Petrucci: “On our first European tour we played
some venue in Stockholm and it was this little
room up these stairs and there were literally no
lights. I remember our crew was using their
flashlights. But yeah, the weirdest places, you’d get
there and there’s a pole in the middle of the stage
where you’re supposed to stand.”
“You remember when we had pyro for a bit,
when we were out on the Images And Words tour?”
LaBrie says to Petrucci. “And one time I went over
to the front of the stage and I forgot that’s where
the pyro goes off, so there’s the pyro and there’s
me singing, and I remember seeing all this white
stuff... and it was just little things like that... it’s
pretty comical. And one night I got my hair caught
in John Myung’s bass strings, that was in the UK
and I keep singing the song, and John’s pulling
away from me...”
“I remember playing a place in the States
somewhere, and it was so hot a couple of us puked
or something after the show,” Petrucci remembers
laughing. “These horrible, horrible gigs that we’ve
done; I don’t miss anything about the
conditions...” He stops and thinks for a second,
then changes tack: “but I remember playing to,
like, no people in a club to then selling out, to
hearing ourselves on the radio, to doing
internationals. I very specifically remember that
shift. That was exciting. I suppose it only really
happens once.”
For Petrucci his excitement for
music started in Long Island, where
he spent his teens playing music
with a varied cast of local musos
and bands. The result was an
eclectic grounding in different
styles of playing.
“I’d just go and jam with all of
them,” he recalls. “The best was
these buddies who liked to jam
and we’d just play Hendrix and
Santana. These two guys would
just get stoned and play guitar,
bass and drums, and I would just
solo for hours...[laughs] and in
fact one of them came up to me
recently, coz we’d record
everything on cassette, and he
gave me couple of CDs and
I played them and my wife was cracking up cos
she was like ‘you played exactly the same way when
you were 16 that you do now!’ You can hear these
jams, they’re hysterical, just me soloing for hours.”
LaBrie, conversely, preceded his Dream Theater
days in the unlikely world of 80s glam. Growing up
in Ontario, Canada, he started out on drums but
having found his voice by belting out the likes of
Zeppelin’s Rock And Roll and Heart’s Barracuda
(before his sister introduced him to prog staples
like Yes and Pink Floyd), he sang in covers bandTrance (“Purple, Kansas, Pat Travers, Johnny
Winter...”) and local rockers Coney Hatch aged
22, before joining glam metallers Winter Rose.
Still, with his quietly modest, serious manner
today one imagines he stopped short of embracing
the fashion. Or did he?
“Did I?!” he says incredulously. “Oh my god
man, I had my hair all pouffed out to frickin’ ‘here’
and I had leopard shoes and really tight, tight
leather pants with the nice glam shirts. I didn’t do
all the make-up, but if you were gonna do that typeof approach you kinda had to look
like it to a certain degree.”
Admittedly his look today, and
that of his bandmates, is almost
defiantly ordinary. Yet on
a musical level this youthful gusto
plays out on Distance Over Time,
alongside robust streaks of
progressive flashiness. If you
weren’t a Dream Theater fan
before, this just might be the album
that converts you. And if you’re
already on board with their world
it’s another layer to the ongoing
minefield of their career – one that
reminds us that, for all the gleaming dexterity and
prog metal, they’re still ultimately a group of guys
who started a rock band. And perhaps most
pleasingly, they sound like they’re having fun
playing it.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Petrucci agrees.
“We’re still the same guys that get together and
have fun. It’s really the same feeling we had when
we were 18, 20.”EDD Distance Over Time is out now via InsideOut.
IE^ M
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LAS
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ELA
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“I had my hair all
pouffed out and leopard
shoes and really tight,
tight leather pants...”
James LaBrie [on his glam metal past]
Game face: Petrucci and LaBriein (^) London, (^2018).
Because he’s worth it...
LaBrie in 1994.
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