I Can Remember When documentary

In 1989, Mike Portnoy began compiling live footage and interviews to create a Dream Theater home video to be distributed through their fan club.

Mike Portnoy: The reason I decided to put together this video is because we didn’t do too much touring off the first album and we were getting letters from people who really wanted to see us. And I realized after sorting through all my home videos that I should put it together, and put it out through the fan club for all the people that didn’t get to see us on this tour could see what we were all about during this first chapter of Dream Theater.

Shortly after, the project was abandoned...

John Petrucci: I think Dream Theater is unique in the writing process, because a lot of times when people ask, “Who writes the music?” maybe one guy writes a music, one guy comes in, hears the chords, and that’s it, and hands out the parts. The way we write is more like improvisation. Some guy might come in with an idea – a chord progression, a riff, a drum beat, whatever – and everyone would just feed off of that, and we’ll just see where it goes. Sometimes we don’t even worry about where the song is going; other times we’re really conscious about where it’s going, where vocals are gonna go. At points we just gel on it and jam and record it and then pick out of that. So it’s really unified; when we go to write a song, it’s like who knows what’s gonna happen? That’s the great thing about that because it’s everybody’s ideas, and we also get into a lot of fights. But the outcome I think is really special.

MP: During the year while we didn’t have a singer, we recorded [an] instrumental demo, around 1987. A lot of that material was what ended up on When Dream and Day Unite, but at that point it was just instrumental versions of those songs. So when we met Charlie we had all these new songs that we were working on throughout ‘87 and then we were ready to go.

~~~A Fortune in Lies~~~

JP: Our first Metallica-influenced [song].

MP: ‘Fortune’ was like the first heavy, sixteenth note F-sharp song. [laughs]

~~~Status Seeker~~~

JP: ‘Status Seeker’ was an example of us trying to get our style into a more accessible type format. Just a shorter version of what we normally do. The record company at one point said, “Can you guys take your writing style and maybe gear it towards radio?” Without sacrificing too much, we just kind of shortened the normal format instead of going on for 20 minutes and being redundant, and came up with ‘Status Seeker.’ So the writing style is pretty much the same, and it was our first single.

MP: We went in and recorded it after only rehearsing it a couple times back home.

JP: How many days did it take us to write that song?

MP: We wrote the song in two days musically. Lyrically on the other hand...

Charlie Dominici: John and I got together to write, and instead...

JP: ...instead we got wasted.

CD: Instead we drank some beers and hung out, and we started complaining to each other about how it was bumming us about how everybody we know used to have this attitude like, “Get a real job, you bum.” Now that we have a record deal and everything, the whole attitude was changing to, “Oh, I always believed in you. I want to know you now.”

JP: And it was everyone. It was parents, it was girls, it was bosses, acquaintances, people. “Get a haircut!” But as soon as you’re doing something that...

Kevin Moore: As soon as it’s legitimized by a record deal...

JP: ...then your hair makes sense. “Oh, they’re in a band.”

~~~cover artwork~~~

MP: Here’s the brand[ing iron] that we used on the album cover. This symbol came about while we were Majesty, thus the ‘M,’ and the artist that did the album artwork had a picture that was very similar to what’s on the cover of the album except it had an ‘A.’ So we told her to reshoot the session with this symbol, but we wanted something with an ‘M’ that would be recognizable for Majesty and just a symbol. So we started looking for a symbol and Charlie found this symbol in some book. I think it stood for Queen Mary of Scots or something like that. It looked really cool, it was very symmetrical – which is something I like – and had an ‘M’ in it and all sorts of things. A lot of people think it spells “Dream Theater” and all that s***, but basically it’s just a symbol that had an ‘M’ in it, and we liked it, so we reshot the cover with this exact brand. And now I’m stuck with it on my arm for the rest of my life!

~~~Ytse Jam~~~

JP: It’s not a sandwich spread...

KM: It’s not a type of traffic situation in India. [lots of laughs] It’s not a big festival where we got together with other Chinese musicians.

CD: It’s certainly a part in sexual positions.

MP: Let’s take care of this once and for all – ‘Ytse Jam.’ [gets up to get drum head]

KM: You people are sooooo stupid! You people are dumb! You’re our fans, we love you. But you’re stupid! No, I’m just kidding.

JP: Well, for those of you who figured it out, this doesn’t apply.

