Dream Theater Dream On

It’s taken prog hard rockers Dream Theater seven years, but Mike Portnoy can finally tell Chris Marlowe that he has no complaints...

Mike Portnoy, the drummer for Dream Theater, is not exaggerating the importance of their new ‘Images & Dreams’ LP when he philosophically shrugs. “We really have to reestablish ourselves. I mean this is in many people’s minds going to be the band’s first album.”

The New York-based quintet’s debut album, ‘When Dream And Date Unite,’ sank quietly into the quicksands of oblivion back in 1989. After that, Mike recalls, “We pretty much lost everything. We were at rock bottom, but we didn’t give up hope. We pretty much rebuilt the whole thing. In addition to getting a new singer, we also changed record companies, management, lawyers...”

Dream Theater’s core members, John Myung (bass), John Petrucci (guitar), Kevin Moore (keyboards) and Mike himself remained intact, but vocalist Charlie Dominici was thrown out with the legal bathwater. He was replaced by James LaBrie, a Canadian who’s past includes stints with Winter Rose and Coney Hatch.

A new singer is not the only evidence of this period in purgatory, Mike believes. “You can hear in the album that we’ve been through three years of hard Times. Most of the lyrics have a common thread running through them, which is loss and sorrow and becoming stronger from those experiences.”

He remembers, “the singer situation was a long and grueling process. We received hundreds of tapes and we auditioned a couple of dozen or so people, but it was just really hard to find the right combination of all the elements we wanted. A lot of people’s focal point is the vocalist, and James brings a whole new spectrum of sound to the band. From the band point of view and the creative point of view, we couldn’t be happier.”

Fitting into the band’s point of view might not be as easy as it sounds, because Dream Theater arrive at the progressive blend of diverse genres through a strictly democratic process. According to Mike, “every member has an equal say in everything. It’s not like any one person’s vision.”

He laughs when asked if that doesn’t lead to spectacular arguments. “Yeah! But for the most part it’s great. When it comes to the songwriting, it really adds a nice diversity to the music. Somebody will come in with some real progressive parts and then off of that it will take a shift into a real moody section, like a Pink Floyd-ish sort of thing, and from there it will go into a heavy section or maybe something a little more funkier or alternative. You always hear bands saying like, ‘We’re open-minded; we listen to everything from the Beatles to Voivod,’ but you listen to their music and it will just sound like one thing. They may listen to all these bands, but they don’t incorporate them into their music.”

Touring is problematic for Dream Theater. “It’s tough,” Mike says, “Because there are a lot of different styles and elements in the music, and it would probably go over a lot of people’s heads if they weren’t familiar with it. I think Rush’s audience would appreciate where we’re coming from. And a lot of the elements would appeal to a Queensryche crowd. Queensryche come from almost a progressive background, but they’ve really broken into the metal mainstream.”

This theory was put to the test recently, when Dream Theater opened a one-off show for Iron Maiden. “Our only concern was how the audience would take to us. But it was incredible. The place, from the very first note, went crazy. There was slam-dancing and moshing and stuff like that – that to us, people would have never done.”

“It’s kind of strange that we could play with a band like Marillion and also play with the band like Iron Maiden, and be accepted in both circles,” Mike concludes. Dream Theater’s musical statement may not be understated, but their verbal ones certainly are.