Beyond Words

As Dream Theater get ready to spend 2017 celebrating the 25th anniversary of their 1992 breakthrough album Images and Words, guitarist John Petrucci sits with Guitar World and shares his memories of the record that changed everything for the Long Island five-piece.

By Richard Bienstock

“It was definitely pivotal,” John Petrucci says of Images and Words, Dream Theater’s breakthrough 1992 album, currently enjoying its 25th anniversary. And indeed, the record, the band’s second overall, changed their fortunes for good. Released in July of that year, Images and Words came as the Long Island, New York–based progressive metal five-piece were experiencing something of a low point in their then very young career. Formed around the core of Petrucci, bassist John Myung, former drummer Mike Portnoy and former keyboardist Kevin Moore, Dream Theater had already released one album, When Dream and Day Unite, on Mechanic Records, in 1989. But following lackluster sales and attention, they found themselves not only without a label but also a singer, after splitting with frontman Charlie Dominici, who proved an imperfect fit for their music.

“We came off When Dream and Day Unite and there was this dry spell,” Petrucci, now 49, recalls. “We hadn’t really done a proper tour, and we were searching for a singer and didn’t have a label. And all the while we were writing these songs.” Eventually they found a new frontman in James LaBrie, who had previously sung with Canadian hard rockers Winter Rose. “We had auditioned a bunch of people, but we knew from the moment he came in that he was our guy,” the guitarist recalls. He adds that the band auditioned LaBrie by having him sing a handful of Journey songs. “Maybe ‘Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ ’ and one or two others,” Petrucci says with a laugh, “because we didn’t have a lot of material.” From there, Dream Theater also found a new home at Atco Records, which, after having them record some demos, “gave us an eight-album deal – the biggest we’ve ever signed,” Petrucci says. “So all of a sudden, we had this feeling of being given a second chance.”

And Dream Theater grabbed that second chance for all it was worth. The eight tracks they recorded for Images and Words proved not only to be light years beyond the music that populated their debut, but also laid out something of a blueprint for the varied sounds and styles they would become known for, from aggressive, metal-tinged riff workouts (‘Pull Me Under,’ ‘Under a Glass Moon’), to soaring, intricately layered pop-rock tunes (‘Another Day,’ ‘Surrounded’) to, of course, insanely complex, instrumentally gonzo prog epics (‘Metropolis – Part I: The Miracle and the Sleeper,’ ‘Learning to Live’). It was an intense and extremely musical album, to be sure, as well as one that, having been released at the height of grunge – “there were no guitar solos anymore,” Petrucci says – was also seemingly out of step with current tastes.

And yet, it became a surprise hit. “We finished the album, put it out and did our first tour, which was us driving ourselves around in a van and playing to a few people every night in clubs across America,” Petrucci says. “And then [first single] ‘Pull Me Under’ started to get some attention. So we had to quickly shoot a video on the road. Then it was being played on MTV. Then I would get into my car and hear it on the radio. Once we went back out on the road, we had a tour bus and all the shows were sold out. Everything changed.”

Now, to celebrate that moment when everything changed, Dream Theater – which these days features Petrucci, Myung and LaBrie alongside longtime keyboardist Jordan Rudess and drummer Mike Mangini – will be spending much of 2017 on the Images, Words & Beyond tour, playing the 1992 album in its entirety, along with selections from their extensive catalog. “It’s great to be able to pay homage to landmark releases – I think the fans appreciate it,” Petrucci says. “And at this point we have so many generations of fans, and a lot of them weren’t around when the album first came out and we toured behind it. So it’s nice to bring it back for the ones that were there and also the ones that weren’t.”

The shows will also be a marked shift from Dream Theater’s most recent worldwide tour, which saw them performing their 2016 double album, The Astonishing, in full. “That was very different than anything we had done in the past,” Petrucci says. “It was the new album, performed in two acts – a very specialized show. But the Images, Words & Beyond tour is going to be a complete departure from that. It’s like, ‘Okay, now we’re playing material from our catalog, it’s music that is significant for a lot of our fans, and it’s acknowledging a special anniversary.’ So it’s going to be more of a party-celebration atmosphere. It’ll be a lot of fun, for sure.”

In recognition of the 25th anniversary of Images and Words, and in anticipation of the upcoming tour, Petrucci took Guitar World on a track-by-track walk through the landmark 1992 album.