MP: Let’s clear this up. Most of you figured it out, but for those of you that haven’t, we used to be called Majesty. If you took this bass drum head or any other thing that said “Ytse Jam,” held it up to the mirror... If you notice [spelling out the letters on his bass drum head in reverse] Y-T-S-E, J-A-M.

~~~The Killing Hand~~~

JP: ‘The Killing Hand’ was a story that I actually wrote; like sat down, wrote a story and eventually put into a lyrical form. And the story goes as follows: there’s this man, and he’s in a barren land with a bunch of memorial type walls with names on them. He’s sitting there all by himself and he’s wondering, like, “Where is everybody?” The guy must have blanked out or something weird happened to him. He doesn’t know where he is and he just sees these names. He’s like, “Who killed all these people? What happened? Was in a war? Was it a plague? What the hell happened?” So what he does – and this is where the sci-fi comes in – he goes back in time. The way the back in time thing all happens is picture the ocean, and if you can go all the way down to the depths of the ocean and through it to the other side, that’s how you go through time; that was my interpretation of going through time. He goes back in time and much to his chagrin, [laughs] he doesn’t find a war and he doesn’t find bombs and scorching flames and all that. What actually was happening was some sort of tyrant-type dude was killing everybody off, maybe like a Hitler-type situation. Or who was that guy that killed everybody with the drink?

CD: Jimmy Jones.

JP: Yeah, like that type of deal. So he’s just like, “Wow! This guy is crazy! I gotta stop all this killing!” So he is not a mortal because he’s from another time; kind of like Scrooge, like you can’t hear him or anything. So he asks the heavens above to be more mortalized, and he becomes mortal and he kills this guy. I don’t know what he does, but he kills him. He’s all psyched, he’s like, “Yeah, I stopped it. I stopped all the killing.” Then he realizes his time is up. He gets this tap on his shoulder and he has to go back through time. So he goes back, and as he’s coming back he’s like, “Oh my God! I don’t feel the same. Something feels weird. I feel like something’s different.” He gets back and this is feeling overwhelms him to such a point that he [goes] back to where he was looking at the wall, and his name now appears as the last name on the memorial. So the whole irony of the story was that in the beginning, the reason why he was by himself is because he was the one who killed everybody in the first place, so he was the only one left. So the time-warp thing happens where he actually goes back in time and he kills himself. It makes no sense really, [laughs] but that is what happened. Basically the song thrives on the fact that we can have time warps.

MP: He was the killing hand.

~~~influences~~~

JP: I think one of the things that keeps this band interesting – not only to listen to, but to play in – is that we take pretty much everything that we listen to as an influence in our writing style. For example, our record collections have lots of heavy metal stuff; really, really, heavy stuff; really hardcore stuff. Then it goes into more New Age stuff and jazz and Latin and different ethnic types of music. If you asked anyone of the guys who their favorite artists are, it’ll range from Peter Gabriel to SOD. It’s just very diverse and I think that’s what keeps the writing always fresh, because we might listen to an Andreas Vollenweider album, and all of a sudden some New Age influences will come out or some funk or whatever. I don’t think we put any limits on what we can do. We don’t say, “Oh we’re a heavy metal band.” I think that’s what really defines the term ‘progressive’ in the true sense is that you’re willing to make some progress.

~~~Light Fuse and Get Away~~~

KM: The name of the song we’ve just taken from what it says on those firecracker packages, “light fuse and get away.” I applied that to personal situations, relationships. How you can sometimes be hardened by personal relationships, like after you come out of a bad one, you can kind of try to separate yourself from it and say, “I don’t want to get involved emotionally anymore with anybody.” You just want to f*** her and forget her. That’s what that’s about. Not about me really having that attitude, but how you can get to that point. When everything falls apart, you just walk away from there with no scars, because you never got involved in the first place. No gain, no pain, which is just if you don’t get involved, if you don’t have a high off the relationship, you can’t have a low. So if you don’t gain anything, you won’t get hurt.

~~~Afterlife~~~

CD: I have been thinking for almost all my life about the concept of an afterlife. So I just applied it to that thought, and I wrote a song which really is out of what the guidelines say or most writers say, that lyrics should make a statement as opposed to asking a question. I said, “Bulls***.” Especially a song like ‘Afterlife.’

