Dream Come True

After eight years of hard work, Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci wakes up to find himself at the top of the progressive rock heap.

By Jeff Kitts

When it comes to grunge rock, Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci has something of an attitude problem.

“Our style is completely different from grunge and alternative music,” says the 26-year-old New York virtuoso. “But I think our music has as much attitude as any of those bands.”

Dream Theater play a complicated, textured style of hard rock that embraces flawless musicianship, endless improv sections, daring arrangements, keyboards, melodic vocals and flashy elements made popular by Yes, Kansas, Rush and other old-school progressive rock bands. Sonically, Dream Theater’s complicated music is worlds apart from the primal, brutal grind of Soundgarden or The Melvins – yet is similarly effective.

“Playing complex music is just our way of challenging ourselves,” says Petrucci. “But everything we play still comes from the heart, just like all those grunge bands. I think people are always looking for new music that has a strong point of view.”

The nucleus of the band – Petrucci, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Portnoy – first got together in 1985, while each of them was attending the Berklee College Of Music in Boston. Although they were serious music students, their primary goal at Berklee was to meet the right musicians and form a band. Once that happened, they left the school.

After hiring Charley Dominici to be their frontman, Dream Theater (which had gone under the name Majesty from ‘85 to ‘88) signed with MCA and released its first album, When Dream And Day Unite, in 1989. The album proved to be a commercial failure, and the band was subsequently dropped from the label.

“I think our first album might have been a little too ‘out there’ for most people,” says Petrucci. “We’re still ‘out there,’ but now our music has more focus.”

After taking some time off to regroup, the band replaced Dominici with Canadian James LaBrie, signed a new deal with Atco Records and began writing material for their second album, Images And Words. The album soared up the charts, fueled by the riveting single ‘Pull Me Under.’ Their success has firmly established Dream Theater as the progressive rock band of the Nineties – and Petrucci as tomorrow’s guitar hero. It’s a role he doesn’t necessarily welcome.

“Being looked at as a guitar hero is very flattering, of course,” says Petrucci. “But being singled out. away from the rest of the band, doesn’t appeal to me. I’d prefer to have people view me as a talented musician in a good band – not as some flashy solo artist.”

Guitar World: Dream Theater’s music is highly structured, unlike that of the many rock bands whose songs are the product of free-form jam sessions. Is jamming still a part of your songwriting process?

John Petrucci: To tell you the truth, the majority of our songwriting is the product of jamming. What usually happens is that someone will come up with a specific idea – like a drum beat or a chord progression – and we’ll just jam on that idea. Other times, we’ll just start jamming on no specific idea and see what comes of it.

GW: Does the band record its jams?

JP: Always. Then we take the best ideas and put them on paper. At that point, deciding on how the arrangements should go begins to get a little more analytical. But the initial spark and the core of the idea always comes from a jam situation.

GW: Your songs tend to go through many twists and turns. How do you maintain continuity between the sections?

JP: One thing we always do when we write is to change only the arrangements and the orchestration – not the chord progressions. The underlying harmony is always the same, and I think that’s what gives it that feeling of consistency. The perfect example of that is ‘Pull Me Under.’ With a few exceptions, the entire song has the same chord progression running throughout. It might sound different rhythmically, or some parts might be in double time, but it’s still the same chord progression.

GW: Images And Words contains a lot of unison playing by the guitar and keyboards. Are the solos written out, and if so, who composes them?

JP: If the parts are complex, we’ll write them out because it’s hard to remember otherwise. Kevin [Moore, keyboards] and I take turns composing solos, but let me tell you, it’s a real nightmare to double keyboard parts on a guitar. It’s a very unorthodox way of playing. You end up doing a lot of skipping around to make it work. And it’s the same thing for Kevin. When he tries to play guitar parts on his keyboard, he has to account for all my bends, inflections and vibrato. But it is very gratifying when we finally figure things out.

GW: Which song on the album gave you the most trouble?

JP: Probably ‘Take The Time.’ All the solo passages on that song were originally keyboard parts. There’s one part that sounds like a flute, and that was really difficult to play on guitar. And there’s this one crazy part after the keyboard solo where I double everything Kev does, and that was real hard as well.

GW: Dream Theater is a real musician’s band. Is there a temptation to overplay?

JP: Yeah, it can be a problem – but that’s what a producer is for. [laughs] I think it was a problem on our first album. Everyone was kind of on top of each other. We were all guilty of stepping on each other’s parts. For example, I would play these huge chord forms that would obscure Kev; at other times Kev was guilty of obscuring our bassist with low synth parts.

GW: Was the band able to overcome the problem on Images And Words?

JP: I was aware of the problem before, but not to this degree. The producer, David Pratner [Firehouse], has a great ear. Working with him changed my perspective about songwriting and arranging. I think everyone in the band views Dream Theater more as an orchestra now – everybody has their place: and when you put it all together, it sounds bigger than the individual parts.

GW: Is this album more focused or more complex than your debut?

JP: It’s both. It’s more complicated, and yet it’s simpler. It’s heavier, but it’s more dynamic. It’s more commercial, but it’s more progressive. We went for all the extremes. But, of course, there are those times when we contradict what I’m saying here. We’re not totally consistent, which is just part of growing as musicians.

GW: Did you make any changes in your setup or gear since you’ve had some success?

