Dream Theater – Light Fuse And Get Away!

Dream Theater are about to explode onto the scene!

Elsewhere in this magazine, you will find my ravings on ‘When Dream And Day Unite’, the debut album from Long Island based Dream Theater. Intrigued by this ingenious magpie’s nest of mixed influences, which is an astoundingly mature first album from a band whose age averages twenty-one, I called guitarist John Petrucci to talk about the record.

‘When Dream And Day Unite’ contains a dazzling. array of musical influences that makes it impossible to fit the album neatly into any particular musical pigeonhole, so I wondered how John himself would categorize his music.

“It does have a lot of influences – everything from really heavy stuff to classical, jazz – and everything in between, hopefully. But basically the way I think of it is that there are a lot of bands that are really heavy, like Metallica and Anthrax, and at the same time, there are bands that are more into the progressive, theatrical kind of thing, like Marillion and Rush.

“People like Marillion and Yes are really cool and they get into great lyrics and concepts and stuff, but they never get really heavy. And then again. a band like Anthrax are really heavy, but they don’t get too conceptual and progressive.

“So for me, our music is like a blend of that, which is the best of both worlds as far as I’m concerned, because I love heavy music and at the same time, I really love involved, orchestrated, theatrical kind of stuff.’’

The reason why the band is so adept at handling the classical influence on their music is that Petrucci, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Portnoy first drew together at The Berklee School of Music in 1985. Keyboard player Kevin Moore who was studying at The Fredonia School of Music, joined them during the winter holidays and the line-up was completed by singer Chris Collins (who was later replaced by current vocalist Charlie Dominici). The band never bothered to go back to sit their final exams at music school...

The band, then known as Majesty, recorded a four track demo in 1986, which earned them excellent international reviews. They were signed by New York’s Mechanic Records early last year and started recording their first album with producer Terry Date. Then they found out that they weren’t the only band called Majesty...

“I call it ‘the dark period’! Unfortunately, we chose a name that a lot of bands seem to have and when we went to trade mark it, we did a search and a number of bands had the trademark rights. I guess it was kind of a blessing in disguise, because some people say that the name was too obviously pompous. You can’t really categorize the name ‘Dream Theater’; you say ‘What kind of band is this?’ It’s not like the band is called ‘Faces of Death’!

“We were racking our brains, taking any input from friends, reading books, looking in magazines, everything, and we had a whole bunch of different names. Our drummer’s father lives out in California and there is this movie theater in Monterrey, I think, call The Dream Theater, and one night when we were really getting desperate, Mike told us that his dad had left a message on his machine that said, ‘Check out this name’ and we were like ‘My God – this is it!’ It’s not too often that your father thinks of the name of your band!”

I asked John who were the main writers responsible for the Dream Theater material.

“It’s a collective writing. What we do is, we write the music first. Someone comes in with a theme or something that he wants to play, and the band works on that in a response sort of way. I suppose we have our own formula that we follow – or you could say we don’t follow any formula! There’s no limitations with the writing. We’re writing a tune now where wherever it ends, it’s going to end! Our sound is – anything goes! We don’t feel we have to mold to anything.”

Now that the record has been released, Dream Theater are hoping to get out on the road.

“I think it’s going to be real important for a band like us to do some touring – it’s not the kind of music that you’re going to hear on AM radio every day!

“We don’t want to be a classic kind of band that only a few people know about. Of course we want to be respected in the industry and all that, but we want to make this our career and it’s really important to be able to do both. Not a lot of people can do that – they either sell out, playing something that they might not enjoy, or they’re doing something that they really love, but then they can’t make a career out of it and have to do something on the side.”

Is there any chance of a Dream Theater visit to Europe soon?

“We’ve got such a great response from Germany, and Japan, and Poland, I just can’t wait to really get over there. That’s the one thing I really want to do – just travel and see the world – and what better way to do it then to spread your music? So I’m psyched to go over there and do it soon!”

Valerie Potter