Progressive Metal

Dream Theater goes to any length to act upon its conscience

By Dave Larsen

Art rock and heavy metal are in essence the stylistic antithesis of one another. The former genre involves complex musical structures requiring a high degree of technical proficiency, while the latter is, to paraphrase the late Lester Bangs, the aural equivalent of a battering ram.

Dream Theater draws Its inspiration from both of these disparate styles, and combines the best elements of each on its Atco Records debut Images And Words, placing them in a contemporary context that lies somewhere between Marillion and Metallica.

Call it progressive metal.

The nucleus of the band met at Boston’s venerable Berklee School of Music in 1985. Guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung approached drummer Mike Portnoy after watching him play in a practice room, having also noticed his penchant for T-shirts featuring underground metal bands.

“They knew that I was a rocker, which is a hard thing to find at Berklee,” Portnoy says. As they talked they discovered that “as well as being into all the metal that was around at that time, we all had a common influence or interest In all the old progressive bands.”

Their love of art rock acts such as Pink Floyd and pre-pop Rush, Yes and Genesis was shared by keyboardist Kevin Moore, but finding a singer with a similar background and the ability and range to match their impressive playing proved more difficult. After releasing the little-noticed When Dream And Day Unite for another label in 1989, the band spent two years listening to hundreds of audition tapes before finding Canadian James LaBrie.

“You tend to find that it’s mainly musicians that are into that old progressive scene because it’s so instrumentally based, yet James really did have an appreciation for bands like Yes and Rush,” Portnoy says. The singer also had a more commercially oriented background, which brings Dream Theater much needed marketability.

Images And Words is No.7 on Billboard’s new artists chart, and much to the band’s surprise, the single ‘Pull Me Under’ is No. 12 on the Album Rock Tracks chart.

‘‘After the album was done we sat down with the record company and we said OK, well look, we really can’t rely on radio, we can’t rely on video – the songs are too long, the arrangements are too involved... we’re going to have to do this strictly through touring and press and word-of-mouth... and then out of nowhere ‘Pull Me Under’ is just picked up on radio and in some respect it’s exploded way beyond what we expected, and it’s just incredible.”

Although Images And Words is nearly an hour in length, the album contains only eight songs, with several approaching or surpassing the 10-minute mark.

“When we start writing we pretty much take the clock off the wall,” Portnoy says. “We don’t want to have to write a song within four minutes just for radio’s sake. However long it takes for these ideas to get expressed and for us to feel that we’ve really taken the song to its fullest potential, then that’s however long it will take.

“And a lot of times for us it takes 10 minutes.”

The band keeps its epic material from sounding overblown by offsetting its progressive leanings with the rhythmic power of contemporary metal, which helps translate Dream Theater’s dramatic sound to the live setting.

“A lot of people have this preconceived idea of quote-unquote ‘progressive bands’ being really pompous, self-indulgent and just really stiff and into their instruments on stage, but for us It’s really important that we don’t get stereotyped like that.

“It’s not just five musicians standing in their own little worlds twiddling away on their instruments – there’s really a lot of energy and just a whole live feel to it. As with the music, it’s bringing the progressive elements into the ‘90s.”