Dream Theater – Awake in Dreamland

To some, the annual migration to Foundations Forum has turned into much more than just another obligatory music industry gathering...it’s become a ritual. Sure, there are other music industry seminars and conventions during the course of the year, but nothing compares to the Forum. Billed as the world’s only hard music convention, this literal three-day clusterf?!k of hard music freaks, fans and industry folk is best described as part rock concert, part freak show, and part pajama party.

Dream Theater (vocalist James LaBrie, guitarist John Petrucci, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Portnoy) are at Forum ‘94 celebrating the release of a new record and for a headlining gig on the convention’s second night, a show that also features a performance by (among others) a certain Swedish guitarist named Yngwie Malmsteen. At the moment, Malmsteen—whose bloated belly and multiple chins has him looking a little like “Elvis: The Later Years”—is swaggering through the hotel lobby, a beer in one hand, his wife Amber in the other.

Malmsteen has just finished his set, a performance that ended with him lighting his guitar on fire. This unfortunately set off the fire alarms in the hotel’s convention center, and the Burbank fire department were called to the scene (can you say Spinal Tap?). That didn’t sit too well with the arriving fire marshall, who threatened to shut down the convention for the rest of the evening. Luckily, Forum officials calmed the chief down, but not before he ordered the room cleared (which was already packed with over a thousand people waiting for headlining act Dream Theater to go on) until the smoke dissipated. As a result, the night’s events (which were already running close to an hour behind schedule) were pushed further back, which meant Dream Theater were going to wind up going on even later. That didn’t sit well with Jim Pitulski, Dream Theater’s manager, who walked out of the convention center muttering obscenities under his breath, each followed by the name “Yngwie.”

But Malmsteen wanted to set things straight.

Rounding the corner of the lobby, he found his way to Dream Theater’s dressing room and invited himself in. The guys in Dream Theater looked confused as Malmsteen barged in and began rambling.

“Hey guys, I’m really sorry,” he started. “I would never do anything to mess with you or screw up your show. Really.”

As he spoke, he moved his arms about excitedly, spilling his beer all over the rug, the couch and himself.

The band, not knowing whether to laugh at him or tell him to just get the f?!k out (or both), just stood there with bemused looks on their faces.

John Petrucci spoke first.

“It’s alright...”

But every time someone else tried to talk, Malmsteen would just ramble right over them.

“Y’know, I really love you guys,” he interrupted, “I play your album all the time and I think you guys are great, blah, blah, blah...”

Amber stood behind her husband, staring at her feet while shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She looked uncomfortable.

“Yngwie, maybe we should go,” she said, tugging at his beefy hand. “They probably want to be left alone. They’re going on soon.”

Yngwie just ignored her.

“I’m really sorry, blah, blah, blah...” he babbled.

Eventually, he left.

As the door closed behind him, everyone in the room looked at one another.

“Uh, that was really weird,” said Petrucci.

Mike Portnoy turned to me and laughed, “Where’s a video camera when you need one?”

For Dream Theater, the past year has been filled with that same sense of surrealism: first, there was the success of major-label (EastWest) debut Images And Words. While the media and MTV were force-feeding the public a steady diet of alterna-grunge, the band went and released the sprawling Images—an album determined to prove that songs don’t have to live and breathe by the standard, three minute-plus formula of verse, pre-chorus, chorus in order to be successful. In addition to establishing the band as virtuosos (one critic wrote: “...it’s obvious that each member of DT is quite capable of running through multiple tempo changes with one hand while eating tuna sandwiches with the other...”), Images sold almost 500,000 copies, remarkable for a debut album. The success of the record and hit single, “Pull Me Under,” yanked the band out of their rehearsal room in Long Island (actually the basement of a hair salon) and catapulted them into the mainstream.

That was followed by a tour that lasted more than a year and a half, which was in turn almost immediately followed by writing sessions for (and eventually, the recording of) new album Awake.

Then, in the middle of the recording sessions, Portnoy married longtime girlfriend Marlene. In an unusual twist, the wedding band was fronted by former DT singer Charlie Dominici. Dominici was the vocalist on Dream Theater’s debut record, When Dream And Day Unite (on Mechanic Records). Dominici was kicked out of the band, and it took them two long years to find the ideal replacement in James LaBrie.

“Seeing Charlie in a wedding band was a weird thing when you think about it,” muses Petrucci. “But he was great. Even when he was in the band, he used to entertain us and play guitar and sing Beatles and Billy Joel songs. He always seemed so natural and comfortable doing that. We’d always say, ‘C’mon Charlie, play ‘Blackbird.’”