KM: What a rebel! [laughs]

CD: Who knows the answers? Afterlife is the big question.

~~~The Ones Who Help to Set the Sun~~~

JP: If any song is in E, that song is in E. [laugh] The beginning for some reason sounds like the inside of a factory or something.

MP: That was originally called ‘Death of Spock’ on the instrumental demo because it just sounded like a soundtrack of Spock being killed.

JP: ...very spacey. The whole song is about a guy who’s driving home late at night, and it’s raining out and he’s really tired and he’s kind of falling asleep at the wheel; I’m sure people have kind of done that. What happens is he has a dream that takes about, I don’t know, a split-second, and the dream is that he actually crashed and he died, and he walks away from this crash. So the whole thing is he’s talking to himself. He’s looking on and seeing what life would be without him, like what people would be affected by his death and how everything caught up to him. And he snaps out of the dream; it takes place really quick. He realizes, “Oh my God. I’ve been running myself down. I’m really busy and I gotta get my s*** together.” And then that segues into the title.

~~~Only a Matter of Time~~~

KM: ‘Matter of Time’ basically is written in a period when the band was just starting to happen and things are going good and everything was positive – not that it doesn’t any more. [laughs] Just like what they were talking about before about ‘Status Seeker,’ how suddenly everybody wants to be a part of it. The catch word for the time was, “Don’t worry about. It’s only a matter of time.” Everybody use to say that in every situation; they still do. That was what it was inspired from. It was also inspired by the fact that we still weren’t making any money – of course now we’re making millions. [laughs] What we had to rely on was just our faith in the future; our belief that it was gonna be only a matter of time. So I was expressing a lot of the fear that I had and I think the band, too. The whole situation when the ‘suited man smiled and says it’s just a matter of time’ is like lawyers and other managers, people wanted to manage us...

JP: ...Steve Sinclair.

KM: People looking at us in a business point of view, which was something totally new for us, making all these promises to us. All we could do is say, “Cool.” We didn’t really know much about the future and it was like ‘approaching the paramount with the sun in our eyes.’ It’s like going up this climb to success but not knowing where you’re going.

~~~To Live Forever~~~

MP: [To Live Forever] was actually inspired by Rattle and Hum. We all went to see that, and after seeing that movie, we were just all completely blown away by U2’s dynamics. And after listening to the first album, we realized that we all have a lot of dynamic capabilities within us as musicians, but we never touch upon it in our own music. We do it at rehearsals; we have a lot of jam sessions and open jams where we just become very dynamic and feed off of each other, but we never wrote a song with any sort of dynamic qualities and simplicities in mind. After seeing Rattle and Hum, we came back and we started jamming on this progression that John had and it turned into ‘Forever,’ which was pretty much our first venture into a very simple dynamic sort of song.

JP: Another thing about that is we all have been trying to get into the elements of songwriting, because I guess what happens when you grow up listening to all the bands that we did, you think that writing a song is putting together the best licks and the best chops and all the weirdest time signatures, and sometimes you don’t worry about the song. Hopefully that didn’t escape us too much, but I realized that I couldn’t take any one of our songs, and sit down with an acoustic – the most basic form of a guitar – and play the song. I would need delays and overdubs, and I’d have to be warmed up and all this stuff, so I said, “Let’s write a song you can sit down and play, whether it be on a piano or an acoustic, but something and have the full sound of the song,” and that was that.

~~~Kevin Moore and John Petrucci~~~

CD: Kevin and John Petrucci I kind of have a personal affinity for because I play guitar myself. I love the piano, I love the keyboard. I can really relate to their musical love and the desire to play and progress as an instrumentalist. As people, John is like the person in me that I kind of lost touch with; the person that stayed young, stayed the child, stayed sensitive and still grows, still learns. Kevin is similar to me in the sense that he’s built his defenses. He’s learned how to deal with the world and he governs the amount of how much he lets people into his personal self and how much he keeps them out; he has a good pulse on that.

JP: Kev is first of all fun to be with. He is probably the funniest person I’ll ever meet and it makes playing together and hang out together that much more enjoyable. As far as musician goes, I have the utmost respect for his playing, his writing and his attitude about music and his openness about music.

