Brad Parmerter has issued Part 1 of a two-part interview with drummer Jeff Plate (TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA / METAL CHURCH / SAVATAGE) as part of his ongoing series of TSO interviews. An excerpt follows.

Q: What memories do you have of the first TSO tour in 1999?

A: "I always tell this story because I think it's hilarious. Johnny and I were standing on the side of the stage at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, waiting to go out, Johnny was so nervous his leg was twitching. I was sweating. We're thinking, here we are wearing tuxedos and we're gonna go out and play Christmas music, what are we doing? And the dry ice was rolling across the stage right into the laps of this older couple who were sitting in the front row. And they were dressed for a symphony orchestra performance. You know, he had this nice black tuxedo suit on, she was wearing a red dress with a shawl and hair done up. Probably 60ish in age and the dry ice was rolling off the stage right into their lap. We looked at each other and said, “We are doomed!” And we went out there and did the show and this couple loved it. They stayed the whole time! We got done with the show, took the bow, the gentleman stuck his hand up and gave me a high five and I walked off that stage and said, “Wow, I can't believe that just happened!” And that was kind of the gist of what happened every show after that. Here we are kind of questioning what's going on here. You know, we were a metal band at one point in shorts and t-shirts playing festivals and coming on and playing 'Taunting Cobras', 'Hall of the Mountain King' and now we're out here in tuxedos playing 'First Snow' and 'Mad Russians' and stuff like that. It was just a contrast to what we had come from."

Q: So you weren't nervous that you couldn't do the show well or perform well, you were nervous that you guys were just gonna bomb.

A: "We were nervous that the audience was not going to accept it. The band was very good. At the time it was, I'll say the ‘original members,’ if that's how you want to term it: myself, Johnny, Caffery, Al, Oliva was not performing but he was part of the whole thing, there was Bob Kinkel, and that core group of people had already done several Savatage records together. So we were tight as a unit. Then you added Mark Wood on electric violin, and the singers were all knocking it out of the park. As far as the talent and the ability of the band, there was really no question about that, it was just how is this audience going to accept this Christmas thing? And along with the couple that was dressed to the nines to watch our show, there's dudes in the audience with Savatage shirts and METALLICA shirts and everybody in between and it was just the weirdest scene. Here again, you come to a TSO show today you're gonna see the exact same thing, only you're gonna see 10,000 of them. It was really more a question of the audience accepting what we were doing. We knew what we were doing was different, but we were doing it well. "Let's go out here and do our thing and see what happens." And here I am 15 years later talking about it, and it's still kind of baffling, but it's great."

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