‘Pull Me Under’

“What sticks out to me about this one is the opening clean guitar figure. It was just something I played in rehearsal. We used to practice a few nights a week in the basement of a meat store. I remember we were down there and I played the three opening notes. I said, ‘This sounds cool.’ So I developed that little figure and then we built the song off it. That happens every once in a while. There are certain things where you work on them, you craft them, you figure them out. And then there are other things where you pick up your guitar and you just play them. That was one of those instances.

“‘Pull Me Under’ is also the song that took Images and Words to Gold [status]. It started everything for us. It all grew from there. And I remember being really proud of the song. When the album was done and mixed, that was the one I’d play for friends, like ‘Check this out.’ There was just some sort of magic that was captured there.”

‘Another Day’

“It’s a very personal song for me. I wrote it about my dad, who was struggling with cancer at the time. So lyrically it’s a song that’s very special to me and always will be. And it kind of exemplifies this guitar thing I like to do, where I combine moving chords with opening, ringing strings. Somehow, even though this one is in A♭, I managed to make it sound good with the ringing B string. And even in the chorus, where it kind of switches to C#, there’s a B and an E string ringing. I think I stole that a little from Alex Lifeson – it’s a very Rush thing to do! It’s also a Steve Morse thing – I was very into Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs at the time.

“Another thing about the song is that it shows this other side of Dream Theater. A lot of people know us for our more progressive side, or maybe our heavier side. But there’s also a pop element to what we do that has always been a very big part of our sound. And you hear that strongly in ‘Another Day.’”

‘Take the Time’

“This was a fun song to do. It was an interesting project because we all took little sections and wrote the lyrics for that specific part. One guy did the first verse, another did the bridge, another did the chorus, and so on. And then we mixed it all together. It was a band songwriting experiment. And it was fun to jam out the ending of the song. I like that it has the long guitar solo at the end, because that gave me a chance to step out. And the samples that are in there, that’s a thing that Mike [Portnoy] did. He and Kevin [Moore] were into stuff like that. I’m not sure where that influence came from with those guys – maybe it was like a Pink Floyd thing or something. But Mike wrote the first verse and so it was his idea to have samples of different guys, like Zappa.”

‘Surrounded’

“This song has Kevin Moore written all over it in terms of the music and lyrics. And it’s an interesting one because, again, we had the progressive side to us, and then we were also into Metallica and Iron Maiden and Queensrÿche and all this heavy stuff. But there was this other side that was sort of poppy and softer. And ‘Surrounded’ is a really good example of that. It also has this major-key thing going on, which comes from bands like the Dregs and Marillion and Rush, where you have a song like ‘Limelight.’

“Another thing I remember about ‘Surrounded’ is recording the guitar solo in the studio. I had this whole crazy lead worked out, and I played it for [producer] David Prater. Afterward, he came up to me, he was maybe two inches from my face, and he was like, ‘That sounds like a bad Van Halen solo.’ I was crushed! And that’s when we came up with the whole repetitive figure with the delay on it. It’s kind of like an Edge thing, where you play a rhythmic pattern and the delay is timed just right and it creates 16th notes even though you’re playing at half the speed. The part came out really cool. But it changed drastically from the original.”

‘Metropolis – Part I: The Miracle and the Sleeper’

“As much as ‘Pull Me Under’ is a song that people identify the band by, ‘Metropolis’ sort of set the bar as far as what we were ultimately going to be more known for, I think. Which was this kind of wacky blend of metal and progressive music. And also having those kinds of figures that were unconventional, with a lot of unison lines – at that time, we were into things like Yngwie Malmsteen and Rising Force, where Yngwie and Jens Johansson would play these crazy lines together. This song kind of mashes up all that stuff. And the way it departs in the middle and goes into that instrumental madness became in many ways a Dream Theater signature.

“As for calling the song ‘Part I,’ that came from the fact that I would look at a Rush album and see a song like ‘Cygnus X-1’ and I’d think, That’s so intriguing! Where’s the second part? [laughs] I liked this idea of continuing songs on other albums. It was a very progressive thing to do. And of course ‘Metropolis’ turned out to be the launching pad for Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory, which came out in ’99 and was a concept album inspired by that song. But the funny thing is, at the time when I wrote the lyrics to ‘Metropolis’ I had no idea what the second song would be! So when we did Scenes, musically we were able to tie in some of the ‘Metropolis’ ideas. But lyrically it had nothing to do with it. I had to figure out ways to make the story on Scenes tie into the lyrical content of ‘Metropolis,’ which wasn’t easy!”

