Dream Theater Brings It ON!

John Petrucci, Lead Guitar, Co-Founder

Upon hearing that John Petrucci was from Long Island, New York, I was even further amazed that I’d never heard of him or seen Dream Theater. Especially because I’d lived on Long Island for much of my adolescence and had worked for LI rock bands for a number of years.

“That’s the funny thing about our band,” Petrucci responded to my cluelessness above, “the people that are into us and have discovered Dream Theater, retain that kind of ‘possession’ of us ... that ‘cult’ kind of thing where they feel so invested and so passionate and so proud to be a fan. And then you have other people who have no idea who we are. They say, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard of you’ or they saw me on the G3 Tour and it was the first time they ever saw me or had heard of Dream Theater. We’ve never really had a lot of ‘pop’ success although recently with the Grammy nominations we’re getting that kind of exposure.” (Dream Theater got Grammy nominations in 2012 and again in 2014.)

“John (bassist Myung) and I grew up together and went to Berklee College of Music straight after high school and met our first drummer Mike (Portnoy) there and we started the band. We left Berklee, started rehearsing and got signed immediately and never had to do the bar scene. We played a couple of gigs but we really bypassed the whole local LI scene.”

How is it that the majority of DT is from Berklee and keyboardist Jordan Rudess studied at Julliard, yet you all ended up shredding guitars and playing in a metal band? I asked rocker Petrucci. “I’ve always said, that there’s a strange misconception about musicians that are schooled and then their ability to ‘shred’ and their ability to play with feeling are mutually exclusive, But they’re not. Schooling increases your knowledge and your ability to communicate with other musicians. But whether you have the ‘Rock ‘n Roll spirit’ is just something that’s inherent; I don’t think that’s learned or unlearned. All the musicians, the guys I grew up with; the guys I met at Berklee; they all say ‘yeah, we understand music and we learned it at school,’ but everybody has a heart of Rock ‘n Roll and Metal and that reckless spirit. I played the style I played before I went to Berklee, so Berklee was this great environment for me where I felt like I fit in and everybody was a musician and I felt like I could learn.”

Petrucci has written the words and music for almost every Dream Theater song. “The guitar is a compositional instrument; that’s the writing instrument. Jordan on keyboards, that’s the other compositional instrument.” What’s the Dream Theater’ writing process? “The way we write, most of the time it’s collective, so we get together onstage or in the studio and we start to bounce ideas off and write instrumentally first. It’s only when we sit down that the tough patches, personal struggles or triumphs, reflections on what is going on in the world can all come out in the lyrics. It’s not your traditional singer-songwriter method of writing where you say ‘I had this idea’ and you sit down with a guitar. We write a song instrumentally first.”

Who were your musical influences growing up? “Well, growing up on Long Island, listening to WBAB, I liked Zeppelin, AC/DC and Sabbath, Van Halen and those guitar players had an influence on me. As I started to get better at it and wanted more, I got turned on to Rush. Rush was a huuuge influence on me. Alex Lifeson was a huuuge influence. Steve Howe. As I got better and better, I had freinds saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to listen to Al Di Meola and Return to Forever. Funny thing is, Stevie Ray Vaughn is one of my favorites and of course Hendrix is unbelieveable but the first time I heard “Voodoo Chile“ was SRV’s version not Hendrix’s.” Add Iron Maiden, David Gilmour and Metallica to Petrucci’s youthful hit list and you can see the development of Dream Theater’s musical formula.

Jordan Rudess, Keyboards

“In the Dream Theater world, it’s a very exciting time. The reason is because a lot has been happening over the last couple of years, two new albums and a big transition getting Mike Mangini into the band. We got two Grammy nominations which opened up Dream Theater to a lot of new people. We had this big transition where we lost the drummer who had been with us since the beginning and we gained this character Mike Mangini and when he came into the band, he added this element. You’ll see, he plays drums like no one else in the world; does things on the drums nobody else can do. It’s his personal energy and musicality that took this organization to a whole new level. The band became a unified force. It opened up new possibilities. This tour—you’re going to see the best Dream Theater show; this is the best experience yet. When somebody walks the concert venue, they’re basically entering ‘The Dream Theater Experience.’ From the moment they come in, we’ve got this cool, almost ‘planetarium vibe’ going and then the music starts and we bring them into our world. We’ve got a lot of multimedia elements, visual things to see.”

