Back To Basics

They’ve built a enormous global following (and divided opinion) with dazzling progressive metal and dizzying live displays. But at heart, Dream Theater are still a rock’n’roll band...

Words: Polly Glass

Dream Theater and good old fashioned rock‘n’roll: not the most obvious bedfellows, you may think. This is understandable. Over 34 years and various line-up changes (ex-drummer Mike Portnoy being the most routinely shouted about) the East Coast cohort of Berklee College Of Music alumni and friends have built a reputation for progressive metal. Dizzying, fiddly, unashamedly ambitious progressive metal, to be precise, crammed with majestic guitar lines, weird time signatures and terrifyingly huge drum kits (a Google Images search for ‘Dream Theater drums’ reveals something that would fill a decent-sized bungalow). It’s imaginative yet colossal stuff, in a sub-genre that’s polarising at the best of times. Chances are you either despise it, or love it with all your heart.

But that’s not where it ends, and it certainly isn’t where it began. Dream Theater didn’t just appear as fully formed prog wizards and tech fiends. Amid all the dazzling virtuosity and other superlatives tagged (sometimes rather worthily) against them, it’s easy to forget that they are still ultimately... well, a bunch of guys who started a rock band. Especially after their previous album, 2016’s conceptual monster The Astonishing, it’s easy to overlook the fact that they were raised on classic rock and cut their teeth jamming along to AC/DC, Boston, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Aerosmith and more for many years. What’s more, they still do that now.

“A lot of times we’ll jam that sort of [bluesy rock] thing, casually hanging out, but we don’t really put it into our music,” guitarist/producer John Petrucci grins through layers of black goth king beard. “So the music is a little bit more serious. But on this record we actually put it in, so for example the song ‘Viper King’, that kinda shuffling Van Halen-meets-Deep Purple feel, we’ve never done that before, but we do it all the time when we jam.”

So there is such a thing as a straight-ahead Dream Theater 12-bar-blues jam?

“Oh absolutely!” singer James LaBrie replies, in earnest Canadian tones. “Blues, Santana, we’ll have Latin jams, yeah we do blues all the time.”

We’re sitting with coffee in their record label’s sleek offices in Kensington, London. They’re a hench, surprisingly short pair, and LaBrie’s face is illustrated with immaculately neat facial hair – in contrast to Petrucci’s more lumberjacked look (which has been beefed up by years of bodybuilding, his other serious hobby). They’re a little jet-lagged but easy company, and cheerfully willing to talk about fourteenth album Distance Over Time, on which they’ve embraced their roots with their rawest, rockiest songs in years. True, they’re still laced with the dexterity and fusion-y freedom we’ve come to expect from them, but this time it’s more grounded in straight-up satisfying riffs and jams.

To what extent did that simply come from a desire to do something different?

“We took that [The Astonishing] as far as it could really go,” Petrucci laughs. “Doing something OTT, theatrical, exploring so many different storytelling styles of music... we got that huge, huge project out of our systems.”

The Astonishing was, on every level, fucking massive. The dystopian concept was complex and grandiose. The tracklisting practically made The Odyssey look half-arsed. The album was followed by an accompanying novel and video game. The live show alone took a year to create. Dream Theater aren’t exactly known for keeping things simple, but even by their standards this was kind of insane.

“Yeah it was insane,” Petrucci nods. “It took, from inception, about three years or so. So coming off that we didn’t feel the need to do anything further conceptually; it was like ‘alright, let’s just get in a room, crank up our amps and just play together and make an organic record.’”

And that’s exactly what they did. Where previous records involved introspective beavering away and email exchanges before coming together to record, this time the whole band decamped to a five-acre property in upstate New York – right next to Woodstock – surrounded by mountains, lakes, forests and wildlife. The initial plan was to write and then leave to record somewhere else, but the private, peaceful setting and lack of urban distractions proved too alluring to turn away from.

