Dream Theater

The term system comes from the Greek word systema, which refers to an organized relationship among components. It denotes plan, order, management and method. Only when each of these subsystems is functioning properly is the total system effective. DREAM THEATER is a perfect musical system. They are made up of five subsystems:

Mike Portnoy – Drums and Percussion
Charlie Dominici – Guitars
John Petrucci – Guitars
Kevin Moore – Keyboards
John Myung – Bass Guitars

Individually, they are all far above average musicians. And as a unit, they produce complex and intricate music that goes beyond the parameters set by the most respected names in the rock genre. Mike Portnoy talks about their first record and then some.

GF: How did the band begin?

MP: Well, we’ve been together since September ‘85 when me, John and John met in Berklee of Boston. It was just a freak thing that we all met. The three of us spent a full year there writing and rehearsing every day and when we decided to leave school and come back to Long Island we hooked up with Kevin Moore. John and John had played with him back in high school, so these guys had already played together. When we hooked up with him it was the four of us, and we had a lot of material and we brought in a singer (Chris Collins). We spent that whole summer playing the club scene on Long Island and New York, and shortly after Chris left the band. After Chris left, we spent about a year looking for a singer. We interviewed over 100 singers before we found Charlie. As soon as Charlie joined we started working on all the new material we had written during the year while didn’t have a singer.

GF: Why did you choose Charlie?

MP: It was weird. It was so hard and we were very, very picky. We spent a whole year interviewing and auditioning singers. Most singers, if they had a great voice, had a bad attitude or their direction was a lot different than ours. And if they were really cool and wanted to write the kind of music we were doing, they didn’t have a good voice. It was just really hard to find a perfect combination of attitude, voice, direction and all that stuff. The four musicians in the band have a perfect chemistry with each other. It’s incredible how easily we work together and write. We needed that fifth element and we weren’t going to sell ourselves short with just any singer. We wanted to make perfectly sure that the singer was going to fit into the chemistry and Charlie did. We noticed right away he had a very diverse voice. He has diverse taste and he has a very similar sense of humor and attitude to ours. So he fit perfectly. After he joined, we put his vocals on all the songs that we had written during ‘87 while we didn’t have a vocalist, and a bunch of these songs are on this album.

GF: What is the band’s musical and lyrical direction?

MP: Well, basically the most important thing about the band is musicianship and song writing. Individually we practice a lot, and collectively too. The whole band practices together four nights a week, for three hours a night, regardless of whether we have a show or not. That’s the way it’s always been. John and Kev teach, so they spend all day with their instruments. It’s harder now, but we practice as much as we can. While we were at Berklee that’s all we did. All day long it was “practice your instrument” and “learn music”. All day long! Then we would get together at night and write and practice as a band. That’s definitely the most important thing as far as our direction goes musically. It’s to take music to its fullest potential—to set a standard and make sure the band reaches that standard in everything.

GF: You’re a musicians’ band. Most people are interested in hearing good music and don’t really care how talented the musicians are. Do you feel that your musicianship ever overrides the music itself?

MP: Sometimes we get scared that our music might go over people’s heads, but it’s hard to tell. When the album comes out we’ll be able to get a much better view of how it’s going to be taken. But right now I think the music, although it’s very technical, has a lot of changes and it’s definitely musicians’ music. It has a lot of melodic things to it. The vocal melodies I think are very catchy, and we spend a lot of time writing the music and that’s important. We don’t just try to go our there and play as fast as we can, obviously, or have as many different time signatures as we can. We try to write music that makes sense. Something that we would want to hear ourselves. Something that’s catchy, some thing that’s melodic and at the same time is very interesting to listen to—whether you’re a musician or not.

GF: At first it took me a couple of listens to grasp the music. it was a little too much at once...but every time I listen to it I hear something different!

MP: I think people need something like that, there’s not much around that has that. Everything is so simple. There’s so much formulated stuff that’s coming out, whether it be a thrash band or a glam band or just a typical run-of-the-mill hard rock band. They just keep rehashing the same formulas. I think it’s important to have something that takes a lot of listening to, takes a lot of thought. It takes a lot of thought to write. We spend a lot of time writing.

GF: Being that the music is so complex, do you think you spend more time writing and rehearsing than other bands?

MP: Definitely. Sometimes we’ll spend a three hour rehearsal working on four measures of music. Something that eventually will become maybe five seconds worth of a song we’ll spend an entire rehearsal on. But then again, other times we’ll write a complete song within two rehearsals. It just depends on the mood and creativity flow. We’re very nit-picky with everything we do. There’s a standard we have to meet. We don’t bring the songs out or perform them until they’re perfect.

GF: What does the title of the record When Dream and Day Unite mean?

MP: Well, the title came from the song “Only a Matter of Time”. It’s a line out of the song. That song is about faith and dedication to music. Faith towards the band and knowing that if you stick to your guns and do what you want to do, do what feels right to you, eventually everything will come around your way. So the line “...when dream and day unite” in the song refers to when your dreams of your career in music, or whatever your dreams might be, and day unite. When your dreams come true. When it happens. But when we decided to use that for the name of the album it can be taken either way. It can be taken that way as it is in the song, or as a surreal type of thought. When dreams, meaning sleeping dreams, meet with day, anything can happen—that sort of image.

GF: How about the name Dream Theater?

MP: Well, the name Dream Theater was a name that we came up with after about six others and it was actually suggested to us by my father in California. It was from an actual theater, a movie theater actually named “Dream Theater”. But I didn’t make the connection between the name of the movie theater until a few days after he suggested it. Initially we heard the name and we all thought it was perfect because it’s not a name that can be stereotyped to any sort of music. It’s not something that’s going to create any sort of preconceived notion of what kind of music we play. It’s as wide open to interpretation as our music is. It’s kind of a contrast. Bringing together theatrics and music and surreal images and a lot of different things.

GF: How would you describe your sound? What kind of music does Dream Theater play?

MP: I guess if it had to be labeled, I would say ‘progressive metal’ or ‘progressive hard rock’. I think it’s a fusion of a lot of different styles because we listen to so much different stuff. I think our style just came about by just putting together all the different styles we listen to, whether it be rock, progressive rock, heavy metal, jazz or classical. We don’t feel there should be some kind of limit to what kind of music we should play. We want to be a metal band, we want to be heavy. But at the same time, we don’t want to be stereotyped as heavy metal because I don’t think that we are a heavy metal band. I think we have the elements of a progressive rock movement of the 70’s, but yet with the sounds and energy of the heavy metal/hard rock movement of the 80’s.

GF: What do you want to accomplish as a band!

MP: Well, of course we would like to be successful. But most importantly we would like to be able to keep our musical integrity and not ever have to succumb to any sort of commonplace deviations. It’s important to us to write music that we’re comfortable with and that we enjoy playing and not having to sell out – which we wouldn’t. As far as musically, we’ve already started writing for the next album, and it varies. We have two new songs that range from one extreme to the other. On one song we tried to become as simplistic as possible. We kind of went for a U2 type feel with just taking a basic progression and really working the dynamics...building it from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs with the most simplicity possible, which is something different than anything we’ve done before. And then, on the other hand, we have the other extreme, which is our other song which is right now up to about 15 minutes long and we’re just going to keep writing and see how long it goes. That’s the most technically involved piece we’ve ever written by far. It’s crazy but exciting. We really want to remain very diverse, both with our influences and with the music we write. We definitely will remain very musical and progressive. As long as we’re musically satisfied. That is the most important thing to us. As long as we can keep writing music that keeps us on our toes, that keeps us happy and that makes other people happy...that’s the most important thing. We want people to enjoy the music.