ALBANY—It took some time for well-traveled, NY-bred guitarist Al Pitrelli to find his forever home, and he found it in a pretty unlikely place: As lead guitarist and musical director for Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the progressive metal holiday music phenomenon that has been the darling of the touring industry for decades, raking in the ticket sales, while doing an incredible amount of philanthropic giving. In the end, it wasn’t just Pitrelli’s shredding that landed him the job; but rather his uncanny ability to improvise, adapt and read music.
Coming up in the Long Island and NYC music scene in the late ’70s and mid ’80s, Pitrelli honed his chops playing everywhere and with everyone, eventually making a name for himself in the NYC studio session circles. Later, he landed key gigs with big names like Alice Cooper, Savatage and Megadeth, but still, never seemed to find a permanent place of artistic residence. Then Paul O’Neill, founder of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, came into his life.
What began in the mid ’90s as an unassuming collaboration between Pitrelli and the late O’Neill (who passed in 2017) quickly grew into the recording and touring gargantuan Trans-Siberian Orchestra has become. The shows are in such demand that there’s now both an East Coast and West Coast band, and Trans-Siberian Orchestra perpetually ranks among the top earning live acts, despite only performing a couple of months out of the year. (As of July 2022, Pollstar put Trans-Siberian Orchestra ‘s box office gross at $769 million.) And on top of it all, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is remarkably devoted to philanthropy, including donating one dollar for each ticket sold.
With Trans-Siberian Orchestra rolling into Albany for its annual performance, I took some time to sit down and chat with Pitrelli, who I’d bump into on occasion back when we both lived on Long Island. Pitrelli—whose mind is seemingly always on music and TSO—was attentive and eager, taking me through the incredible history of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and sharing with 518scene.com his insights as a veteran player, as well as what it means to carry the considerable weight of O’Neill’s legacy.
BRENDAN MANLEY: How are things with you and Trans-Siberian Orchestra?
AL PITRELLI: Good. Just about wrapping up all the preliminary things and about to move the entire organization out to Omaha, Nebraska, and get to work. Early next week we’re going to start rehearsing and getting this thing up and running for real, so I get really excited when I get to the airport in Omaha and I walk through the gate. I’m like, “Alright, now it’s time to dance.” Right now, it’s still a lot of little nickel and dime stuff.
BM: Why Omaha?
AP: One reason is that it’s in the center of the country, so we’re rehearsing there and we can kind of go anywhere we want from there for our next show, whereas when we used to rehearse down in Florida, we were on the peninsula and you can’t really drive that far. You’re locked up to the same subsequent cities. So that was part of the reason. The other reason was it’s just a great community and a great arena—Mid America Center in Council Bluffs, IA—that can actually accommodate both bands simultaneously. Production-wise it’s one of the few arenas in America that can withstand that load hanging from the ceiling. It’s run by a fantastic bunch of people; a great staff.
We’ve been rehearsing there in town for I think 18 years now, and that’s just become our norm. Everybody knows we’re going to stay at the same hotel, eat at the same restaurants, and we know that it’s going to be very efficient and we’re going to get our jobs done. Because we have about three and a half weeks to rehearse the show twice a day, not only musically, but also with our production heads: with the pyro, with the lasers, the whole thing, because I want every show to be a perfect show.
Like opening night for me in Council Bluffs, it’ll be a perfect first show. But you know, maybe it’s my 20th show when I come see you, but it’s your first Trans-Siberian Orchestra show, so it’s going to be a perfect first show every time we hit the deck. So, we have a lot to do. But it just turned out to be a great place to work.
BM: I remember bumping into you back in the ’80s down at the clubs on Long Island…I even caught some Widowmaker shows (with Dee Snider on vocals) at Sparks in Deer Park. Are you still an East Coaster?
AP: Oh God…yeah dude. I grew up in Hicksville. The old stopping grounds. Now I live up in the mountains in Pennsylvania with my wife and our two daughters. I talk to the kids in the band and they don’t get it; I’m like, you have no idea what it was like being a teenager in the ’70s, especially on Long Island. The music scene was just something completely different, and I try to explain it to them, and they’re like, “What do you mean? You could play bars four or five nights a week?” I’m like, “Forget it. Never mind.”