‘Under a Glass Moon’

“This is a fun one to play. I remember creating the solo for it in the apartment I was living in at the time. We had recorded the basic tracks, and then I had a little time to work on solos. I had a four-track at home, and I would play the tape over and over, just going over the solo section. I remember thinking that I wanted to do something that was chock-full of all different types of guitar techniques, and that I wanted to catch all the rhythmic things that were going on with the drums and the bass and have the guitar match up with them. And it turned out to be a pretty cool solo. When people heard it for the first time they were like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of weird!’ And fans come up to me all the time and say that’s their favorite solo of mine. And all I can think is, Well, what about all the ones after that?” [laughs]

‘Wait for Sleep’

“It’s a prelude to ‘Learning to Live.’ The musical figure that’s used later on in that song is introduced here. Again, a very progressive thing to do! And certainly something that bands like Yes and Rush and Marillion have done. ‘Wait for Sleep’ is also another one that is very signature Kevin Moore. He was really great at sitting down at the piano and creating things that had such a great feel and mood, and that transported you both lyrically and musically. And the song introduced yet another side of Dream Theater, where we could get very sensitive and go a little bit jazzy. We weren’t afraid to have these sort of sweet sections with piano and vocal. A song like this made the whole album more cinematic. It was us showing that not every song had to be like ‘Metropolis’ and hit you over the head. We could have things like ‘Surrounded’ and ‘Another Day’ and ‘Wait for Sleep’ that brought the listener to another place. And following this one with a song like ‘Learning to Live’ just made that contrast all the more special.”

‘Learning to Live’

“This is a great example of us doing the progressive, epic, long song thing. And I think it’s also a great indicator of our overall headspace when it comes to songwriting, which is that we don’t feel the need to write songs in traditional form. An interesting thing in this song, too, is that John Myung wrote the lyrics, and he also wrote the bass breakdown that starts the verse. And John always had this funny thing where he’d play a riff he wrote, and when you first listened to it you wouldn’t really get it. It’d be in some combination of odd time signatures, but not because he was thinking, like, Oh, I’m going to link this and that into this other thing... He was just playing what he was feeling. But there was always something a little quirky about it that made it sound really cool. I’d be like, ‘What are you playing? I don’t really get the time signature.’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t know – just listen to it!’ [laughs] When I listen to that part of ‘Learning to Live,’ I get reminded of those moments. So that’s a special thing for me.”

Inset

Images And Words: An Axology

John Petrucci details the gear behind ‘Pull Me Under’ and the rest of Images and Words.

“We recorded Images and Words at BearTracks Studios in Suffern, New York; David Prater was the producer and Doug Oberkircher was the engineer. At the time I didn’t have a lot of gear. I had hooked up with Ibanez when we did the first album, so I had a couple guitars – but not a lot. When we were at BearTracks the Ibanez guys said, ‘We want to send you something. It has this weird paint job on it but it’s the shape you want and it has the pickups you like. Check it out.’ The guitar wasn’t even a regular model – just a custom thing. The paintjob, that sort of Picasso design, was something their artist did. And they were like, ‘Just ignore the paintjob.’ But when I opened the case I thought, This is actually pretty cool! I like it. I used the guitar to record the whole Images and Words album; for anything that needed to be played on acoustic I borrowed a Gibson from Doug. Then I used the Ibanez for the whole tour. When it came time to do my signature model [the Ibanez JPM100], I was like, ‘Let’s just do this.’

“As far as amps, I had a Boogie rig that I brought in, which consisted of a Quad preamp and a 295 power amp. David had some stuff, too. And he had all these crazy ideas. I remember he wanted me to use this little 1x12 speaker. I couldn’t even tell you what it was – it looked like a homemade cabinet. And for the clean sound on ‘Pull Me Under’ he had me use a little Zoom 9002. We recorded something like six different takes of that and then vari-speeded the tape – it was all on tape – to get the chorusing sound.

“I wasn’t a big pedal guy at the time. You listen to the guitars on the album and you can hear they’re not very effects-driven. Maybe we added some delays in the mix. For that matter, any of the effects that are there were done in the mixing stage. But there weren’t a lot – I don’t recall any phaser or anything like that. The guitar was recorded pretty pure. There’s clean, crunch and lead. Which is pretty much what I still do today!”

—Richard Bienstock