Trans-Siberian Orchestra to start its 2024 'Last Christmas Eve' tour in Council Bluffs

Wednesday evening at the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Trans-Siberian Orchestra will close out a month's worth of rehearsals with the first show of its 2024 tour that will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its rock opera "The Last Christmas Eve."

Arguably the biggest ongoing holiday touring production of the past 25 years, TSO also will be celebrating two milestones with the tour that begins, as it does every year, in the Council Bluffs arena where the orchestra gathers and rehearses, starting in late October.

Those milestones: 20 million tickets sold and more than $20 million in donations to charity, numbers that would seem to be impossible for a show that tours for just two months of the year.

But TSO has a secret weapon (or two rather) it uses to pull that off.

"Most people don't realize we have two different touring groups," said TSO music director and lead guitarist Al Pitrelli. "There's a West Coast and East Coast group. So when you look at that schedule, it's literally impossible for one band to cover all that.

"We've been doing this with two bands ever since the year 2000, but we play to roughly 1 million people a year between the two groups. Along with that, is the charity, the dollar per ticket."

The two groups rehearse in the Mid-America Center at the same time, one stage set at each end of the arena floor, as the cast and crew put together the lavish production that brings a rock show, complete with pyrotechnics, together with the music and story written by TSO's late founder Paul O'Neill.

For Pitrelli, TSO grew up out of a single song the group recorded for its debut album, "Christmas Eve and Other Stories."

"It'll be 30 years ago this coming February or March, when I first started working with (drummer) Jeff (Plate), the guys in Sabotage and Paul," Pitrelli said. "When Paul first put the faders up on "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo, 12/24" I knew that there was something ... artistically that he was going after than what would have been maybe the norm in that era. And I knew people would be drawn to it."

Plate had the same feeling during the sessions for "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24."

"When we recorded this song, there was no denying when you heard it, it was fantastic," he said. "You hadn't heard anything like it. Christmas music up to that point had been relatively safe. Even if a rock band was doing a Christmas song, they really sugared it up quite a bit. There wasn't much of an edge to it. That song certainly had an edge."

"Christmas Eve and Other Stories" went platinum. So did 1998's "The Christmas Attic," setting the table for TSO's groundbreaking tour.

"I've always thought when we started touring back in 1999, the curiosity of people that come to see the band was one thing," Plate said. "But I think once they got in the room it's the story, it's the lyrics, it's the songs. I think Paul's story is the star of the show."

The first couple of TSO tours were far from the massive undertakings that find about 40 semi-trucks and buses rolling out of Council Bluffs each November as the two bands hit the road.

"We started (in) '99 Jeff and I," Pitrelli said. It was one band back then. We had one box truck, a bus and a fog machine, and Paul had a saying: 'Put everything back into the show, make it bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.' We always want to surprise the repeat offenders and the folks who are coming for the first time have no idea what to expect anyway. We absolutely want to keep them on their heels as well."

Now TSO with its stories and music, has become a holiday tradition for the thousands who come to the shows each year.

"It has become, like 'It's a Wonderful Life' or in my case, 'A Charlie Brown Christmas,' where I want that comfort of the familiarity of my holiday tradition to remind myself," Pitrelli said. "But to be honest, becoming families' holiday tradition was never on my radar."

That, he said, began to be clear before the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2020 TSO learned just how much it meant to fans who wanted to keep their holiday traditions alive.

"When we had to cancel our tour and the only thing we had to do was livestreaming, we didn't really know too much about what was going on with that," Pitrelli said.

"We played one show that year, which was a gift for us, when we found that 250,000 homes purchased that livestream because they wanted to spend the holidays with their favorite band celebrating that story again, that's when I said, 'You know what, this is a lot bigger than I thought it was.'"