That’s where we cut our teeth, dude. Listen I remember going to see bar bands when I was a kid, like, “These guys are awesome,” and then started my own band, and at 15 and 16 years old was playing bars, because the drinking age back then was 18 with no photo ID. So we were golden.
BM: I think about all the people LI produced back then. I remember at some point, there was one huge gig you got because of a recommendation from another Long Island guitarist: Steve Vai, right?
AP: Steve recommended me to replace him in David Lee Roth’s band when he joined Whitesnake. I knew Steve because I replaced Steve in his bar band when he went off to college. He was from Carle Place/Westbury and I grew up in Hicksville, the adjacent town, and I just answered an ad in Good Times newspaper or whatever the music paper was at the time. It said, “Guitar player needed for original band.” I audition and they’re like, “Okay you’re our new guitar player.” I’m like, “What happened to your old guitar player?” “He went to college.”
Then I met him and we became friendly over the years. He was just such a great dude and a mentor and he’s always remained in my life. I have nothing but praise for Steve, not only as a musician, but also as just a human being; like, one of the best on the planet.
BM: Tell me a little bit about this latest Trans-Siberian Orchestra tour.
AP: Well musically the cat’s out of the bag: We’re performing the third installment of Paul O’Neill’s Christmas trilogy, The Lost Christmas Eve. We’re going to play that in its entirety and that’s a show and story we haven’t brought out since I think 2012 or 2013. Musically we’ve done a bunch of these songs in the set over the past bunch of years, but again not doing it in its entirety.
It’s a very beautifully written story. It’s got a wonderful meaning and characters. The thing about Paul’s stories is that everybody in the audience relates to them in some way, shape or form. There was an incredible quote by Leonard Bernstein regarding Beethoven: He said part of the genius of Beethoven was his artistry was accessible, but never ordinary. That statement made me think for a minute, “That’s very Paul O’Neill,” because all of his stories and all his music is very accessible to the listener, but none of it is ordinary. That’s the balancing act you have to do as an artist.
People love this story, musically the songs are great, and it’s a lot of fun. But the last time we did it was a dozen years ago, and technology has advanced so much that our crew is going to be able to present it visually this year in ways they couldn’t even have thought up 10 or 12 years ago.
So again, keeping our audience back on their heels, like, “Oh my God, did you see what they did this time?” Because about half the audience I consider repeat offenders: They come back every year. I want them to have their familiar tradition; I want them to feel, “Oh yeah, this is our holiday thing, with my family” or their grandparents or whatever, but I also want to keep them on their heels, too. I never want to repeat myself.
Like the opening of the show, for the second half of the show we pulled out some songs we haven’t done in a long time, and again the production will be bigger and better and crazier. It’s got to grow every year. It’s got to be better. That’s what Paul O’Neill established, what’s going to be almost 30 years ago when this thing first opened its eyes, and that’s what it’ll continue to do.
BM: The same situation as in the past, there’s going to be a West Coast Trans-Siberian Orchestra lineup and an East Coast lineup that are both simultaneously touring?
AP: Yeah. Everything that we’ve ever done was unprecedented. In ’99 we did our first tour, but just the one band. I don’t know, there was six, seven, eight cities on the itinerary? I was like, “This is awesome.” We had a great time. Then the next year promoters from all over America wanted a show. Paul looked at me and he goes, “Dude we cannot get a band from Boston to Seattle to San Antonio to Albany to Chicago. We only have so much time we could do this.” He said he’d keep a band up in what I call the “13 Colonies” and he looked at me and goes, “You put a band together and go to the rest of America.” I was like, “Okay, we’ll figure it out.”
A couple years later, he called me, but he goes, “Listen, uh we’re sold out in Salt Lake City. Do you want to do another show?” I’m like well I can’t, because the day after I’m in Denver. He goes, “No, let’s do a show at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, same day.” I’m like, “You want to do a rock ‘n’ roll show in the middle of the day, and another one at night? Okay.”
This thing has grown up in ways that if I look in the rearview mirror and think about what we’ve accomplished, I just kind of scratch my head and go, “How did we pull this off?” I’m so glad that we did.
