He's proud to be a goldanged musical
'entremanure' in the heart of the Midwest
Mannheim Steamroller's Chip Davis

By Joanne Nesbit
U-M News & Information Services

Photos courtesy Mannheim Steamroller

In the mid-1970s he was writing music about truckers and a convoy of 18-wheelers headed across the country:

Was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
In a Kenworth pullin' logs,
Cab-over Pete with a reefer on
And a Jimmy haulin' hogs.
We is headin' for bear on I-one-oh
'Bout a mile outta Shaky Town.
I says, 'Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck.
And I'm about to put the hammer down.'
                                              From 'Convoy,' 1975

Now 1969 School of Music alumnus Louis Davis Jr.—alias Chip Davis, alias Mannheim Steamroller—has his own convoy. It grew from the success of his hit tune that went gold in two weeks, selling more than a million copies in two months and eventually 10 million singles. "Convoy" also fanned the citizen band radio craze and yielded the 1978 film of the same name. It led Davis eventually to build a multi-million dollar and multi-faceted recording, retail and concert business that has brought in three quintuple platinum, two platinum and nine gold albums.

The Mannheimers roll in after a road trip.

In a convoy of eight tractor-trailers and two buses, Davis recently came off the road from Mannheim Steamroller's "Christmas Extraordinaire Tour 2001" that swept the highways from Seattle to Las Vegas to Chicago, with stops in between at such venues as Denver's Pepsi Center and Dallas's Reunion Arena. Davis personally skips the bus brigade and returns in his private plane, a perk earned by his business acumen and the success of one-night performances.

A bassoon and percussion man
A Concert Band bassoonist and percussionist in the Michigan Marching Band, Davis left the Midwest to tour with the Hollywood-based Norman Luboff Choir after college. Later, he returned to his hometown of Sylvania, Ohio, to teach junior high music for a year and then rejoined the Luboff Choir. "Norman was such a moving force for me musically," Davis says, "because he was really the one who opened my mind about being eclectic. I was very, very classical before that and would never have thought of adding synthesizers."

Some of that interest in classical music might have come from his family of musicians. His father taught high school music. His mother is a former trombone player with Phil Spitalny's All Girl Orchestra (both U-M graduates and both former members of the Michigan Marching Band), and his grandmother, also a music teacher, started him on the piano at age four. At 6 years old, Davis composed his first piece, a four-part chorale about his dog Stormy, and began singing in his father's boys choir at 10.

Still on the move, a trip early in the '70s to Omaha for a workshop at the University of Nebraska led to an offer to produce a local dinner theater performance of Hair, an eight-week commitment that turned into six months in the Cornhusker state. That's where Davis's entrepreneurial convoy hit the road. When the theatrical gig ended, Davis worked as a jingle writer for an Omaha advertising firm, teaming with Bill Fries to write radio and TV commercials for Old Home Bread. The jingles, which later won Clio advertising awards, revolved around fictional truck driver C.W. McCall, his girlfriend Mavis, dog Sloan and the Old Home Filler Up and Keep On Truckin' Café.

An ad that drew requests for replays
The ads were so popular in the duo's "rap with a twang" style, Davis reports, that listeners called radio stations to request them, just as they would request a pop song. The Des Moines Register even published the air times of the commercials in the daily television listings.

Requests soon flowed in for concert appearances, and Davis and Fries obliged, with Fries singing the words of C.W. McCall and the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant Boys providing the music. The Power Plant Boys were an eclectic group of musicians whom Davis had assembled to record his non-McCall works. He called them the Mannheim Steamroller.

Davis named the ensemble after an 18th-Century German orchestral crescendo pioneered by Johann Stamitz and the Mannheim Orchestra. The Mannheim sound built intensity by adding layers of sound, color, texture, other instruments—and, especially, volume. To Davis, it was like a steamroller, so he added the term as a "colloquial joke name for that style."

Fries left the music business in 1980 and Davis, now on his own, moved along the entrepreneurial highway, forging his own brand of material, an alloy of classical composition with rock energy, harpsichords, recorders, electric bass and synthesizers. It's an eclectic sound that relies heavily on the classical training he received at the School of Music, a sound his fans find just right for occasions ranging from Christmas classics to mood music "for the times of your life" like romance, dinner, partying and Sunday morning coffee.