MP: Kev is the comedian of the band. Kev never fails to make us laugh. He’s always got something really funny to say. He can make any normal situation into a very funny situation. He’s a very serious person, too. He can be very emotional. He’s also a great lyricist. I love his lyrics. Both of his lyrics on When Dream and Day Unite I think are incredible; I love ‘em. John is a very, very serious and dedicated musician. He’s the sort of guy that will just keep constantly learning and practicing, and will never ever stop because he’ll never be satisfied with his playing. As far as his playing goes, he is a monster. I think he is the best I’ve seen and I think he’s very underrated. I think a lot of times people don’t realize how good he is. He doesn’t realize how good he is, but he’s the sort of guitarist that can just do anything.

~~~John Myung~~~

JP: John is very original. I relate to John incredibly when it comes to dedication and practicing. I can remember sitting down [when] we were young and being like, “Man, we gotta practice six hours today.” This is when we weren’t even in the same band. Everyone else would be partying and whatnot, but if we saw each other out, it would only mean one thing, and that was that we got our six hours of practice in. He has to be [one of] the most inspirational people that I know, because the devotion [is] just amazing. Call him up, you hear a metronome in the background and it’s like, “Wow, I should be doing that.” So he just completely pushes [himself].

CD: John Myung is a very special guy, very quiet, very sensitive, very introspective, very talented player and writer. It’s hard to get close to John, but I feel like I am close to John and I know I’ll always be. And I respect his musicianship.

MP: John Myung is a very, very interesting person. He’s very quiet and introverted, and he’s got his set ways and values, and he lives by them. As a musician, when I first met him, he never put down his bass. His bass was like part of his body. Up at Berklee, he would never go out or anything. He would just spend all day practicing and all night, and when we weren’t practicing as a band, he was constantly locked in a practice room at Berklee, just constantly practicing, never putting that thing down.

~~~Mike Portnoy~~~

CD: Mike is a real sweet guy, real open and honest guy. Mike is a real special guy and he happens to be one of the best drummers I’ve ever heard in my life.

JP: My dad had turned me on to something that I read where it was saying how mental practicing can be such a great supplement to actually playing your instrument, and Mike is the complete example of that, because he’s just always thinking of rhythms and playing things. The greatest thing is that he comes up with things and he looks at things with a completely different perspective than you would imagine, but he looks at things from a completely different perspective than what one would expect. And that’s when we start to get into the analytical scene because Mike is the most meticulous person I’ll ever know, and so far as coming up with different ways to turn around the beat or accent things or be creative, he’s like the genius of that. As a drummer, I think he’s abnormally involved in arranging and knowing what’s going on. He can probably play all of our parts on the guitar and all the instruments to his best ability. He knows the notes that we’re playing, he knows the scales that we’re playing, he writes things out and it just kind of helps us when it comes to counting. I didn’t grow up with Mike but I met him in school, and that was the best thing that school did for me: introduce me to one of the greatest friends I’ll ever have and one of the greatest drummers I’ll ever play with.

~~~Charlie Dominici~~~

CD: All these guys are personal friends of mine. I respect them all, I admire them all, I love them all. But most of all, I’m really happy to have known them and to know them to be working with them, because they make me feel like it’s never too late to learn and to progress and to become something more than we were the day before. And that’s what I feel I do when I’m with this band: I grow. Somebody told me a long time ago, “Stay green and you grow, grow ripe and you rot.” Since I joined this band, I’ve gotten back to staying green.

JP: Charlie is definitely one of my favorite singers. I think his voice is just so smooth, and I like the soulfulness of his voice. Also he was a really good influence on the band because he came from more of a pop background and we were coming from more of anti-pop, heavy metal, progressive rock, and the blend I think and into diversity into the depth of the writing style.

MP: It was just a matter of the chemistry not mixing. He had all of the ingredients that our chemistry has. He was a very open person, very honest, down-to-earth, very musical. I think he’s got an incredible voice; his voice is so melodic and he has a lot of soul and he really knows how to sing music. He would come down and do Billy Joel songs or Beatles songs and just sing the s*** out of them. He had a lot of similar qualities to us, but I don’t think he was right for us. The chemistry just did not mix. We had the four of us and we had him with very similar characteristics and qualities, but for some reason it was like oil and vinegar: they’re both on the same salad, but they never mixed together for some reason, and they both taste good on the salad, but for some reason they don’t mesh.

JP: I think the reason why he’s not in Dream Theater now is because I think stylistically we might have overshot so far as a pop singer and a progressive band or whatever it might have been. I think he definitely had the same vision. I think his voice is phenomenal; it might not have been in the right band.

CD: By the time you see this video, I’ll have probably been thrown out and some new guy will be the singer, but even if that should happen someday, I know I’ll still remain friends with the guys.