BM: Are you on the East or West Coast leg?
AP: I’ve been running the West Coast for a while now. I’m okay with that. I don’t like changing people in the band and I don’t like changing the band in the different cities, because the folks in your audience grow accustomed to you and they look forward to seeing the guys and girls in the East Coast band, or on my side, in the West Coast band. There’s a familiarity and almost like a reunion, if you will, every year. So, I really don’t ever like changing the itineraries.
BM: I guess that means there aren’t any recent noteworthy lineup changes?
AP: Listen, when you get a chemistry—especially in a rock ‘n’ roll band—you don’t want to mess with it. That’s not something that could just be fabricated or fraudulently put together. The audience will smell the fraudulence from a mile away. This band is a band and it’s playing together for decades, with the exception of somebody getting a better gig, or unfortunately, occasionally somebody passing away. I’m not changing anything.
BM: So, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is more of an ongoing thing, and less about guest artists popping up.
AP: Yeah, no. Absolutely. It’s people who’ve been with me for decades. What they do the rest of the year, they have a great time and go work or do other things; that’s fine. For me, this has been a full-time job for, I don’t know, 25 to 30 years now.
BM: It’s extra interesting for us too up here, because you’ve incorporated Moriah Formica into the band. She’s from Albany and is one of our local heroes.
AP: She’s so awesome. I heard her sing and I was like, “Okay, you’re coming with me.” She’s so amazing, personally and musically and vocally. She seems to enjoy it, because her band has taken a hiatus for the past couple of winters. She loves coming back and singing with us and we just have a great time with her.
BM: Tell me about a little bit about The Lost Christmas Eve record, considering it’s the 20th anniversary of its release.
AP: Well, I think the story is one thing; it’s just a great story about loss and redemption and dealing with differences and all these things that everybody in the audience goes through. I think that’s why they love the story so much. For me, I wrote a lot of the songs on this record with Paul. I remember sitting down at the piano and playing some kind of Dr. John or Leon Russell blues figure on the piano, and he’s like, “Oh I like that. What is that?” That became one of the songs on the record.
We would get together a lot. He was my best friend, he was my big brother, he was my producer, but we developed by the third record a really special bond, musically. We’d done a lot of records together, but there was something about this record that we just kind of clicked in and spent a lot of time in the studio exploring ideas that you normally wouldn’t think would end up on this record. That’s what I loved about Paul. I would come up with some outside weird thing and he’d go, “I can write that into the story.”
That was when I first discovered that my musical involvement with him has no boundaries. Now I can tap into any part of my musical background and bring it to his attention, without feeling embarrassed or like he isn’t going to like this. I just remember a guitar in my lap recording some of these songs saying, “Dude, this is like the fourth or fifth record we’ve done together under the TSO heading and there’s no end in sight, man.” I’m just so proud that we worked together. I’d known the guy since 1985; we covered a lot of miles together.
BM: It must be a heavy sense of responsibility for you to carry on his legacy. That must be significant for you, I would imagine.
AP: Well, I tell you what, that’s a very interesting point you just made. It’s not a sense of responsibility in carrying on his legacy; I mean it is, but it’s more. I’m honored to do so and to have been his right hand musically for like three decades. I’m just honored to carry on something that he and I talked about. We’d be in the studio, or on a tour bus, or on an airplane, and he would say time and time again, “I just want this thing to live forever, long past all of us.” He would say if we play our cards right, this is music that people will celebrate long after us; our great-grandchildren will do so, and their grandchildren too.
The responsibility part is my responsibility to the repeat offenders in the audience, who have told me thousands of times over the years, “Hey dude, it’s not the holidays until we see you play live, or we play your music in our homes, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.” That’s an enormous compliment and enormous responsibility, because you’ve invited us into your homes and you celebrate this work as part of your holiday tradition now. That’s a big thing, brother. I’m honored and flattered, but I also have this enormous responsibility that I could never take for granted. I always want to make sure that they enjoy themselves.
