Lake City’s Vivint Arena on Tuesday before heading to the West Coast.
TSO ‘keeps growing’
When Trans-Siberian Orchestra performed that first show in Pennsylvania, the band had a pair of buses and a box truck of equipment to help pull off its signature special effects — including an arsenal of laser lights and pyrotechnics.
Last year, Pitrelli counted 21 tractor-trailers and 12 buses.
Pitrelli talks about TSO’s growth the same way he talks about his oldest child, who is 37 and a master chief in the Coast Guard special forces.
“I watched him grow from infancy through adolescence to adulthood becoming a man that I couldn’t even imagine. I’m so proud of him,” Pitrelli said. “That’s what TSO is like. It’s like one of your children. I can’t believe that we’re approaching three decades — and it keeps growing. Everybody loves this kid.”
Over the years, Pitrelli has watched TSO become a multigenerational tradition for families — fans who started out coming to the show when they were kids are now bringing their own kids.
“The width of the age just keeps growing and growing and growing,” said Pitrelli, who recently turned 60 but said he feels like a 16-year-old every single time he takes the stage. The guitarist said he was especially emotional when he learned that 250,000 homes streamed the band’s online concert in 2020, when the pandemic shutdown made the massive annual tour an impossible undertaking.
A major part of TSO’s fanbase are the people who come back year after year — fans Pitrelli affectionately calls the “repeat offenders.” The guitarist even noted that one fan recently celebrated his 700th TSO show.
With an East Coast and West Coast winter tour that often sees two shows a day, TSO’s production is a well-oiled machine, what Pitrelli described as a “choreographed, almost military endeavor.” Planning the show is a year-round project, and every single move is rehearsed — down to the synchronized hair flips.
But to keep the loyal fans guessing, Pitrelli said the band likes to mix it up a little for each tour. This year’s show sees the band performing songs they’ve never done live before, he said.
And while you can count on the show to get bigger and brighter each year, Pitrelli said, one aspect remains untouched: The message at the center of it all, created by late TSO founder Paul O’Neill.
Remembering TSO founder Paul O’Neill
This year, TSO is performing “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve,” a story about a runaway girl who finds refuge in an abandoned theater on Christmas Eve. With help from the theater’s resident ghosts, the girl is eventually able to reunite with her family.
Pitrelli has gravitated more toward the story as he’s gotten older, and as he’s lost some of his own friends, including O’Neill.
“There’s always been an empty chair at my dining room table, which seems much more apparent especially around the holiday season,” he said. “And what I realize is everybody in the audience has the same thought — everybody misses somebody. And the fact that … 15,000 people in an arena connect with the full story because everybody misses somebody, it doesn’t lessen your pain. … But you know that at least you’re not alone.”
It’s been five years since O’Neill died. Pitrelli said he thinks of his late friend “every second of every day.” Every TSO show is a manifestation of O’Neill’s artistic vision. When Pitrelli places his guitar around his neck at the start of each show, he feels gratitude for the man who has allowed him to live out his dream of being a musician night after night — a dream Pitrelli had ever since seeing The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when he was just 2 years old.
“Everything that I am is because of that man,” Pitrelli said. “Everything I’m able to live is because of this art that he created. That’s Paul O’Neill.”
For a time, at the start of the pandemic, Pitrelli thought he may never perform for a live audience again. It didn’t take long for him to realize he’d been taking his career for granted — TSO was a beloved, well-established holiday tradition, and “who’s ever going to take Christmas away from us, right?” he said.
When the band pivoted and, like most musicians, performed an online show in 2020, Pitrelli closed his eyes and let the memories from all of his years playing in front of a live audience wash over him. Now that’s he’s back on a stage performing for packed arenas, the guitarist is celebrating each show a little bit more, hanging on to the thrill of it all just a little tighter.
“I’d do this in a Hazmat suit — I don’t care,” he said. “This is who and what I am, and I love what I do.”