Dream Theater Finds Success Through Back Door

Eight years ago, three long-haired guys got together at college to do some jamming. They started to play rock ‘n’ roll and put together some heavy metal tunes.

Nothing unusual about that, right?

“Well, at the time for us three long-haired guys studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where everyone was really into jazz and stuff, we got looked at pretty strangely when we were pumping out all this loud, frantic music in a rehearsal room,” said Mike Portnoy, drummer for the band Dream Theater.

But the efforts are paying off for Portnoy, bass guitarist John Myung and lead guitarist John Petrucci. The threesome stayed at Berklee for a year, then headed home to Long Island, N.Y., where they hooked up with a fourth musician, keyboardist Kevin Moore. The four found a singer, and got on their way.

“Our original record deal sort of fell into our laps really,” Portnoy said in a recent phone interview. “We weren’t gigging in clubs or shopping around demo tapes to record labels, but we had friends in other bands who were signed and they told people about us.”

But it didn’t work out the way the band planned. “We had no idea how much of a business music is,” Portnoy said. “And we took a lot for granted and made a lot of mistakes.”

Two labels and singers later, the band has found a home at Atco, a division of Atlantic Records, and the quartet has become a quintet with the addition of James LaBrie on vocals.

Their latest album, Images And Words, debuted about nine months ago, and the guys have been on the road touring hard to promote it ever since.

“We spent a lot of time in between records trying to rectify our mistakes,” Portnoy admitted. “And we spent several months in the studio working with James and putting this together. So it’s great to be touring.

“We’ve done Europe and Japan and have traveled the (United) States three times and now we’re doing it again. We’ll keep doing it as long as the record’s still out there doing well.”

Portnoy said the most exciting taste of success came when the band landed in Japan for the first time. “Japan was something else,” he said. “It was really incredible. The fans there are so fanatical. There were people waiting in the airport when we landed. We felt like the Beatles or something.”

Musically, the band likes to incorporate elements of jazz and “progressive” metal with traditional metal sounds. And everything it does is a cooperative effort. The band composes all of its music in rehearsal, each member adding pieces until the puzzle is completed to their satisfaction. The album cover is a combination of images everyone wanted to incorporate, and most of them contribute lyrically as well.

“The piece I like best on Images is a single called ‘Take The Time’,” Portnoy said. “Because it is the only song on the album that we all collaborated on musically and lyrically. Everybody took a section. And it really describes what the band has been through.”

Indeed, ‘Take The Time’ is a message of reevaluation, hope and change... three elements the boys of Dream Theater are now well-familiar with.

“If there’s a pensive fear/A wasted year/A man must learn to cope.

“If his obsession’s real/Suppression that he feels Must turn to hope.”