Ever go to a restaurant on like some random Saturday night and it was killer, and then you tell your girlfriend or your wife or your friends, “Let’s go there man, it was so good!” And you go to the restaurant the following weekend, and it sucks? That’s so embarrassing. If these people are going back, imagine if we weren’t up to par. How would that person feel, and how would I feel about disappointing somebody?
I want to make it more special and intimate and enjoyable. I just want all those things to exist all the time. This is like watching one of my children grow up to be 30 years old. Do you ever get tired of telling your baby that you love them, or kissing them goodnight or good morning? Nah. Same thing with this. That’s something that I take really seriously and I love doing it.
BM: What’s the biggest challenge of doing that for you, at this point?
AP: No real challenge… We get together—myself, the management team, a couple of the department heads, the musical director on the East Coast, and our talent scout—and start having our weekly conferences on the phone or Zoom by say, the second week of January. It’s like, alright what are we doing next year? We spend all year talking about that.
I always compare it to the football team who won the Super Bowl last year. Kansas City won their second consecutive Super Bowl last year, and I would bet the farm that coach Reid isn’t sitting back with his feet up on the couch. He immediately went back to the books and said, “Okay, how do I rebuild this team and do it again?”
Is it challenging? I don’t know if I’d call it challenging, but that’s what you have to do. It’s dedication and discipline. It’s easy to sit back and become complacent and say, “Ah man, you know we crushed it again, top-five grossing act, who cares what’s in the rear view.” But dude, I love doing this. It’s brand new every year, because I’ve been doing it since I was a baby. It’s that excitement walking into an arena for the first time and when I put that guitar around my neck or watching the crew unload 22 tractor trailers of stuff. This is fun.
BM: You’ve played with so many great people over the years, and you’ve got such an incredible resume on your own, in and out of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, are you still pushing yourself as a guitar player? Are there nights where you challenge yourself, or is it a cakewalk now?
AP: Well no, it’s absolutely not a cakewalk, because as an artist I’m constantly learning something new about my art. Every day I’ll grab the guitar and I’ll maybe find a combination of notes I wouldn’t have. Or I’ll kind of accidentally revisit an old Wayne Shorter song from the Weather Report days and I’m like, “What an interesting selection and combination of notes. Let me look at that; I wouldn’t have played that sequence.” Or my love affair with being a student of the piano. I’m a nerd, dude. There’s always a new set of chords that I can find, or ways to make this harmonically more interesting as a guitar player.
I look at some of these kids on Instagram and I’m like holy shit; good Lord. But that’s part of it: You always want to be a better guitar player. But I’m more concerned with being a better arranger, or a better songwriter, or a better film scorer. My job primarily, like 70 percent of what I do with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, has nothing to do with playing the guitar; it’s arranging. It’s bringing things to life. It’s creating underscoring for poetry, or musical ideas just to make it a bit more exciting.
So yeah, every day I’ve got a guitar in my lap or I’m sitting on the piano or I’m just listening to something I normally would not listen to. There’s this Latin jazz station that I listen to on SiriusXM, and I’ll hear these artists, and their interpretation of the same 12 notes, but they’re doing it so different, I’m like, “Fuck, that’s awesome.”
BM: You hit on an interesting point about social media: It seems guitar has gone to this whole new level of craziness. Every time you go on YouTube there’s some 12-year-old kid who’s just ripping.
AP: It’s just a funny world to be in now. I started boxing about 15 years ago. I have a coach in Omaha when I get to rehearsal; I have a one of my best friends, Mick Doyle, an ex-middleweight champ. When he got tired of boxing, or too old for boxing, he got involved in Muay Thai and when he got too old for that, he started doing Jiu-Jitsu. He’s one of these guys who’s got black belts in everything; he’s just like a lifelong artist in that regard.
One of the best lessons I ever learned from him was at the end of one of our couple of weeks together. We glove up and he and I get the head gear on and he goes, “Okay, it’s a free-for-all fight.” I got my ass kicked, to say the least. He looked at me at the end and he goes, “You don’t ever box a boxer. You don’t grapple a Jiu-Jitsu guy, and you don’t ever kick a Muay Thai guy. Find out what they don’t do, and concentrate on that.” Same with me as a guitar player: I’m not going head-to-head with these kids. That’s the evolution of what the guitar is. I’m not gonna box them. I’m gonna do shit that they don’t do. If they’re concentrating on ripping the fastest solo known to mankind, I’m gonna find the two greatest notes ever and let them ring through an arena. Or I’m going to come up with a series of harmonic cadences that they wouldn’t have thought of. I’m not boxing a boxer; I’m too old.
