Lifting The Curtain On... Dream Theater

“We could easily have given up or gone our separate ways, but I think the fact that we stuck together shows how committed we all are to one another and our music.”

Dream Theater vocalist James LaBrie had not been having what you’d call a good week. Backstage at the Ritz in New York City, LaBrie was a half hour away from taking the stage before headliners Iron Maiden. With his head stuffed up from what he himself diagnosed as a sinus infection, the Toronto, Canada native relayed the harrowing tale of a recent attempt to enter the U.S.

It seems that customs officials stopped him twice in a three-day period when he tried to board a plane. They even went so far as to whisk him away to a remote interrogation room somewhere deep within the bowels of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport just to “question” him. The problem was that LaBrie didn’t have a working visa, which he needed if he was coming into this country to make money.

“It was unbelievable,” sighed LaBrie. “I was trying to explain to them that I was going to the U.S. for promotional purposes only, and that I wouldn’t be making money, but they didn’t believe me. I even brought them band pictures, the album cover, anything I could get my hands on, but they wouldn’t let me go. They kept asking me the same questions over and over, just really harassing me. They kept asking me if I’d ever been arrested, even though I kept telling them no.”

I guess he forgot to tell them about the time he got fired from his job as a postal worker and wound up killing 57 people and the grill chef at McDonald’s.

Kidding. Just kidding.

Dream Theater’s management company eventually took care of all the necessary paperwork, and LaBrie was permitted to enter.

“But I didn’t think I’d ever get here,” he said, looking like he was going to start having Midnight Express flashbacks any minute.

Backstage jitters were setting in. Here it was, only the band’s third show of the year, and they were already opening for Iron Maiden at the Ritz. Guitarist John Petrucci peered out from behind the curtain at the few thousand Maiden fans who had already gathered and noticed that the natives were visibly restless.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself. “I hope they don’t give us any shit.”

Overhearing the comment, Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris smiled. He walked over to Petrucci and reassuringly whispered, “If they do give you shit, mate, just give it right back.”

Petrucci shot Harris a look, like, “Easy for you to say; that’s your crowd out there.”

And he was right – most of the 3,000-plus fans crammed into the 2,500-capacity Ritz had never even heard of Dream Theater. Hell, when Iron Maiden’s first album came out back in 1980, Petrucci was still in grade school, air-guitaring to Rush albums like Hemispheres and 2112.

In the back of the club, near the bar, a couple of musclebound steroid-heads chanted, “Mai-den! Mai-den!”

I hoped Petrucci couldn’t hear them.

“F?!k the opening act! Mai-den! Mai-den!”

Yikes. I really hoped Petrucci couldn’t hear them.

Drummer Mike Portnoy was a little more relaxed about the whole thing. “If the people are into us, great,” he said. “If not, that’s okay; we’ll reach the people that really count, the ones who will appreciate what we’re doing.”

It was easy to pick those people out of the crowd. They were the ones wearing faded Yes shirts and King’s X buttons. There was a Queensrÿche baseball cap and some Fates Warning jerseys. Progressive-metal fans, people who aren’t satisfied with the three-chord, 4/4 beat of the average metal band, these are Dream Theater’s supporters. The band’s new album, Images and Words, is a heady mix of complex musical arrangements and flowing melodies. They’ve been described as “Metallica meets ELP” by some and “Rush on steroids” by others.

Some critics claim that this style of Kansas/Yes/Rush-influenced rock died years ago, and that Dream Theater are going to have their work cut out for them if they want to survive in the ‘90s. What ultimately saves Dream Theater from being tagged a dinosaur band, though, is the fact that their guitar sound is post-Metallica – heavy and in your face – making them more of what you’d call a contemporary progressive unit. But they’re still going to have their work cut out for them.

We’re living in a time when non-musicians, like rap “artists,” dominate the charts, selling millions of albums despite the fact that they can’t play instruments or sing a note. The type of hard music that’s selling these days is either Slaughter-style fluff or grunge rock – which many feel is nothing more than recycled Sabbath riffs, Seattle style. Dream Theater fits into neither of these formats. It’s also standard operating procedure that rock-radio singles don’t exceed a three-minute running time, yet the first Dream Theater single, “Pull Me Under,” is over eight minutes long.

“Y’know, we could easily write an album’s worth of three-minute commercial pieces,” defended Portnoy, “but then we wouldn’t be true to ourselves. There’s so many bands out there doing the same formula. I think people want to hear something a little more diverse, a little more challenging. I think there are elements of our music that can appeal to just about everyone.”

The group formed some seven years ago, when Portnoy, Petrucci and bassist John Myung met while attending Berklee. Petrucci and Myung had already been jamming with Fredonia School of Music student/keyboardist Kevin Moore and were looking to put together a band. Finding common denominators in their love for Rush and a shared home base in Long Island, New York, the four of them decided to quit school and form the band (which was then called Majesty). Joined soon thereafter by local singer Charlie Dominici, they spent their days practicing and writing in the basement of a hair salon, then recorded their first demo, which would subsequently get them signed to Mechanic Records.

Changing their name to Dream Theater (some other band had the rights to the Majesty moniker and wouldn’t part with it), they recorded their first album, When Dream and Day Unite, an ambitious, if somewhat busy, album that got them tagged “overplayers” by critics and “untouchable” by peers.

