proved too alluring to turn away from.
“This barn had been rebuilt into a beautiful state-
of-the-art studio, the guy who scored The Revenant
built it I think, but he sold it so there was no
equipment in it,” Petrucci enthuses. “And they used
the original barn wood, they treated it and used it
for the inside, so it’s really beautiful. It was such
a cool space and it sounded so good, we were like
‘why are we leaving this place?!’”
Duly inspired, they persuaded their crew to
turn the space into a functioning studio, bringing
in the considerable arsenal of Dream Theater
equipment to kit it out. They all stayed for
a month; living, writing and recording together
for the first time in their whole career.
“It was like summer camp,” Petrucci grins, “we
weren’t commuting back home [at night], we were
able to get back to that feeling of when we were just
teenagers jamming together and writing music and
hanging out and having a drink, cooking or staying
up late after the sessions going to the house and
just talking and stuff, so it did help us rebond and
commune as friends and musicians.”
Listening to the two of them reminiscing it all
sounds endearingly like one big teenage slumber
party. Blissful days and nights were spent playing
music, bonding over Metallica-style riffs, talking,
barbecuing or prepping meats with one of
Petrucci’s smokers that he’d brought from home.
At the end of a day’s rehearsing or recording they’d
saunter back to the adjacent farmhouse to sleep,
hoping they didn’t encounter any bears on the way.
“One night a mother bear and her cub came
right up to the door, she
was trying to get into the
garbage which was just
outside the studio,”
LaBrie chuckles. “And
especially with the cub
around we were like ‘I’m
not going out there!’”
“But because we were
isolated we didn’t have to
stick to any sort of
schedule,” Petrucci adds. “Like if it was a little later
every day it kind of didn’t matter; we’d order some
food in, everything centred around food, ‘who’s
cooking? What are we barbecuing?’”
And obviously you can play louder because you
don’t need to worry about noise complaints.
Presumably this naturally led you to be louder, and
then heavier...“It’s very true,” Petrucci nods. “There’s
something about being in a room with guitar, bass,
amps cranked up. Mike [Mangini, drums] would
play and he’d be like ‘man can you hear the guitar
echoing off the room...’ there’s something about
doing that that brings you back to this really primal
mood, that helps drive the music in that direction.”
Petrucci’s rock and
metal-geared homelife
seemingly fuels this
approach. His wife,
Rena, plays guitar in
tribute act Judas
Priestess and his 23-year-
old son is also in a band,
so there’s always music
in the house – mostly
heavy stuff, like the
Dream Theater team’s favourite jam tracks.
“Me and John Myung [bass] could play any
Iron Maiden song in, like, two seconds,”
Petrucci says enthusiastically. “And Jordan is
more coming from Genesis and Gentle Giant,
things like that. But whether it’s Van Halen,
anything classic Zeppelin, AC/DC, Rush, there’s
certain things we all know bits and pieces of.Somebody starts breaking into something and
we’ll all join in.”
“It depends on the mood,” LaBrie adds. “John
might crank into a Metallica riff or Jordan
[Rudess, keys] might play the organ and all of
a sudden it’s reminiscent of Jon Lord so we’ll go
into a Deep Purple bit...”I
n keeping with their album output, these days
the Dream Theater road operation is a slick,
top-of-the-range affair with shiny tour buses
and hotels and state-of-the-art production. In the
same way that it’s now strange to imagine, say,
early Rammstein gigs before they had such
a colossal pyro budget, it’s curious to think of
Dream Theater paying their dues on the toilet
circuit. But pay them they did, slogging it out for
years crammed into a van playing dodgy joints
across the States and beyond. Has it left them
with rose-tinted nostalgia for those early shows?
Not so much...
“If we did get a room it would be a day room, so
we all had to frickin’ take turns showering,” LaBrie
remembers wincing slightly, “and then eventually
we’d move up a bit, there’d be three rooms, and
then every fifth night you’d get your own room.”EDDIE (^) M
ALL
UK
/A//T
LAS
ICO
NS.
CO
AA
M
“I remember playing a
place in the States that
was so hot a couple of
us puked afterwards.”
John Petrucci
Just one cornetto...
Petrucci in 1994.
Men in (mostly)^ black:^ the^
current^ Dream^ Theater^ line-up.
56 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
DREAM THEATER