I look at Patrick Mahomes and compare him to Joe Namath. How do you do that? Joe Namath was like the greatest quarterback when I was a kid, but the trajectory and the evolution of the sport has given us Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes and so on and so forth and there’s some 12-year-old right now who’s watching Mahomes play who’s going to outdo Mahomes in another 10 years. That’s how shit works.
BM: Tell me about the philanthropy aspect of Trans-Siberian Orchestra and how it developed too, because that’s an amazing angle of the story.
AP: Well, let’s go to the origins of that. Again, that’s Paul O’Neill. Paul grew up where we grew up: He came from Patchogue. And if you remember, it was like a 42-mile drive to a faraway planet, going into New York City. I remember working with Paul or meeting him in ’85 and kicking around the studios, going to Ray’s Pizza, or the Beacon. Every time I turned around, he’d be reaching in his pocket and handing somebody on the street a five-dollar bill, or a ten-dollar bill.
When we did our first show, in Philadelphia at the Tower Theater in ’99, Paul came up to me and he goes, “Hey man, we’re sold out tonight.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s fantastic,” and he goes, “We’re going to take a dollar from every ticket and donate it to a charity here in town that I know is a real good charity and the money is going to get to where it needs to be. We’re going to do that for every ticket we sell, forever now.” Somebody had told me earlier in September that we passed the 20 millionth ticket sold, so far. Now if you do the math, a dollar from every ticket adds up to a lot of loot.
Paul’s one of those dudes, he only talked about things once and then he implemented it every day of his life. He wanted to make a difference in the world. He wanted to change the face of how rock bands come through town and touring acts and all that stuff. And he wanted to just help people. He’s accomplished that. I’m really proud of him and his family continues on that legacy. I’m proud to be part of an organization that puts the community first.
BM: What’s incredible about that too, is that it’s almost like the good karma has affected everything all around. I don’t know the exact figures, but I’ve read that Trans-Siberian Orchestra financially has done incredibly well; if all touring bands could do as well, they’d be thrilled. So, the fact that you’re doing all this philanthropy and people are making money and it’s a success, it’s all good all around. Makes you wonder why more acts don’t take that strategy.
AP: Listen, I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart brother, you saying all that, but this thing was put together in a very different manner, and the star of the show is the story. It’s not like the people in the band are faceless or nameless or anything like that, but it’s not contingent on one lead singer and four dudes in a band, you know? The product has to be something that is irreplaceable and not only irreplaceable, but not contingent on a personality. How many bands have you seen where the lead singer thinks that they’re bigger than the band, then moves on to do something else and maybe that crashes and burns and then the band never gets back together?
Paul wanted his stories to come to life; if he has five or six characters in the story that need to express their woes or their trials and tribulations, well you’ve got five or six different lead singers who can now present that as characters. There’s this camaraderie. Nobody in the band has the wherewithal to pull the plug on it. It’s not about the individual, it’s about the group, and it’s about the presentation of the story and the celebration of Paul’s wishes and works and all those wonderful stories and that big brain of his watching them come to life.
BM: And Trans-Siberian Orchestra is really so unique too, bringing this heavy neo-classical metal-tinged approach to Christmas music.
AP: Ever since I recorded “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24,” when I played that opening ostinato underneath the cello, playing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” I was like, “Paul you’re on to something here, dude. This is awesome.” That was 30 years ago and it still gives me chills when I hear it, because nobody had heard anything like that before, around the holidays anyway.
BM: Are you doing any music outside of Trans-Siberian Orchestra on your own?
