D
ream Theater and good old
fashioned rock’n’roll: not the most
obvious bedfellows, you may think.
This is understandable. Over 34
years and various line-up changes
(ex-drummer Mike Portnoy being the most
routinely shouted about) the East Coast cohort of
Berklee College Of Music alumni and friends have
built a reputation for progressive metal. Dizzying,
fiddly, unashamedly ambitious progressive metal,
to be precise, crammed with majestic guitar lines,
weird time signatures and terrifyingly huge drum
kits (a Google Images search for ‘Dream Theater
drums’ reveals something that would fill a decent-
sized bungalow). It’s imaginative yet colossal
stuff, in a sub-genre that’s polarising at the best of
times. Chances are you either despise it, or love it
with all your heart.
But that’s not where it ends, and it certainly
isn’t where it began. Dream Theater didn’t just
appear as fully formed prog wizards and tech
fiends. Amid all the dazzling virtuosity and other
superlatives tagged (sometimes rather worthily)
against them, it’s easy to forget that they are still ultimately ... well,
a bunch of guys who started a rock band. Especially after their
previous album, 2016’s conceptual monster The Astonishing, it’s
easy to overlook the fact that they were raised on classic rock and
cut their teeth jamming along to AC/DC, Boston, Iron Maiden,
Def Leppard, Aerosmith and more for many years. What’s more,
they still do that now.
“A lot of times we’ll jam that sort of [bluesy rock] thing,
casually hanging out, but we don’t really put it into our music,”
guitarist/producer John
Petrucci grins through layers of
black goth king beard. “So the
music is a little bit more
serious. But on this record we
actually put it in, so for
example the song Viper King,
that kinda shuffling Van Halen-
meets-Deep Purple feel, we’ve
never done that before, but we
do it all the time when we jam.”
So there is such a thing as a straight-ahead
Dream Theater 12-bar-blues jam?
“Oh absolutely!” singer James LaBrie
replies, in earnest Canadian tones.
“Blues, Santana, we’ll have Latin jams,
yeah we do blues all the time.”
We’re sitting with coffee in
their record label’s sleek offices
in Kensington, London.
They’re a hench,
surprisingly short pair, and
LaBrie’s face is illustrated
with immaculately neat
facial hair – in contrast
to Petrucci’s more
lumberjacked look
(which has been beefed
up by years of
bodybuilding, his other
serious hobby). They’re
a little jet-lagged but easy
company, and cheerfully
willing to talk about fourteenth
album Distance Over Time, on
which they’ve embraced their
roots with their rawest, rockiest
songs in years. True, they’re still
laced with the dexterity andfusion-y freedom we’ve come to expect from them, but this time
it’s more grounded in straight-up satisfying riffs and jams.
To what extent did that simply come from a desire to do
something different?
“We took that [The Astonishing] as far as it could really go,”
Petrucci laughs. “Doing something OTT, theatrical, exploring so
many different storytelling styles of music ... we got that huge,
huge project out of our systems.”
The Astonishing was, on every level, fucking massive. The
dystopian concept was
complex and grandiose. The
tracklisting practically made
The Odyssey look half-arsed.
The album was followed by an
accompanying novel and
video game. The live show
alone took a year to create.
Dream Theater aren’t exactly
known for keeping things
simple, but even by their
standards this was kind of insane.
“Yeah it was insane,” Petrucci nods. “It
took, from inception, about three years or
so. So coming off that we didn’t feel the
need to do anything further
conceptually; it was like ‘alright, let’s
just get in a room, crank up our
amps and just play together
and make an organic record.’”A
nd that’s exactly
what they did.
Where
previous records
involved introspective
beavering away and
email exchanges before
coming together to
record, this time the whole
band decamped to a five-acre
property in upstate New York- right next to Woodstock –
surrounded by mountains, lakes,
forests and wildlife. The initial
plan was to write and then leave
to record somewhere else, but
the private, peaceful setting and
MA lack of urban distractions
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All the young dudes: Dream
Theater in Chicago, June 1993.“We were able to get back to
that feeling of when we were
just teenagers jamming together,
writing songs and hanging out.”
John Petrucci
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