A death-metal concept record about a war that was still being fought somehow produced one of the most durable Christmas radio hits of the next three decades. The American metal band Savatage released Dead Winter Dead, their ninth studio album, on October 24, 1995, and the record's strangest twist had nothing to do with guitars.
Three voices of the Bosnian War
The album told its story through three voices: a Serbian teenager, a Bosnian girl, and an old man. The setting was the Bosnian War, which was raging as the band recorded in New York studios through the summer before the release. Singer and keyboardist Jon Oliva and producer Paul O'Neill shaped the narrative around a mortar crew, a weapons buyer, and a cellist returning to a ruined city.
The lineup itself was unstable. Guitarist Alex Skolnick, who had played on the previous Savatage album Handful of Rain, declined to take part in the recording so he could focus on his own solo group. Oliva brought in drummer Jeff Plate from that tour and then called his old friend Chris Caffery, a former member of Doctor Butcher, who had been a touring and session member of Savatage since 1987.
Al Pitrelli joins on guitar
Atlantic Records wanted a second, better-known guitarist in the band. So Al Pitrelli, who had played in Alice Cooper's live band, joined as co-lead guitarist alongside Caffery. The result was a heavier, more theatrical sound, but the label's concern about star power turned out to be less important than a piece of music buried in the album's track list.
That track was 'Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)'. It became an unexpected radio hit, despite the album's bleak subject matter. The song's melody quoted the opening theme of Mozart's Symphony No. 25, and another track, 'Memory', quoted the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the 'Ode to Joy'. Savatage had smuggled classical music into a metal record about shelling Sarajevo.
Savatage had smuggled classical music into a metal record about shelling Sarajevo.
Serjan, Katrina and the cellist
The story itself followed Serjan, a Serbian teenager who joins a militia and fires mortars at Sarajevo, and Katrina, a Bosnian girl who buys weapons and joins her comrades. The story opens in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. Years later, as November 1994 draws to a close, a man who had departed Yugoslavia in his youth returns to the ruined city as an old man. He plays Mozart on a cello in the ruins of a fountain while shells explode around him.
Serjan and Katrina hear the cellist's music from opposite sides of the front line. On Christmas Eve the music suddenly stops. They cross no-man's-land at the same moment and meet at the fountain, where they find the old man dead in the snow with his cello smashed. The war story ends with them leaving together.
The radio response to 'Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)' pushed the band to explore similar music in a different direction. Around the same time, Paul O'Neill and Robert Kinkel were planning a new project called Trans-Siberian Orchestra. That group later reissued the track as 'Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 1994' on its first release, Christmas Eve and Other Stories.
Dead Winter Dead was never a huge album by chart standards: it reached number 18 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart, number 68 in Japan, and number 80 in Germany. But the collision of a Balkan war narrative, Mozart, Beethoven, and a Christmas Eve ceasefire gave Savatage an accidental second life. The band kept the metal, while Trans-Siberian Orchestra took the cello-and-orchestra idea and turned it into an arena spectacle. The album runs just over fifty-two minutes, and every song on it was written by Jon Oliva and Paul O'Neill, with one exception: 'Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)' also credits Robert Kinkel. Cellist Mary Wooten performed the solo part that gives the record its mournful center.