AP: No. I haven’t done that in decades. Dude, this became full-time for me. If we’re touring, I’m touring. When we’re not touring, I was in the studio with Paul. If I wasn’t in the studio with Paul, I was on some airplane going somewhere to do something with Paul. I always wanted a home. As a kid growing up with a poster of Jimmy Page or Ronnie Wood or Duane Allman on my wall, I didn’t aspire to be a session player. I didn’t even know what that was until I discovered Tommy Tedesco, and Larry Carlton, and Steve Lukather, and was like, “These guys are awesome.”
You want to be in a band. I ended up being a session player for a long, long time, until Paul gave me the opportunity to not only have permanent employment, but a permanent place for creativity. I have a lot of musical things to say and he encouraged that out of me and he enjoyed that. I found that it was not genre specific and it wasn’t like I was doing the same style of music all day and all night. You never know what we would do next in that band. One minute I’m playing some pretty crushing guitar solo thing, and next minute I’m sight-reading a Mozart symphony. I don’t really have to go anywhere else to find my musical outlets; I’m good right here.
BM: Did your time at Berklee College of Music in Boston help with those session days and the skills you later employed with Trans-Siberian Orchestra?
AP: That didn’t come from Berklee; I lasted in Berklee about a semester and a half. What I did gain from Berklee is I met musicians; young players like myself at the time from all over the world. I realized how universal those 12 notes that I’m familiar with really are and if they’re manipulated in such a way you can create sounds that I wasn’t aware of.
I went to Berklee with some of my best friends: I met Derek Sherinian, who played keyboards with me in Alice Cooper, and then went on to join Dream Theater. The drummer was a guy named Will Calhoun who was later part of the band Living Colour. We would just be hanging out in the lunchroom, talking about Miles Davis, Stan Getz, AC/DC, Van Halen… It was like they dispelled the boundaries for me, musically. Will was like, “Yeah man, I’m going to play something from Charlie Parker and I’m going to go into something from Aretha Franklin and then I’m going to play something from Black Sabbath.” I’m like, “You can do that?” He’s like, “Yeah, why not?” That’s when the veil came off.
My two styles of music now are good and bad. I don’t care about what style it is; there’s something to be loved and learned from all these different genres. But I had a good handle on the mathematics of music long before I went to Berklee. Going back to Vai, he would tell me all the time, “Your soloing is fine, dude. Work on your rhythm playing and make sure you can sight read better than everybody else.” Listen, when Steve Vai tells you something, you do it, if you’re smart.
Growing up on Long Island as you know, when you’re young there’s only two things you do: Either you play football, or you’re in the marching band. I was kind of small, so I’d get beat up by the football players, so they handed me a trumpet in third grade, and I’ve been taking guitar lessons since I’m like, I don’t know, 5 years old. Formal lessons, where back then you had the Mel Bay or the Alfred’s Basic book. They didn’t have tablature back then; they had the written note, so I was learning how to read music.
Dude, I knew how to read music before I could read the King’s English. I didn’t know it was going to serve me well later on. As you go through the public school system with junior high and high school and you’re in the band, orchestra, wind ensemble, jazz band, or the choir, I just thought everybody could read music.
BM: That’s cool! And I didn’t know you played the trumpet.
AP: Yeah, I played trumpet and then a little bit of saxophone. That’s before my love affair with the piano started. When Paul called me up to work for him in February ’95, he wanted a guitar player who was going to be more cinematic in their approach to guitar playing, if that makes any sense. Especially regarding that song, “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo.” Instead of just wowing him with chops and all that stuff, I heard the music he was writing, and being a huge fan of Bernstein, Rogers and Hammerstein, Andrew Lloyd Weber, a lot of soundtracks and obviously John Williams, I thought, “What does this visual need sonically?” That’s what I did for him. He’s like, “That’s exactly what I needed.”
But what sealed the deal with me and him was when he had recorded a version of, I think it was Mozart’s 23rd or 24th Symphony, and he wanted guitar playing on it. I go, “Dude, you got the score?” He goes, “You can read it?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He put the entire score out and I’m kind of hunting and pecking through—this is the oboe part, the violin part, this is what the cello’s doing—okay, now I can put a guitar part together.
