Wildly successful Savatage-offshoot—as we know them in the metal world—Trans-Siberian Orchestra, have kicked off their huge Christmas season, presenting an all-new show, namely the live debut of The Christmas Attic.

Hours before the band’s Toronto show at the Air Canada Centre, guitarist Chris Caffery, a long-time friend of BraveWords through his past with Savatage and as a rip-roarin’ solo artist, sets the scene for the cool Yule to come...

“Well, the stage set and story are completely different,” begins Caffery. “I mean, this stage is unlike I’ve anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s a stage set that is made to resemble a giant chest, because the story of Christmas Attic is this girl wanders into the attic, and she discovers this chest, and it has all these letters in it, and that’s what the story is—they match each song on the album. And Bryan Hartley and Paul O’Neill, they came up with a way of making this chest actually be part of the stage. And at the beginning of the show, the drums come alive, and the strings and keyboards come out of this thing and it’s awesome. Plus there’s a lot of different three-dimensional cinema screen work and things that we’ve never done before. It’s an amazing set. So apart from the fact that it’s an entirely new story, it’s an entirely new feel and look to the stage itself; definitely something that’s completely different all the way around.”
“It’s the same as always with how it’s done: we sell the story,” explains Chris, on the challenges of presenting this particular album, the band’s second, issued back in 1998. “So the biggest challenge comes, I think, in Paul putting together the narration and the flow of that to where it’s not too long, but long enough to tell the story. You know, the songs are in the order they are on the record. We really can’t do much about that. I think we might’ve switched one thing around, just to kind of break up some vocal and instrument songs, but the story has to go where it goes (laughs). You really can’t change it. So it kind of writes itself that way. There’s a lot of material that is in this show that we’ve played before, but there’s a lot we haven’t played. So it was just a matter of this being the only piece of the Christmas trilogy that’s never been played as a piece live.”

 

 

Being a senior member now, around from day one, I wondered if Chris’ role in the band had changed over the years.

“Not really a tremendous amount. You just get more relaxed and do your thing a little bit more comfortably. Al (Pitrelli – guitars) and Jeff (Plate – drums) really pay attention to a lot of the details, but now we’ve all really started to tighten up the band in the live situation. I think in the past... the biggest change for me was like I used to go up there and have a lot of fun and not really pay a lot of attention to details. And that’s what we do now, especially with everybody being with the in-ears. There’s a lot of that, with a lot of these instrumentals being locked to specific time code. You have to be playing to the click tracks, so everything is kind of tightened up. As far as everything else goes, it hasn’t really changed that much, other than I might be, you know, older and little bit slower (laughs).”

As for highlights now, an astonishing 16 years into the ever-evolving pageant? “Usually ‘Wizards in Winter’ gets a really big pop from the crowd. That song has got a lot of energy live. And as far as the vocal performances go, it’s funny, the songs that are really getting big pops are the ones that Daryl Pediford sang. It’s ten years since he had passed away, and the ‘Three Kings’ song and ‘Music Box Blues’ are kind of two that really showcase the vocals more in the show, and they happen to be his songs. And then you get to the second half of the show, and there’s a song that’s on the Dreams of Fireflies EP, ‘Someday;’ Kayla Reeves gets to sing that and that kind of showcases her. But most of the vocal songs in the first half are really just emotional kind of power, you know, heavy power ballads. They’re not really showcasing vocals in that way that the other ones do.”

 

 

Another very cool function of TSO however, is the almost surreptitious flying of the flag for metal—or at least learning a friggin’ instrument—that TSO demonstrates in fine fashion, leading by example.

“Well, you definitely see that,” notes Chris. “I mean, we see people that bring their children—because we do the autograph signings after the show—and you’ll see people that have their children there that were seeing the band at age 5, and this being our 16th year on the road and you’ll see them at age 15, and they’ll be like, ‘You know, he’s playing guitar three-and-a-half years now and you’re his favourite guitarist.’ That’s the craziest thing, when people will tell me I’m their inspiration or the reason why they play guitar, because they’ve watched me and that’s what they wanted to do. And that’s the most surreal part about all of this, because I had my people like the K.K. Downings and the Ace Frehleys and the people like that. Even Rik Emmett, being here in Canada, to think about that. I wish I had a way to invite him down to the show, because he was one of my hugest inspirations, especially being a lefty that played right. But we definitely see that. This band is made on the music and singing, and one is as important as the other. Not that it is isn’t important to an AC/DC song, if there’s music, but we have songs that have no vocals, which is something they don’t. So we have these points where, yes, you can just play an instrument and you can be a part of something like this. There’s a way to be a classical musician. Like it kind of opens people’s eyes to a lot of different ways. You know, you can be a classical musician who plays rock, and you can also be a rock musician that plays classical.”
“You always dream of being in something that gets to this level of success,” says Chris, who has known the trenches, but through this odd phenomenon, gets to also know about gold and platinum records. “You know, you want to be a rock star, you want to have the tour buses, you want to have sold-out shows, you want to see this, that and the other. And so when it all happens, I think you feel pretty special. Especially for us—four guys in Savatage that are out touring this right now (ed. split between the east and the west troupes of TSO). I mean, we stepped up on stage 16 years ago feeling like a bunch of sheep going in front of a pack of wolves. We didn’t know what to expect. We were a metal band, we came from metal bands, and we were going up there in these tuxedos about to play this music. Yet Paul had had complete confidence the whole entire time that this was going to be exactly where it was—and that’s the genius part about Paul. But us, we had to go up there and sell it, and it was a bit nerve-racking. But then we saw that it was working, and then we watched it build. It went from theatres to multiple shows in theatres to multiple days of shows in theatres, to breaking into the arenas, to multiple shows in arenas, to multiple shows of days in the arenas, to... you know, and now you’re gonna bring it to the festival level. And so it’s just been really cool to be a part of it from the first second.”

 

 

(TSO live photos by Jason McEachern)