The clincher to the band’s rollercoaster ride came towards the end of the Awake recording sessions, when longtime keyboard player Kevin Moore told the other members he was unhappy and was quitting the band. Months later, it’s still a sore subject, and looks like it will remain one for a long time. Moore had, after all, been with the band from the very beginning, sticking it out from the tough days with Mechanic to the couple years the band was singerless. To leave at this point, with the band on the verge of breaking big, seems unfathomable.

“Kev said to me, ‘look at the four of you guys; you’re all so passionate about the band,’” recalls Portnoy. “‘You guys love it, and you love what you’re doing—and I just don’t anymore. It’s become a job, and it’s not what I want to do.”’

“During the last six months, we really started to feel like there was a distance growing between him and the band,” adds LaBrie. (Moore actually told LaBrie that he was leaving while James was in the process of recording his vocals for the album.) “You could see that he wasn’t happy with it anymore. It was definitely noticeable that he was having more fun and gratification writing his own material, which was geared towards industrial and dance-type stuff.”

Why then, I asked, did he do the album and the photo sessions that followed?

“I don’t know,” says Petrucci. “We’ve been friends since we were little kids, and this was obviously something that took a lot of soul-searching and thinking. It’s really hard to understand where he was coming from . But if you spent your whole life trying to get to a certain point, and then once you get there, you realize that it wasn’t what you really wanted after all, then you’ve got to figure out what it is you want.”

“Kev tried to explain the situation to us through ‘6:00’ (a song off Awake that Moore wrote), but he didn’t tell us that when he first presented the song,” says LaBrie. “It’s about a guy who realizes that his life hasn’t turned out the way he wanted and that he should’ve chased his dreams, but he never did.”

Ironically enough, Petrucci wrote a song about the situation as well, also, not informing anyone what the song was really about.

Says Portnoy, “John later told me that ‘Innocence Faded’ was about how there was a certain innocence and excitement about the fact that we all grew up together and were in the band for such a long time. Through the years, though, that innocence has faded. There’s a line in the song that goes ‘the mirror falls behind you,’ referring to how we used to be mirror images of each other. We were all so much alike, and now we’ve drifted apart. And then the line ‘distant like brothers’ and ‘passionless stage’ refers to Kev ‘cause he was just passionless about it all.”

“We’ve been friends for such a long time,” says Petrucci, “And I bet we’re not going to see him for a while. It’s really sad. I grew up with him and the band was our means of hanging out. Now that’s all changed.”

Tonight’s gig is the band’s first in a year, and it’s also their first playing material off Awake. And it’s their first show ever without Moore—on keys this eve is Jordon Rudess of the Dixie Dregs.

Despite all that, the show is successful. The mostly industry (read: jaded) crowd, surprisingly enough, sang along to familiar numbers like “Pull Me Under” and “Take The Time,’’ while cheering on the newer, heavier songs like “6:00” and “Lie,” as well as the more melodic numbers like “Voices” and “Lifting Shadows Off A Dream.”

In the dressing room afterwards though, the band are less than thrilled with their performance.

“Wow, that was...different,’’ sighed John Myung, sinking into the couch.

“Playing gigs like this are tough,” notes Petrucci, looking a little dejected. “When you haven’t played together in a long time, there are usually some quirks that need to be worked out, and that usually takes a couple of shows. When you do a one-off show like this, chances are it’s not going to be that good. Plus, during the whole year-and-a-half that we toured, it was usually just us and the opening band, and we usually have full control as to what’s going on. Here, there are a lot of bands playing in one night and you don’t have a say as to what goes on. As a result, you kind a get pushed around a little. The whole thing wound up going by so fast. I don’t know, maybe we’re just spoiled.”

It also turns out that Yngwie made his way to the backstage area and stood near Petrucci’s side of the stage for the duration of the set. That didn’t help.

“Yeah, it was a little unnerving knowing that he was there watching me,” Petrucci laughs. “The guy is an amazing guitarist and I was a little nervous.”

It seems Portnoy can relate.

“Before we went on,” he adds, “I was talking to Mikkey Dee (the former drummer for King Diamond, now with Motorhead—a great skin basher in his own right) and Eric Singer (Kiss drummer—no slouch either) and they both told me that they were hanging around to see the band and watch me play. I just thought uh-oh,” he laughs.” But those guys were so drunk, they probably didn’t even notice how rusty we were.”