Then he pressed record and the score was in a different key than what he had recorded. He goes, “Oh man.” I go, “No, just rewind.” I started playing it again, in the right key. He’s like, “How did you do that?” I said, “Well, I just transposed it.” He goes, “What are you doing for the rest of your life?” I was like, “Nothing. Hanging out with you, I guess.” That was it.
Everything in my education, all the other artists I’ve ever worked for, everything that I’ve ever done, was unbeknownst to me a curriculum that I was starting, to prepare me to sit down in the chair next to Paul. Because you never knew what he’d do next.
BM: You have played in an incredible list of bands. The longevity and the accomplishments are just crazy, when you stack them up. What’s been the key to your lengthy career?
AP: Anybody in my age group, if you wanted to work, you had to be adaptable. You had to sit in with the band and it’s supposed to sound like you’ve been in that band forever. And by being in cover bands and playing clubs and doing three or four sets a night and cutting your teeth that way. You do whatever you got to do to survive. There’s no safety net. If you do this the right way, you do this thing because you love it, not because you love the money. There is no money, until there is. So, it’s about falling in love with something and wanting to sound like that.
From two years old, when I’d seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I wanted to be Paul McCartney. When I heard the Allman Brothers for the first time, I wanted to be Dickey Betts and when I heard King Edward—when Van Halen I came out—I just wanted to throw my guitar away and die. But what you do is you adapt, you overcome, you improvise. You figure out a way. This guy needs a guitar player. I’m broke and I’ve got to go work. Is it a country band? Is it a jazz band? Is it a wedding band? Is it a heavy metal band? Is it a Sabbath tribute? I don’t care; I’ll figure it out.
BM: Until they call up and it’s Megadeth, and you’ve gotta replace Marty Friedman. How the fuck did you do that?
AP: You do it because it’s a challenge. It’s, “This shouldn’t work out well, but I’m going to prove the odds wrong and I’m going to figure how to do this.” Talk about going and playing a style of music that I wasn’t that familiar with and making it sound like I’ve been in the band from the jump! It took a while, but I will not give up; I will not quit. That was probably one of the most daunting tasks ever, to not only learn the solos, but learn them exactly, or as close as humanly possible as I could, and replicate that nightly. I was like, “Wow, man, I’m not going to get by on my abilities on this one. I’m going to have to work really, really hard,” because I wasn’t going to let that opportunity go away.
BM: Do you think things would have been different with your tenure in Megadeth if Dave Mustaine hadn’t gotten injured around that time and kind of put the band on ice? Would you still be playing in Megadeth now?
AP: I’m gonna say doubtfully, because my departure wasn’t really contingent on that. You’ve got to factor in that 9/11 had just occurred. I was a fill-in guitar player for what was supposed to be a couple weeks and then a couple months and it lasted a couple years. But my love was with TSO, because those records were out selling millions and millions of copies.
When they offered me the job to fill in for Marty, I called Paul and said I was going through at the time my first divorce, and my life was tail-spinning personally, and I needed to get the fuck out for a while and make some money. Because again, the TSO thing was in its infancy. There was no money floating around. We were doing it because we loved it and we were making some records and we did the one tour in ’99.
Dave gave me the opportunity to leave that world behind and go out with him for a while. I didn’t know how long it was supposed to last, but we continued working and did a couple of records. I loved my time with him, but you know my heart was always with Paul and the thing that I helped him create. And then when you factor in September 11th, I was like, “You know what, dude? Let’s finish out this tour. I’m not going overseas. Let’s do the live record and the DVD and I’m going to politely say that I’m done. I don’t want to do this any longer. I’m not traveling the world when they just blew the fuck out of New York City.”
BM: That’s true. I forgot how that coincided with the timing of 9/11 almost exactly.
AP: Yeah, I was still living down in Long Island back then, and that was a fucked-up time for sure. I just wanted to go home. I had just gotten remarried. My second wife at the time was living in New York City. I was like, “Listen, this touring thing is not as important as going home to your family and making sure everybody’s okay, and then figuring out what the fuck’s going on with the country and then the war and all that shit.” I called Paul and said I’m coming home, and he’s like, “Well about fucking time, dude. Let’s get back to it.”
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For more TSO, check out our photographer Stephanie J. Bartik’s killer shots from the latest Albany show!!
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