When the subject turns to technology and the products Rudess has created to use onstage and in the studio, his excitement grows. “As a keyboard player, I’m totally into sounds and all my crazy programming and apps I create. That’s my world: making sounds. The most popular app that I made was MorphWiz which is an app that combines the world of audio and visual together to morph audio wave-forms and video wave-forms together simultaneously. I’m mostly a musician but I got into this business because I’m passionate about next-generation musical ideas. I love the idea that technology can lead us into new kinds of expression and I dream about that.”

Mike Mangini, Drums

As Mangini and I chatted, he rapidly drummed on pads in the dressing room. Like most drummers I know, Mangini is hyperactive and always moving. For 11 years, Mangini was a professor at Berklee College of music.

“I was on the road with Extreme and Steve Vai before Berklee but I’ve always been a teacher,” Mangini started off. “My being a teacher forced me to understand how to explain myself to somebody else meant I had to understand cognitive science and a lot of the sciences. And a lot of different world religions too because we had a lot of international students as well. The teaching has always been important to me and learning more about myself is tremendously important. However, since the music and sports programs have been cut in our schools it’s got to be one of the worst things in world because when you’re a kid those two things are fun. And those open up passageways in the brain, make people think and make them happy. They don’t seem like work. And the fun thing about Dream Theater is and you’ll see this tonight, the music appears to be complex, and it sure is as far as the meter and the changing, but it’s not a quick listen; we’re not a fast-food; you’re going to a nice restaurant and paying for well-prepared, great food. After a number of listens, people who see Dream Theater start to get it.”

“The whole point of my drum set is it’s designed for ambidexterity, left and right. With that drum set, it’s designed to reflect the ‘orchestr-ality’ of our music. I look at all those toms as one entity. I can match our guitar player’s hitting higher notes by going up on the toms. I also have pads that trigger the sounds of the timpani. temple blocks, cowbell and all the other forms of percussion but I have a drum module to make all those sounds. I have four triggers for my hands and four for my feet.”

When I told Mangini that I was 10 when I got a blue-sparkle Ludwig drum set for Christmas but hadn’t kept up with it, he encouraged me strongly. “Go get another one!! Get another drum set. Let me tell you something, look it, your joy and your intention is really, really important at any age. Not everybody has to be the end all and be all at anything they do. You can just enjoy what you’re doing.”

Then, Mangini and I as two drummers sitting around rapping started discussing the intricacies of drumming. It was an education for me. “As a drummer, you have to develop an ‘inner voice,’ in your mind, you have to develop selective attention. Where you hear an external time source like a metronome and you pay attention to it and then you also have to focus on which limbs are landing where on the drums, and then, you also have to focus on where you are in the song, and then you have to focus on the management of your balance. All of these things, you only have one brain to manage them, so you have to develop a modular reality where you layer ... you now how Photoshop can layer? Well a drummer can layer different thoughts and sounds.” Does he ever get distracted and lose time on a song? “I am the center of the time for everybody onstage, so in my mind my center of time is my inner voice keeping time. Or an external time source. Not much can really crack me. Unless I get lazy. Then yes, something that happens with another musician can crack me, something I see visually can crack me or some thought that comes into my head about what I ate for dinner can throw me off. Because I’m losing the order in which I prioritize my thoughts. I’m using my inner voice a lot to subdivide time. I’m thinking in noise and numbers.”

What other drummers do you like to listen to? “If I’m in a groovy mood, I’ll listen to Steve Gadd who has a plain, almost military sound to him. If I’m in an artistic mood, as far as the use of cymbals and drums on the kit, I’m going to look to Terry Bozzio. If I want to hear someone who takes something complex and simplifies it, I’m going to put on Neil Peart. You know what’s so wonderful about Neil’s playing and Rush is they take time signatures that don’t have a standard, simple beat to it and they make it sounds so musical. They’re just fabulous.”

“Let me sum it up: we’re drummers—we hit things. What I do for a living is I hit stuff and I count stuff.”