A Conversation with Mannheim Steamroller’s Chip Davis
From ‘Convoy’ to Christmas, Chip Davis Has It Covered
There’s no one else in the music world quite like Chip Davis, the colorful and inventive master musician and marketer behind Mannheim Steamroller. Mannheim Steamroller, in case you somehow don’t already know, is the greatest-selling Christmas artist in history, with dozens of albums and a worldwide following for its progressive rock arrangements of traditional Christmas tunes. In anticipation of the Steamroller’s upcoming arrival at the Granada on December 29, I spoke with Davis by phone from his home in Omaha, Nebraska. He was energized on this morning from having seen the group in Lincoln the night before. One imagines him sipping on a cup of artisanal cinnamon hot chocolate as he recalls the many twists and turns of his remarkably successful career. Although Davis does not always travel with the group these days, the Steamroller remains very much a family affair with two of his daughters, Elyse and Kelly, both now singing on the popular Christmas tours.
You’ve had an unusual career and succeeded largely through doing it all yourself. How did you become such an independent artist?
In the early 1970s, I wrote the music for some country songs featuring a character named C. W. McCall. His biggest hit came in 1975 with “Convoy,” and through that success I was able to get in the door at all the big record labels with my new project, something called Fresh Aire, and that was the beginning of Mannheim, but at the time, no one in the music industry wanted to buy it. They said they didn’t know where to put it in the racks in the record stores, so they passed on it. And since I was doing quite well at that point with writing jingles for radio and television, I started trading my services for additional studio time. It was in that period that I decided to create my own label, American Gramophone, and distribute the Fresh Aire records myself.
