Rock Band Dream Theater Takes Its Show On The Road

If Mike Portnoy has his way, Dream Theater won’t write another hit song. “We’re not concerned with singles; we’re concerned with albums,” says Portnoy, the band’s drummer.

Dream Theater carries a torch previously held, in turns, by Yes, Pink Floyd, Rush and Queensrÿche – constructing compositions rather than songs, weaving classically influenced romps into virtuosic masterpieces. Some run as long as 25 minutes and, with one turning-point exception, radio has never touched them.

Of course, no progressive-rock band can call its career complete without scoring a concept album. Scenes From A Memory, Dream Theater’s new rite of passage, is more opera than rocker. The story centers on a reincarnated man who discovers a past life of love, jealousy and brotherly murder. In typical Dream Theater fashion, the music is lush with soaring vocals and indulgent, technically astounding musical performances.

The band is performing Scenes From A Memory from start to finish as the core of its current road show.

“The only way we would have continued to move forward with this band is to do exactly what we did, which was to ignore everybody else and do what we wanted to do,” Portnoy says. “It wasn’t until this album that [record company officials] came to their senses to let us do what we do, and it’s breathed new life into us.”

The band took shape in the mid-’80s, at Boston’s prestigious Berklee School of Music, where Portnoy met guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung. They jammed in an empty music room, challenged one another’s mental and physical dexterity and discovered mutual roots in Long Island, N.Y. They dropped out of Berklee after one year, found a keyboardist and dedicated themselves to their new band (originally called Majesty).

Searches for the right singer were so fruitless that the group considered forging ahead as an instrumental-only outfit. Singer James LaBrie stepped in just as Dream Theater prepared to record its major-label debut, Images And Words. The song ‘Pull Me Under’ mushroomed into a surprise hit on radio and MTV, exposing Dream Theater beyond the progressive-rock niche and propelling the band into a major international draw. Dream Theater continued pushing the boundaries of progressive rock during the latter ‘90s with the albums Awake and Falling Into Infinity. But as grunge gave way to pop-punk, which then bowed to hip-hopped hardcore, popular tastes crumbled any momentum Dream Theater first saw with ‘Pull Me Under’.

With Falling Into Infinity, especially, there was a lot of pressure to create singles,” Portnoy says. “We worked with a top-name producer and even an outside songwriter for one song. We rose to the challenge and wrote what we thought was the ultimate radio Dream Theater album. When that didn’t even work, we hope that would be a message to everyone to just leave us alone.”

The song ‘Metropolis, Part I’, from Images And Words, served as a launching pad for the narrative story line in Scenes From A Memory.

As with its previous discs, the band first composed and charted all its music note-for-note, then added lyrics. Portnoy and Petrucci constructed the story line, mapped it into chapters, then divided the lyrical chores among themselves.

“Making a concept album is like writing an 80-minute song, and we’re very good about writing long songs,” Portnoy says. “Usually we’re free to go off and write about whatever the hell we want to write. This time, it was crucial that each of us be on the same page.”

Portnoy likes the idea of Scenes From A Memory leaving the same cultural footprint as The Wall did 20 years ago. Regardless, he promises, Dream Theater won’t create another piece of music with mass acceptance in mind.

“Look what Metallica and Queensrÿche did – they built an empire, then did a left turn and stripped away everything that made them special,” he says. “We’re not expecting miracles. But as long as our existing fan base is there and we’re given the creative freedom to work as we did on this record, I see no reason we can’t hold the same ground as bands like Pink Floyd.”