Al Pitrelli is a live in the moment kind of guy.
It’s come in handy as a 63-year-old grandfather, who also has more than a dozen nieces and nephews. When family comes to visit, he’s ready to wholeheartedly embrace the fun — albeit with a magic eraser and broom on hand to quickly clean up some inevitable messes along the way.
As a guitarist who has been with Alice Cooper, Megadeth and Trans-Siberian Orchestra, it has been key to his success.
While going on tour generally means performing the same set list night after night, Pitrelli prefers to think of performing in terms of individual shows rather than the whole tour at large.
He treats each show like it’s his first — and that’s because for at least one person in the audience, it likely is a first.
But as Trans-Siberian Orchestra is soon approaching 30 years since releasing their first album, “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” Pitrelli is getting a little reflective.
He talks about TSO’s evolution the same way he talks about his children.
“You hold them as an infant, you’re half riddled with jubilance and the other half terrified, like, ‘What do I do?’” he told the Deseret News during a recent phone call. “And now I’m looking at this thing, it’s gonna turn 30.
“But the fact that it keeps growing and more people fall in love with it,” he continued, “I’m just so proud of what this has become.”
This week, Trans-Siberian Orchestra brings “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve: The Best of TSO and More” tour to Salt Lake City — the first place they tried out playing both a matinee and evening show, which has since become a regular part of their touring schedule.
Ahead of the Wednesday shows at the Delta Center, Pitrelli talked about his love for the Utah fanbase (and his go-to spot for food), 30 years of TSO and how he walks the fine line of making a show that is a holiday tradition for so many new and exciting.
Why Utah holds a place in Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s heart
Pitrelli doesn’t have a specific reason Salt Lake City was the place for TSO’s inaugural matinee.
“But I’m very proud that it was, because we love it here,” he said.
Now, after more than 20 years of coming through Salt Lake City, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra tour would be incomplete without that stop, Pitrelli said.
“It really is like a second home, just because we know it so well,” the guitarist said.
Since TSO’s schedule usually allows for some downtime in Utah, Pitrelli likes to walk around Salt Lake City. He’s wandered around City Creek, and always makes a point to walk by the Ferrari dealership that’s about a mile away from Whole Foods — ”just walk by it, can’t afford it,” he only slightly jokes.
Some members in the band like to go skiing in Park City — “Please don’t break anything, and make it to the show,” Pitrelli will tell them.
Pitrelli also has a go-to place for food: Mumbai House.
He’ll order a bunch of food from the Salt Lake restaurant for some band members to eat while sitting on the tour bus catching up on sleep or shows.
“Great Indian food,” he said. “It’s just awesome.”
But one of Pitrelli’s greatest memories in Utah — and in TSO’s nearly 30-year history — is that first matinee show. Along with the band’s first-ever show, a gig at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, and the first arena show the band ever played — the home of the Portland Trailblazers — that Utah matinee is a standout moment.
“When we started coming through Salt Lake, I’d never heard a crowd that loud in my life,” Pitrelli said.
Tran-Siberian Orchestra, ‘a 30-year diary’
Before TSO’s first show, the band had released a couple of heavy metal Christmas-themed albums that people were buying. But a few years in, as he was about to be face-to-face with that fanbase for the first time, Pitrelli really had no idea what to expect.
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.
He recalled seeing an older couple wearing crocheted Christmas sweaters with reindeers on them. Directly next to them sat a man in a Slayer hoodie.
That eccentric visual, Pitrelli said, ended up foreshadowing the wide range of fans who find meaning in the work of TSO’s founder, the late Paul O’Neill.
The guitarist has witnessed TSO become a multigenerational tradition for families, with fans who’ve been following them for 20-plus years now bringing their own kids and grandchildren. He’s been the backdrop for wedding proposals — usually during the song “Christmas Canon” — and watched the formation of new families.
For the guitarist himself, the meaning of the songs he has played countless times have changed over time. The song “Ornament” from TSO’s first album, about a father’s prayer for his runaway daughter to return home on Christmas Day, hits harder now that he has two kids in the military.
“It’s almost like having a 30-year diary,” he said. “I don’t spend a whole heck of a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror, but every so often I’ll take a peek. I’m like, ‘Wow, this is going pretty good so far.’ But the task at hand is to make this year’s tour better than last year’s tour.”
‘It really does take all year long to do this’
Trans-Siberian Orchestra has firmly established itself as a holiday tradition, with shows across the country extending from mid-November to the end of December.
But in terms of planning, there’s really not an offseason for the band. The artistry, Pitrelli said, comes from all corners of the TSO organization — the lighting, lasers, pyro, music, etc. — and it is a massive undertaking.
”It really does take all year long to do this,” Pitrelli said, noting that last year’s tour included 21 tractor-trailers, 12 buses and 100 crew people.
Pitrelli usually returns to the drawing board during the second week of January for what he described as “conversations and arguments and, you know, the occasional agreement.”
Planning a show each year is a delicate balancing act. As a yearly tradition for many fans, the show comes with certain expectations. But at the same time, Pitrelli doesn’t want it to get stale.
He lovingly calls TSO’s biggest fans “repeat offenders” — the ones who come back year after year. In his mind, he wouldn’t be doing his job — or at least doing it well — if those fans came back to a show they’d already seen.
This year, the centerpiece of the show is “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve,” the rock opera that tells the story of a girl who runs away and finds refuge in an abandoned theater on Christmas Eve. Written by Paul O’Neill, it’s a story Pitrelli said has resonated with fans and become their new version of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or “Miracle on 34th Street.”
That story, which Pitrelli calls “the star of the show,” remains intact. But this year’s tour also features music Pitrelli said TSO hasn’t done in 15-20 years — including a set of songs that celebrates the 25th anniversary of the rock opera “Beethoven’s Last Night,” which tells the fictional story of the composer’s final day on Earth.
“I always want the music to grow,” Pitrelli said. “Somebody told me a long time ago that a complete art is a dead art. And I just kind of like how it’s moving forward, the evolution of it.
“I owe it to Paul O’Neill and his legacy, myself as an artist, the people in the band, management, Paul’s family, and the people in the audience,” he said. “I’m gonna work hard every year, deconstructing it and putting it back together bigger and better.”
Each night he takes the stage, Pitrelli says he’s living out a dream that started to take shape when he was 2 years old and saw The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
“My dad always told me, ‘If you’re having a good life, it’s gonna go by in five minutes.’ And here we are.”