Things unraveled quickly from there.

The relationship between Dominici and the band got strained somewhere along the way, and he was given a pink slip. Their deal with Mechanic also went sour.

“We were really unhappy at Mechanic,” said Portnoy. “We weren’t given the proper tools we needed to function as a band. We had tours lined up, but they pulled the plug because of financial backing. So we opted to get out of the deal.”

It took two years for them to get signed again, and two and a half years to find a new singer.

“We were really tested during that time,” recalled Portnoy. “We could easily have given up or gone our separate ways, but I think the fact that we stuck together shows how committed we all are to one another and our music.”

What’s even more impressive is the fact that, during that time, the band got signed to a major label (Atco) on the strength of a cheesily recorded demo that didn’t even have vocals.

“When I first signed the band, people thought I had gone completely mad,” confessed Atco A&R Director Derek Oliver. “I introduced the band to the company with some very low-budget, cheap-sounding home-recorded demos. They didn’t even have a vocalist at the time. But the material had these amazing 15- and 20-minute-long songs with amazing instrumental prowess on them.”

In order to prove his sanity, Oliver put the band in a proper studio with David (Firehouse) Prater to record a three-song demo. The finished tape had a running time of 45 minutes. Three songs. Forty-five minutes. “I played those demos for the label,” Oliver remembered, “and they said, ‘You’re not mad. This band is incredible.’”

Now all they had to do was get a vocalist.

After auditioning hundreds of potential singers, the band finally found the one they were looking for right in their own backyard – or so they thought. New Yorker Chris Cintron was brought in, and work on the new album was about to begin when LaBrie sent in his tape and “ruined everything.”

LaBrie, former vocalist for Coney Hatch and Winter Rose, heard that Dream Theater was looking for a singer. After listening to a friend’s copy of the first album, he was impressed, but not quite sure if they were right for him. Then he checked out rough demos of the songs the band was working on for the new album and was totally blown away. “Right then and there I was totally sold on the idea of working with them,” he said. “Their writing had matured greatly, and the overall stuff on those demos was incredible. “

LaBrie called the band and told them that a tape was in the mail. They weren’t interested.

“They said that they already had a singer,” explained LaBrie. “So I said, ‘Okay, good luck,’ and figured that was that.”

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Portnoy decided to play LaBrie’s tape on the way to rehearsal one night. He was so blown away that he got the rest of the band to listen to it. The next day, Portnoy called LaBrie.

Laughing, LaBrie recalled the message. “He said, ‘Uh we just got your tape, and, uh, we’d like you to come to New York and, uh, see if things click.’”

Things clicked.

LaBrie’s performance on Images and Words is incredible. From breathy whispers to nosebleed-inducing highs, his crisp, clean, richly textured vocals give the technically complex Dream Theater a sound that is instantly warm and easy on the ear. To give you an idea of LaBrie’s range, he was in a band singing Heart covers at the age of 16.

“James makes everything we do so much more listenable,” said Petrucci. “His voice is really pleasant to the ear.”

In an effort to make their entire sound a little more ear-friendly, the band enlisted producer David Prater to work on the album.

“I think a lot of the songs on the first album went over people’s heads,” admitted Petrucci. “We made a step toward changing that early on by using David. The production of this album is night and day compared to that one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Terry Date [producer of When Dream and Day Unite]; he’s a great producer, but he didn’t really guide us. We had a limited budget, and his job was to get us in there and get us out, and that’s what we did. Everything is so much cleaner on this record. David really helped us get some great sounds. The vocals were always up front, and everything was immediately more digestible. We needed that, ‘cause, y’know, we don’t want to go over people’s heads.”

I had to ask it: “Do you think Dream Theater overplays sometimes?”

Petrucci started to say something, then stopped and smiled.

Whew. I thought he was going to hit me.

“Sometimes we do,” he answered. “We have to work on that. But overplaying is a weird concept. Overplaying, to me, is when there’s something that supposed to be the focal point – like vocals, for instance – and there’s all this soloing and stuff that takes away from that. I think we’re moving away from that.”

Suddenly the lights dimmed and the band’s intro tape went on.

Showtime.

Watching Petrucci’s face, you could see that Steve Harris’ advice was well-taken. “Give ‘em shit back. Give ‘em shit back. Give ‘em shit back,” he seemed to be saying as he walked onto the stage.

Luckily he didn’t have to, because halfway through Dream Theater’s first number (“Pull Me Under”) the crowd of Maiden rivetheads and earthdogs began moshing. By the end of the set the Ritz was in total mayhem.

I turned and looked for the steroid-heads. They were gone.

No, wait, there they were, up front. The steroid-heads were moshing in the pit to Dream Theater. Now I’d seen everything.

Through it all, Petrucci, jaw dangling somewhere around his ankles, gazed out at the club with a look of utter amazement on his face. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said afterwards. “We never expected a reaction like that. Jeez... those kids were stagediving during the acoustic parts. But I don’t know. Maybe they were just so psyched to see Iron Maiden that they were just being nice to us.”

I doubt it. I think they just recognized amazing talent when they heard it.