- TSO's Paul O'Neill with the stuff he makes his music with
Trans-Siberian Orchestra founder Paul O’Neill has had a busy morning. “We stayed up all night doing interviews last night and then woke up early,” he says, not sounding the least bit groggy. “After some Egg McMuffins with sausage and hash browns, we’re ready to go. It’s all good.”
This is quite a change of pace for a guy known to work all winter and hibernate during the spring and summer months. But this year, he is taking Trans-Siberian Orchestra back on the road to support Beethoven’s Last Night, a concept album the group released in 2000.
You can see TSO at 8 p.m. Friday at EJ Thomas Performing Arts Hall and at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Palace Theatre (1615 Euclid Ave., 216.241.6000, ). Here’s what the garrulous guy had to say about the current tour. —Jeff Niesel
What made you decide it was finally time to take Beethoven’s Last Night on the road?
We’ve been dying to take it out on the road for a long time. The original idea for TSO was to do several rock operas, a trilogy about Christmas and two rock albums. The trilogy took off faster than expected. It was a curse and a blessing. The blessing is that we stumbled into a Tchaikovsky. When he wrote The Nutcracker, it was just another ballet like Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. It never dawned on him that it would be associated with the holidays. I’ve been in rock ’n’ roll for 36 years, and there’s a rhythm to it. You tour for one or two years and you make an album and then you tour for one or two years. We basically go in the studio and start an album and then shut everything down and start to build these huge productions every year. The show has gotten out of control. It’s a good problem to have. It’s intentional. Pink Floyd were our idols and we have an advantage that they didn’t with the technology. [With last year’s] Night Castle we couldn’t get on a straight run, and we had to hit the road. That’s why it took over three years to finish. It’s already gone gold and will go platinum. The band is psyched to start the tour off in Ohio. Beethoven died on March 26 and we want to do the first show on the eve of his death and the second one in Akron on the day of his death. The first TSO show ever was at Palace and it sold out instantly. Look at what Cleveland has wrought.
Talk about why you think of Beethoven as the world’s first heavy metal musician.
A lot of my friends from the ’70s and ’60s are deaf now. He was deaf without the electric guitars. The other main inspiration is that we have 24 guitars and lead singers, and we tend to write about subjects that are larger than life. Hence, the Christmas trilogy. For the first non-holiday tour we wanted a subject that was larger than life. But we needed a subject that everybody couldn’t identify with. I don’t care if you are born the [poorest of the poor or you’re born a Rockefeller. I don’t care if you’re born crippled or Michael Jordan, everyone thinks you have a tough life. Everybody has problems. Look at Beethoven. He was the world’s most famous piano player, a legend at a very young rock. He started to go deaf in his twenties. They found out a decade ago that the cause of his death was probably massive lead poisoning. It would not only have caused deafness but manic depression and wild mood swings. He fought his way through all that to write the ninth symphony. It blows my mind. It’s like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel blind. He would bring countless happiness to people but couldn’t hear. It does have a happy ending based on a true fact that a lot of people don’t know. I got the inspiration from Dickens and Victor Hugo, the Who, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Dickens wrote about subjects that were larger than life. He did it in A Tale of Two Cities in the way that he doesn’t zero in on Robbespierre or Louis XVI. He does it in a way that everyone can identify with. That’s what we try to do with Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
