![]() ![]() Davis’s arrangements include elements of progressive rock-his work is dramatic, maximal, ambitious-and of New Age music, which, in the mid-seventies, was just beginning to find its center as a genre. How to characterize the Steamroller aesthetic? The vibe is extreme. He took to describing Mannheim Steamroller as “eighteenth-century classical rock.” The outfit was named after the Mannheim roller, an intense melodic crescendo developed by the court orchestra of the German city of Mannheim, in the mid-seventeen-hundreds. ![]() With the cash he’d earned from “Convoy,” Davis decided to start his own band. It also inspired a feature film, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, and Ernest Borgnine “Convoy” went on to become the highest-grossing film of Peckinpah’s career. McCall’s first single, “ Convoy,” made it to No. Fries voiced the character Davis wrote the music. (“Old Home is good buns,” the tagline went.) The McCall character-a smooth-talking long-haul trucker, part Chuck Yeager, part Waylon Jennings-was so instantly and thoroughly beloved that Davis and Fries were offered a record deal. McCall for a series of commercials for the Old Home Bread Company. He and William Fries, the agency’s creative director, conjured up a truck driver and C.B.-radio virtuoso named C. In 1974, Davis, a classically trained bassoonist and composer, was living in Omaha, Nebraska, and writing jingles for Bozell & Jacobs, a local advertising agency. (Pause on that number for a moment-Beyonce’s “Lemonade” sold around two and a half million copies.) The project is the brainchild of Chip Davis, who arranged, conducted, and produced “Christmas.” He is also credited with playing several instruments, including the recorder, the crumhorn, and “dry ice.” In the last twenty-five years, Mannheim Steamroller has sold more than twenty-seven million Christmas albums, between “Christmas” (six million copies) and its many follow-ups. Now I say unto you: if your response to the throbbing opening synthesizer notes of “ Deck the Halls”-rejiggered, Steamroller-style, for maximum histrionics-is not “ Hell yes!,” then you have not enjoyed enough eggnog with your supper. Per a 2016 Billboard accounting, “Christmas,” Mannheim Steamroller’s first collection of boosted holiday classics, remains the third best-selling Christmas album of all time, just behind Elvis Presley and Kenny G. The enduring exception to this, of course, is the heavy, enveloping wave of the neoclassical act Mannheim Steamroller, a sound so plainly nuts and uncanny that it suggests anything is possible. Given the holiday’s origins, one could argue that most traditional Christmas music is too demure and reverential-a polite refrain of “ pa-rum-pum-pum-pum” can’t really convey the wildness of a divine miracle. The story of Christmas Day, as recounted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is fairly radical: a virgin mother gives birth to a son in a remote and frigid barn, while an angel descends to a group of shepherds and declares the baby the Saviour of all of mankind, fulfilling eons of messianic prophecies. ![]()
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