Holidays sparkle, steam on stage

Mannheim Steamroller's holiday show aims to "take a place like the Ice Palace and turn it into a complete Christmas environment,'' complete with music, snowmen and Christmas village.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 23, 2000

Publicity photo] Seasonal favorite Mannheim Steamroller is bringing its Christmas show to the Ice Palace on Dec. 12.

Starting about 25 years ago, Mannheim Steamroller defined the new age genre with a string of best-selling albums of founder Chip Davis' self-styled "18th century classical rock."

But when Davis wanted to make a Christmas album, record industry executives pooh-poohed the idea.

"I was told by the distributors that artists only do a Christmas album when you've run out of ideas or you're trying to fulfill a contract," he said. "Well, I said I didn't care. I wanted to do it because I like music from the Renaissance, which was right around the time when a lot of the Christmas carols we know today were minstrel songs. So I just went ahead and did the album myself."

And the rest is holiday-music history. Mannheim Steamroller Christmas sold more than 5-million copies on the strength of Davis' arrangements of Deck the Halls, We Three Kings and other standards.

On its own American Gramaphone label, Mannheim Steamroller went on to make a series of Christmas albums whose sales total 18-million. Now the band is on tour with a multimedia Christmas show that comes to Tampa's Ice Palace in December.

"We take a place like the Ice Palace and turn it into a complete Christmas environment," Davis said in a phone interview from Omaha, where he lives on a 100-acre spread and the label is based.

"Right from the minute you walk in the door, you'll start bumping into costumed characters, like snowmen and gingerbread men. There will be a choir singing. As you walk into the arena, instead of there being mercury vapor lights on like there would be for a sporting event, there's a theatrical lighting rig and a 6,000-square-foot Christmas village."

The stage is equipped with three video screens on which a movie of a medieval feast is projected.

"I take you back to the year 1490," Davis said. "I shot a $2.5-million, 20-minute film over in London reenacting what a holiday feast would have been like back then. The film is sometimes interactive with the group, as if we're playing as the minstrels for that feast."

Along with Christmas music, the show includes selections from Davis' Fresh Aire series, eight albums based on themes from the seasons to Greek mythology to infinity.

Greet the season With productions of The Nutcracker, Messiah and A Christmas Carol scheduled, tradition rules, but there are plenty of twists and turns.

Davis, who plays percussion in Mannheim Steamroller, has solid musical credentials. Trained at the University of Michigan, where he was bassoonist in the concert band, he sang with the Norman Luboff Choir and taught music at a junior high in his hometown of Sylvania, Ohio.

He sees himself in the tradition of American classical composers like Aaron Copland, whom Davis once met when both were testifying before Congress about copyright issues. The difference is that Davis came along when technology revolutionized music.

"I have always constructed pieces in a very classical way," he said. "But because of the recording medium, I've probably been allowed to have more freedom than Copland ever had. Mozart would be having a blast right now in a modern recording studio."

There are a couple of fascinating pop-culture twists to the Mannheim Steamroller story. In the 1970s, when Davis was an advertising jingle writer in Omaha, he wrote the music for C.W. McCall, the fictional truck driver whose Convoy and other ditties capitalizing on the Citizen Band radio craze sold millions.

"The C.W. McCall band was almost exactly the same group of guys who Mannheim Steamroller is," he said. "We got out our slide guitars and did that shtick for a while."

From a merchandising standpoint, Mannheim Steamroller is something of an innovator, with not just its own record label but a thriving business in everything from videos and T-shirts to bubble bath, barbecue sauce and coffee.

It doesn't hurt that the band has picked up some influential fans, such as Rush Limbaugh, who has played Mannheim Steamroller music on his talk radio show.

"Rush is a huge fan," Davis said. "He's come to our shows. You wouldn't believe how many people first heard about us from him."

At a glance

The Mannheim Steamroller Christmas show is 7:30 p.m. Dec. 12 at the Ice Palace. Tickets: $25-$75. (813) 301-2500; http://www. icepalace.com

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