JP: Just one. I’m running through two Mesa/Boogie 290 power amps now; the second one runs into two 2x12 Rectifier wedges with which I basically run my own monitor system. So wherever I am on stage, I can hear a direct signal from the preamp. I’m not subject to the variables of monitor systems.

I went to Mesa/Boogie with this problem; because monitor systems are so variable and so often are really bad, I couldn’t count on hearing a decent guitar signal – especially if I moved around at all. And they came up with this solution – the vice president, Jim Aschow, actually built it for me – and now they’re thinking of marketing it. It seems to be a very common problem, so I can’t believe no one’s ever raised it before.

GW: How did the band form?

JP: John Myung [bassist], myself and Kevin all grew up together playing in different bands, and John and I went to the Berklee College Of Music together. And while we went to the school to study music, we also wanted to meet other musicians and hopefully form a cool band – which is why a lot of people go there. So we met Mike Portnoy [drummer] there and formed the band.

GW: For how long did you, Mike and John attend Berklee?

JP: Well, none of us graduated! [laughs] We went for a total of two semesters. My major was going to be Performance On Guitar, and you really can’t establish a major in two semesters. So I spent most of my time there just taking my preliminary courses, like Arranging, Harmony, Ear Training – most of the basics.

GW: Did you already have a style when you went to Berklee?

JP: No. I sounded like Yngwie, only not as good. [laughs] I was really into Rush, so I also sounded a lot like Alex Lifeson – especially the way we both use chorus. To tell you truth, I still don’t feel that I’ve developed a unique style. But you can definitely hear my influences in my playing.

GW: Why did the three of you leave school?

JP: We all wanted to study music, of course, but what each of us really wanted was to meet other musicians and form a band. Once we all got together, we started rehearsing for six hours each night. Since the academic curriculum at Berklee is very demanding, we knew we’d never be able to keep our grades up and still be in a full-time band.

GW: Can learning in a classroom be a hindrance to a rock guitarist?

JP: It’s funny, people think that studying music will somehow hinder your ability to rock. I mean, I grew up listening to Zeppelin and Sabbath like everyone else, but I studied so I could learn the language of the instrument. Why can’t you have it both ways?

GW: There’s always the argument of feeling versus technique.

JP: I’ve always felt that you should be technically proficient enough to be able to express what you want to do. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play with feeling. Look at Steve Morse; he’s the most incredibly talented player, yet no one could say that he doesn’t play with feel.

GW: What was the most valuable thing you learned during your stay at Berklee?

JP: I think the greatest thing I got out of going to Berklee was learning how to teach myself. Berklee is a lot like a gym, in that it has a lot of different resources for you to use – but no one is going to force you to use anything. You have to do it yourself. And even if you don’t go to Berklee, you can just go out and buy a book like Ted Green’s Chord Chemistry.

GW: What else would you recommend to young players?

JP: The first Paul Gilbert home video was very helpful to me. I also once recorded a Steve Morse guitar clinic while I was at Berklee, and half of the stuff I still practice today is from that tape. I was also really impressed by a Joe Diorio book called Fusion – it helped me a lot. There’s so much available to young guitarists today; they just have to find what’s out there and take advantage of it.

GW: What inspired you to teach after leaving Berklee?

JP: After I left school, I worked in a deli on Long Island for about 11 months, until it dawned on me one day that I should not be making sandwiches for a living. I always liked showing people things I had learned on guitar and talking guitar with other players – and besides, teaching was also a good way to make money. [laughs]

GW: What was the most important thing you taught to your students?

JP: Probably the idea of applying yourself and using the resources available to you. And practicing!

GW: Did you learn anything about your own playing from teaching?

JP: Sometimes it made me realize that I didn’t know a piece of music as well as I thought I did. You can think that you know something just because you can play it for yourself. But once you have to teach it to someone else and explain it and demonstrate it proficiently, you find that you really don’t know it. I always stressed the importance of being expressive and using phrasing elements – and making sure the students always retained some sense of a personality when they played.

GW: How did you learn to play?

JP: I went to Berklee when I was 17, and before that I had been playing for five years, just listening to records and copying. I would listen to albums by Al Di Meola and Yngwie and slow them down to 16 rpm, and learn from that. Then when I went to high school, I took some music theory courses and learned things like traditional classical guitar theory.

GW: What other players do you admire?

JP: I think Joe Satriani is incredibly expressive, especially in the way he uses bending. Steve Vai’s Passion And Warfare is also amazing. The only real progressive rock bands I was into were Rush and Yes – which is where I got most of my compositional style from. But when it comes to solos, I take more from the modern players like Satriani and Vai.

GW: What goes into a typical practice session for you?

JP: When I’m on the road, I practice differently than I do when I’m home. All I’ve been practicing lately is maintaining the technical sections of our music. When we were recording the album, I only practiced what I had to record. I just like to maintain my chops.

GW: As such a gifted musician, does it bother you when guitarists who can barely play their instruments achieve superstar status?

JP: It really doesn’t bother me, because at least a lot of those players have tons of attitude. Whether they can play or not is another story. But what does bother me are these bubble gum glam-rock players who act like they can play, and have that rock star image.

GW: Dream Theater is such a technical, complex band – is it ever difficult to let the attitude show through?

JP: Not at all. Playing complicated music is just our way of expressing ourselves. To me, there’s still nothing better than just plugging in and letting it rip.