What is Trans-Siberian Orchestra? How one member tried to explain it to her parents.
If you mention to someone that you’re going to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra on Saturday at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, and they tell you they’re not familiar with the group’s music, there’s a quick and easy way to help them get the picture: YouTube clips.
Pretty much any footage you call up will provide a taste of what the holiday-themed tour has to offer.
But back when Mee Eun Kim joined TSO, in 2000, YouTube wasn’t around yet — which made explaining the concept to her parents rather challenging.
“How would you describe Trans-Siberian Orchestra to somebody who doesn’t know about it? It’s so hard to do,” says Kim, a native of South Korea who has played keyboards off and on for two decades (and every year since 2011) for TSO. “It’s like, ‘Mom, Dad, it’s kind of a rock band, but we do play Christmas music. And we do have a little bit of jazzy blues ... and there’s a classical string section.’ They’re like, ‘What?’ It was not easy for them to imagine what I was doing.”
At the time, Kim was a recent graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music who had been writing and producing for Korean artists even as a student, and her father had every expectation that she would return home to fully launch her career in South Korea.
“And then boom, I started touring with these long-haired rock guys. So my parents had to come and see it ... and they were really blown away. I remember my dad saying — or, well, he told my mom. He would never tell me. He was too proud. He told her, ‘OK, now I am very pleased,’” Kim recalls, laughing.
Long-haired rock guys have been a calling card for Trans-Siberian Orchestra since the early days; after all, the group was originally a side project started by the members of heavy-metal band Savatage and led by Paul O’Neill, who throughout the band’s heyday was its go-to producer and co-writer of many of its biggest songs.
In fact, one of Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s most popular non-original members is long-haired rock guy Joel Hoekstra, who like Kim has — since 2011 — been a mainstay on the TSO East tour (a second set of musicians performs as TSO in the western U.S. concurrently from mid-November through December).
He started as a hired gun juggling two other jobs: one as the lead guitarist for Night Ranger and another as a performer in “Rock of Ages” on Broadway. “I knew that TSO was hugely successful, and I knew some of the people in the band. But I had never seen a show when I got the gig.”
Nine seasons in, he feels like part of one big, noise-making family. “This is my holiday tradition,” says Hoekstra, whose off-season touring jobs now include playing lead guitar for Whitesnake and Cher. “It’s hard to explain, but I would feel really, really strange not doing TSO come holiday time.”
It’s an image of Hoekstra, by the way, that you’ll see first if you do search for Trans-Siberian Orchestra on YouTube. He’s in silhouette, down on one knee, the neck of his electric guitar pointed skyward, and his head thrown back so that his blonde mane cascades behind him, catching the glow of the spotlight just right. It’s one of a variety of ways in which he likes to ham it up on stage.
And when he’s not striking a guitar-hero pose, you’ll often catch him smiling — at fans, at fellow band members, and sometimes, for who knows what reason.
“That’s not feigned or fake in any way, shape or form,” Hoekstra says. “Look, I feel happy to be alive, and I feel happy to be healthy. These are things that I check in with every day. So it starts with the basics. Then to be actually standing with a guitar, doing what I love, what I set out to do when I was a kid, for thousands of people, with my friends, playing music that I enjoy ... I mean, what do I have to be unhappy about?”
The guitarist will smile and bite his lip and scrunch his face and drop to his knee to play during two shows in Charlotte on Saturday (one at 3 p.m. and another at 8), when he and Kim will join five other musicians and 10 vocalists in performing two sets — the first of which will feature a revival of TSO’s original rock opera “Christmas Eve and Other Stories.”
That set includes Trans-Siberian Orchestra classics like “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24,” “O’ Come All Ye Faithful,” “Good King Joy,” “Promises to Keep” and “This Christmas Day”; the second set will be bolstered by greatest hits and fan favorites like “Christmas Canon” and “Wizards in Winter.”
Beyond that, Hoekstra doesn’t want to spoil any of the visual surprises. “We like to roll with the shock and awe, so I have to be kinda tight-lipped about that stuff,” he says.
But it wouldn’t matter if the entire concert was posted online in advance. Fans would still buy tickets and come out for the show, because — well, because that’s how TSO fans like to roll during the holiday season. Every holiday season.
“They keep coming back,” Kim says. “Like, why do you keep going back home to visit? Why do you always eat turkey on Thanksgiving, or why do you always have certain food for Christmas? It’s some familiarity, and that comfort they get from coming back to see us and hearing the music they know.
“It’s a tradition. It’s like, ‘OK, it’s Christmas, we gotta go see a TSO show.’ Otherwise ... it’s not Christmas.”
Trans-Siberian Orchestra
When: 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Spectrum Center, 333 E. Trade St.
Tickets: $49.50 and up.
Details: 800-745-3000; www.ticketmaster.com.
Théoden Janes: 704-358-5897, @theodenjanes
This story was originally published December 2, 2019 at 4:44 PM.
