Trans-Siberian Orchestra drummer Jeff Plate on 25 years of touring and hard rock Christmas music

When Trans-Siberian Orchestra started touring theaters in 1999, they traveled with just one 24-foot box truck, filled with a couple dozen lights, a fog machine and a star curtain.

“It was really more about, let’s put this thing on stage and see if this is going to work. Obviously it worked,” said Jeff Plate, Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s drummer. “There were more questions than answers at that time. But we started out very small because it was a big production.

“It was a big group of people to take a huge risk on doing a large tour. So Paul (O’Neill)’s first move was, let’s just take it out there for a few shows in select cities and make sure this thing is going to work. And from that first tour on, it has just been moving upward and getting bigger every year.”

Fast forward 25 years and TSO, founded by the late producer Paul O’Neill, is touring with 20 tractor trailers full of lighting and sound equipment. Known for their elaborate live shows, the symphonic Christmas hard rock band has grown so in demand to necessitate two touring groups, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast. They’ll hit Pittsburgh on Dec. 21 for a pair of shows (2:30 and 7:30 p.m.) at PPG Paints Arena, in a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of the group’s 2004 album, “The Lost Christmas Eve.”

“Paul loved production. He wanted to wow the audience, give them everything that they bargained for. And we’ve kind of reached the limit of the size of show that we can do considering the schedule that we have. But it is massive. It’s massive. … There’s a million moving parts in the show. And they almost always go off without a hitch. It really just blows my mind at how well run everything is because I’m sitting in the middle of it, I see everything that’s going on. And it’s amazing. Night after night, day after day, tour after tour, it just runs so smoothly.”

In a recent interview, Plate discussed “The Lost Christmas Eve,” reaching 20 million fans and the enduring appeal of Christmas music:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of “The Lost Christmas Eve,” so what makes this year’s show special?

“Lost Christmas Eve” is the third installment in Paul O’Neill’s Christmas trilogy that he wrote for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. We haven’t done this show in probably 12, 13 years. So it’s going to be pretty cool to bring this one back to the stage. And unfortunately we lost Paul O‘Neill back in 2017. And even at that point, Paul was talking about trying to revise the show and bring it back. So, this year being the anniversary of the release of the album, Paul’s family and management decided that this is a very good time to bring this one back out. Fans have been asking for this for quite a long time. This show and this story were very well received when we did this some years ago. And it contained some of our biggest hits: “Wizards in Winter,” “Christmas Canon Rock, “Siberian Sleigh Ride.” So there’s just a ton of great music on this album. And it’s going to be another great show.

When you started, could you ever imagine that it’d be going for this many years?

No, I don’t think any of us could. When “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” was first released in 1995, released by the band Savatage, which I was a member of and Paul was producing and managing at the time, that song within a couple months became like this instant holiday hit. And this opened the door for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra to be created. But prior to us touring, we had released two albums “Christmas Eve and Other Stories” and “The Christmas Attic,” both were very well-received. “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” that entire album was a big hit for the holidays and not to mention “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo” was slowly becoming part of the holiday tradition.

So we knew we had something musically that was really, really working. Paul had created something that was really getting the public’s attention. But to think that we would be doing these massive tours every year — every year in a row for that matter except for covid — and the audience would be growing every year and these tours would just be so successful every year, when we first stepped on stage in 1999, I don’t think anybody had any clue that this was going to develop into this. Maybe except Paul. He was always kind of ahead of the curve on all of this. He was seeing a little bit further down the road than a lot of us were, but it’s just been an amazing ride, and there seems to be no end in sight.

It sounds like there was a void for hard rock Christmas music and (TSO) filled that void.

Up to that point and even still today, there’s a lot of artists that do Christmas songs. There’s a lot of rock artists that do Christmas songs, and they’re all kind of safe. I think when “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo” hit the airwaves, once you got past the intro with the cello and the guitar, which was very pretty and very serene, boom! Here comes the drums and the power chord and it was like, holy cow, we didn’t see that coming. I think it was just such a shift from the normal style of Christmas music, rock Christmas music, for that matter. It just really got everybody’s attention, and like I said, Paul followed it up with two other great albums that followed the same formula. He was on to something from the very beginning, but once he really got rolling, he perfected his style, him and his writing team really made some great things happen, and then surround all this with the stories that Paul had, that went along with every album, all of this just connected with the audience in such a big way.

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TSO will be hitting 20 million fans this year. Is that mind-boggling to think that you’ve played for that many people?

For people that don’t know, when TSO tours every winter, we have two different touring groups. We have an East Coast group and a West Coast group. This actually happened in the year 2000, the very second year that we toured, because all of a sudden, they were hit with so many offers and so many shows to do, there was no way to cover all of this in the short amount of time that we had. So Paul and his team decided, let’s split the original cast in two, we’ll fill out all the other players, the musicians and vocalists, and we’ll send this thing out with two different groups and try to cover as much ground as we can. So having said that, we’ve been running like this ever since the year 2000, so between both bands we played to close to a million people every year, and it’s one of the highest-grossing tours every year, one of the most-attended tours every year.

And thinking of the short amount of time that we do this, it’s literally like seven and a half weeks that we do this tour. I think 110 shows, 66 cities. It’s remarkable what we’ve been able to do, but I do these interviews every year, and we talk about these numbers and things. You see 20 million, you’re like, wow. It’s just amazing. Along with that is the $20 million in charity that we’ve donated over the years, too. A dollar per ticket has gone to charity ever since we started playing. And that was another thing that Paul instituted from the very beginning was helping out the local community, so every local station or the promoter picks the charity in that town. They know what’s going on. They know where this money needs to go. And we’re all very, very proud of not just the charitable work that we’ve done, but just everything else that’s been accomplished over the years. It’s really pretty cool.

Is it ever too early for Christmas music?

(laughs) For some people, no. I mean, I get comments all the time, I listen to your music all year round. Hey, you know, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. There’s a little bit of everything in TSO. There’s the classical element. There’s the rock element. There’s a progressive element. There’s some blues in there. There’s some really beautiful acoustic songs. There is a little bit of everything. And the fact that TSO’s Christmas music really isn’t like anything else, it all makes sense. Whatever makes people happy, and if it puts them in a good mood, no matter what time of year, I think that’s pretty cool.