Simple Beginnings Mannheim’s Christmas Album For Friends Turned Into The Biggest-Selling Series Of All Time

The Christmas series started simply enough. “I decided I was going to do a Christmas album just for friends,” says Chip Davis, founder, composer and main man of Mannheim Steamroller.

The group’s collective “Fresh Aire” Christmas records (spanning three releases in the last decade) have since made many new friends and sold 14 million copies. It’s the biggest-selling Christmas series of all time.

“I just call it connect-the-dots marketing. It’s not like I’m on some mission,” said Davis, an affable, 50-year-old heartland native who expanded the series once he sensed the demand. It features old and new seasonal music played on anything from ancient instruments to electric bass and synthesizers.

The Nebraska-based Davis, apart from writing and conceiving marketing plans for Mannheim Steamroller, also plays drums for the group. The tour has six core Mannheim members, plus a pit orchestra of 20 members, and a portable “Christmas village” carried around the country in three semis and set up before each show.

“It looks like an old-fashioned European town square, with a toy train going around the entire village,” said Davis, who even hires a youth choir in each city to sing carols in the lobby.

Davis’s love of all things Christmas originally came from his childhood in northwestern Ohio. “I grew up in a little farm town of 500 people - and there were a lot of Christmas activities around the Methodist Church,” said Davis.

The latest Mannheim tour also has a mammoth, 180-by-40-foot video screen. “I like the multimedia idea,” said Davis, who uses slides and video, including footage of actors dancing during a set of Renaissance songs in a castle. Some were collected on a live home video (“Mannheim Steamroller Christmas Concert”) filmed in Omaha and released last year.

Davis even has a Christmas movie in the works. “It takes place in a shopping mall in the future,” he said. “In the story, the people moved there for environmental reasons.” He won’t say much more about it, except that it’s “getting close to happening.”

Some observers say Davis was just lucky, that he was in the right place at the right time in tapping a mainstream fondness for a classical/ rock Christmas hybrid. He nearly admitted as much when he said, “All I do is basically follow my heart and take care of the needs as they come up.”

Davis doesn’t go around boasting that he’s a virtuoso, but his unpretentious approach has definitely caught on with a vast audience. It’s an audience he began cultivating during the mid-‘70s with a series of humorous country hits under the fictitious name of C.W. McCall. These included “Convoy” (a playful, country-rap tune he co-wrote) and “Old Home Filler Up and Keep on Truckin’ Cafe.”

Then Davis started the first disc in his “Fresh Aire” series, this one a new-age-slanted set inspired by the change of seasons. The first “Fresh Aire” (in 1975) evoked the mood of springtime, followed by the autumn-inspired “Fresh Aire II” (in 1977), the summer-stoked “Fresh Aire III” (1979), the winter-influenced “Fresh Aire IV” (1981), and “Fresh Aire V” (1983), a musical depiction of Johannes Kepler’s mythical trip to the moon in 1609.

The seeds for the “Fresh Aire” Christmas series were thus sown. So was his love of nature imagery, as expressed in his album “Saving the Wildlife” (a soundtrack for a PBS special) and “Yellowstone: The Music of Nature” (1989), which raised nearly $500,000 for Yellowstone National Park. Davis has set another record in this regard, since it’s the largest individual contribution ever to the park.

Some of Davis’s music may be simplistic, but there’s no denying his astute business sense. He’s planning to develop “Airplex,” a 300-acre performing arts complex with a park and amphitheater in Nebraska, between Omaha and Lincoln. “We’ll have hiking trails on it and we’ll do some children’s programming,” he said. “We’ll also have a hotel and three restaurants as part of it.”

Clearly, Christmas and the other seasons have been kind to this heartland entrepreneur.