Steamrolling to Success by Keeping to His Game Plan : Music: Louis ‘Chip’ Davis Jr. puts a virtual lock on the Christmas market by breaking all the traditional record business rules with Mannheim Steamroller.

He’s folksy and down-to-earth, a bearded 47-year-old, let’s-have-a-beer kind of guy. But Louis “Chip” Davis Jr. is also a sharp-as-a-tack entrepreneur who has built one of the most remarkable success stories in the music world.

And he’s done it with a group called Mannheim Steamroller, his own record company--American Gramaphone--and a virtual lock on the Christmas music market.

Mannheim Steamroller? You say it’s not a name that conjures up images of mistletoe and Christmas trees?

Don’t tell that to the legions of enthusiastic fans who have bought more than 8 million copies of “Mannheim Steamroller Christmas” and “A Fresh Aire Christmas.” Or the record stores that have placed orders for 3.5 million copies of “Christmas in the Aire,” the group’s newly released, third Yuletide album.

“We probably could have taken 4 million orders,” says Davis with a chuckle, “but we were a little cautious. And it’s kind of funny when you think about it. . . . We’re dragging our feet saying, ‘Hey, come on you guys don’t order so much,’ when usually everybody’s out there saying, ‘Hey, come on, take another 100,000 pieces.’ ”

Virtually unheard on the radio, performing in an orchestral rock style that most hip young recording executives would reject in a flash, Mannheim Steamroller (the name traces to an 18th-Century orchestral-style crescendo) has broken all the traditional record business rules. In doing so, it has become synonymous with Christmas for millions of listeners.

Friday night at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, the group, which consists of six core musicians and an accompanying ensemble of 18 players, will present its annual live Christmas concert. This year’s program includes a panoply of sound and sight that reaches even beyond Mannheim’s elaborate standards of presentation.

“We’re attempting,” Davis says, “to take the audience back in time to when some of these Christmas carols were actually created.

“We play the songs on the old instruments--harpsichords, recorders, crumhorns--surrounded by video screens that show a film we shot in England, re-enacting an actual feast the way it would have been done back around 1450, 1500. And the players become part of the film. It’s like a 3-D projection without the glasses.”

The production is a clear illustration of the determination to do things his own way that has made Davis such a successful music business maverick. Few artists would devote so much time, money and effort to a tour limited to a holiday-associated period.

But Davis, whose music conglomerate is comfortably located in the unfashionable (from the entertainment world’s point of view) Midwest city of Omaha, has always operated outside the mainstream of the corporate record business.

One could, for example, make a case for the fact that his “Fresh Aire” recordings of the mid-’70s--ignored by the mainstream record market, first discovered and treasured by audiophiles--opened the way for the instrumental formats now identified as New Adult Contemporary and New Age.

And his first Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album in 1984, released at a time when the conventional music business wisdom suggested that seasonal recordings were dead in the water, proved the conventional wisdom wrong.

“It was a shot in the dark,” Davis recalls. “People weren’t doing Christmas albums back in the early ‘80s. Then, suddenly we had this weird dilemma of having a peak record. It sold about 190,000 copies the first year--more than we’d sold with any other record. And then it just kept selling.”

Curiously, Davis’ first ticket to prominence had nothing at all to do with instrumental music or Christmas. A 1969 graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in performance on classical bassoon, he spent the next few years touring with the Norman Luboff Choir, learning to play the drums and teaching junior high school music in his hometown of Sylvania, Ohio.

In 1976, after resettling in Omaha, Davis and then-partner Bill Fries wrote the crossover country hit “Convoy” for a fictional character, truck driver C.W. McCall, originally created for Old Home Bread commercials. The song rose to No. 1, and Davis was named country music writer of the year in 1976.

While Davis was pushing the C.W. McCall phenomena to its limits--nine albums and 20 million records were sold--he was refining an entirely different kind of music he called “18th-Century classical rock.” The blend of harpsichords, recorders and classical structures with synthesizers and rock rhythms was performed by a studio ensemble and released on Davis’ newly formed American Gramaphone label. (The name, intended to echo the prestigious classical label Deutsche Gramophone was misspelled by the art director who designed the logo.)

“It really started out being a kind of experiment in quality sound, using unusual instruments and unusual recording techniques,” Davis says. “And our whole marketing initially was through the stereo equipment stores. But then the people who were buying the speakers started buying the records that were being used to demo them.

“Then CDs came along, and since our base was already audiophile, CD literate types, we were making 20,000 CDs at a whack while everybody else was making 5,000.”

Even after sales began to escalate, Davis--who lives with his expectant wife, Trisha, and their 4-year-old daughter, Kelly, on a 100-acre property located near his Omaha facilities--was cautious about retaining control of every aspect of his product. Creation of the music, production of the recordings, marketing, sales and distribution have all been closely managed by Davis and his staff. He attributes the striking success of American Gramaphone and Mannheim Steamroller to “common sense, word of mouth and good advertising.”

“Since I’ve always had to sell this stuff myself,” he explains, “I use this technique I call connect-the-dots marketing. It’s like, you put enough dots, and you draw them all together and it’s, ‘Hey, there’s a picture.’ ”

Does it work? Apparently so. The new Christmas album is already at No. 15 on the pop chart.

“The only time you hear us on the radio is when we buy our own spots,” Davis says. “Or when Rush Limbaugh, who seems to like us a lot, plays something. Yet somehow we’ve managed to sell millions of records with just regular advertising, by treating them like a regular product.

“And we never skimp with our retailers. My directive to the sales department is that I want people to have to trip over one of our in-store displays to get inside the store.”

Davis is quick to acknowledge that his sales schemes, however well-planned, would be irrelevant if the music failed to touch his audiences. And, in the case of Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas music, he is very confident about the nature of that connection.

“There’s a sort of recurring theme in the letters we get which suggests that people feel that there’s an honesty to our music,” Davis says. “We sure try to make that be true. And maybe taking these Christmas carols back to their origins has something to do with it. Because the way I look at it, it’s the Christmas songs and the spirit of the songs that are the real stars of our show.”

* Mannheim Steamroller Christmas concert at the Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m. (213) 480-3232. $21.50 and $30.50.