Devoted Fans Keep Hitless Dream Theater Thriving

Sun, Mar. 10, 2002

Most rock bands crave attention from radio and MTV. For Dream Theater, which formed as a highbrowed antithesis to popular rock, one minor hit turned into a major trap.

Dream Theater nearly disbanded during its battle to escape the expectations born from “Pull Me Under,” a song from its 1992 debut that launched the band to worldwide attention. A decade later, the band thrives on the unabashed formula of progressive rock – complex compositions, virtuosic performances, soaring vocals and zero thought to airplay.

“The fans we have now are with us for who we are,” says drummer Mike Portnoy. “We’ve tried the outside writer. We’ve tried the outside producer. The only way this band can function is to shut everyone else out and do what the five of us want to do.”

Dream Theater bears the torch once held aloft by Jethro Tull, King Crimson, early Genesis, Yes and Rush, delivering some of contemporary rock’s most technically mind-blowing passages. The music is rife with gymnastics – meticulously constructed polyrhythms, epic sweeps of mood and scale, solos that come as frequently as choruses.

Dream Theater’s presence today on a major label (Elektra Records) is all the more distinctive at a time of unprecedented economic pressure on artists to deliver hits.

The band’s new studio release – the double-CD “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” – does nothing to dissuade its most ardent fans or its harshest critics. Like Rush’s “2112,” half of it is a concept album. Disc No. 2 contains just the 42-minute title song – eight movements, including a fully orchestrated overture, with stories laying out six distinct states of madness.

The entire record is laced with stylistic leaps, from thrash metal to flamenco to classical composition to lush balladry. Yet as with each of its records, Dream Theater weaves melody into the musicianship. The lyrical content has grown beyond the mystical and fantastical into emotional and social realism, and the band’s songcraft has never been better.

“You can mosh to it and, on the same track, hear something that sounds like a George Lucas soundtrack,” Portnoy says.

Dream Theater formed when Portnoy, guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung – all natives of Long Island, N.Y. – met at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. They dropped out together and focused on their band, recruiting a keyboardist and hunting fruitlessly for a singer. They considered becoming an instrumental-only outfit before finding singer James LaBrie.

A shortened version of “Pull Me Under” caught national airplay, and the band earned a gold record for sales of its 1992 debut disc, “Images and Words.” The band has never experienced another hit, nor has it strived for one. Dream Theater went so far as to shelve their “fluke hit,” as Portnoy calls it, through two years of concerts and its triple-live CD.

While record company executives wanted the band to deliver more radio-ready tunes, the band’s core fans never cared. Dream Theater has largely appealed to other rock musicians and the band-fan equivalent of computer nerds. The band lists two-dozen musical equipment manufacturers as exclusive endorsees and each musician has seen numerous features in “tech” magazines such as Guitar Player, Bass Player and Modern Drummer. The band owes much of its appeal outside those circles to LaBrie’s golden pipes.

Despite the higher price tag of a double-CD, “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” briefly topped the sales chart of online retailer CDnow.com. Portnoy attributes that to both loyal fandom and creative evolution.

“The American (sales) numbers are small, but it’s a worldwide thing for us. In Europe and South America and Asia, they don’t rely on radio or MTV to feed them the latest bands, and we fill arenas there,” he says. “We’re free to do whatever we want artistically, and the biggest irony is we keep selling records, which keeps the label happy and out of our kitchen. I couldn’t have scripted a better place for us to be.”