“This barn had been rebuilt into a beautiful state-of-the-art studio, the guy who scored The Revenant built it I think, but he sold it so there was no equipment in it,” Petrucci enthuses. “And they used the original barn wood, they treated it and used it for the inside, so it’s really beautiful. It was such a cool space and it sounded so good, we were like ‘why are we leaving this place?!’”

Duly inspired, they persuaded their crew to turn the space into a functioning studio, bringing in the considerable arsenal of Dream Theater equipment to kit it out. They all stayed for a month; living, writing and recording together for the first time in their whole career.

“It was like summer camp,” Petrucci grins, “we weren’t commuting back home [at night], we were able to get back to that feeling of when we were just teenagers jamming together and writing music and hanging out and having a drink, cooking or staying up late after the sessions going to the house and just talking and stuff, so it did help us rebond and commune as friends and musicians.”

Listening to the two of them reminiscing it all sounds endearingly like one big teenage slumber party. Blissful days and nights were spent playing music, bonding over Metallica-style riffs, talking, barbecuing or prepping meats with one of Petrucci’s smokers that he’d brought from home. At the end of a day’s rehearsing or recording they’d saunter back to the adjacent farmhouse to sleep, hoping they didn’t encounter any bears on the way.

“One night a mother bear and her cub came right up to the door, she was trying to get into the garbage which was just outside the studio,” LaBrie chuckles. “And especially with the cub around we were like ‘I’m not going out there!’”

“But because we were isolated we didn’t have to stick to any sort of schedule,” Petrucci adds. “Like if it was a little later every day it kind of didn’t matter; we’d order some food in, everything centred around food, ‘who’s cooking? What are we barbecuing?’”

And obviously you can play louder because you don’t need to worry about noise complaints. Presumably this naturally led you to be louder, and then heavier...

“It’s very true,” Petrucci nods. “There’s something about being in a room with guitar, bass, amps cranked up. Mike [Mangini, drums] would play and he’d be like ‘man can you hear the guitar echoing off the room...’ there’s something about doing that that brings you back to this really primal mood, that helps drive the music in that direction.”

Petrucci’s rock and metal-geared homelife seemingly fuels this approach. His wife, Rena, plays guitar in tribute act Judas Priestess and his 23-year-old son is also in a band, so there’s always music in the house – mostly heavy stuff, like the Dream Theater team’s favourite jam tracks.

“Me and John Myung [bass] could play any Iron Maiden song in, like, two seconds,” Petrucci says enthusiastically. “And Jordan is more coming from Genesis and Gentle Giant, things like that. But whether it’s Van Halen, anything classic Zeppelin, AC/DC, Rush, there’s certain things we all know bits and pieces of. Somebody starts breaking into something and we’ll all join in.”

“It depends on the mood,” LaBrie adds. “John might crank into a Metallica riff or Jordan [Rudess, keys] might play the organ and all of a sudden it’s reminiscent of Jon Lord so we’ll go into a Deep Purple bit...”

In keeping with their album output, these days the Dream Theater road operation is a slick, top-of-the-range affair with shiny tour buses and hotels and state-of-the-art production. In the same way that it’s now strange to imagine, say, early Rammstein gigs before they had such a colossal pyro budget, it’s curious to think of Dream Theater paying their dues on the toilet circuit. But pay them they did, slogging it out for years crammed into a van playing dodgy joints across the States and beyond. Has it left them with rose-tinted nostalgia for those early shows? Not so much...

“If we did get a room it would be a day room, so we all had to frickin’ take turns showering,” LaBrie remembers wincing slightly, “and then eventually we’d move up a bit, there’d be three rooms, and then every fifth night you’d get your own room.”

Petrucci: “On our first European tour we played some venue in Stockholm and it was this little room up these stairs and there were literally no lights. I remember our crew was using their flashlights. But yeah, the weirdest places, you’d get there and there’s a pole in the middle of the stage where you’re supposed to stand.”

“You remember when we had pyro for a bit, when we were out on the Images And Words tour?” LaBrie says to Petrucci. “And one time I went over to the front of the stage and I forgot that’s where the pyro goes off, so there’s the pyro and there’s me singing, and I remember seeing all this white stuff... and it was just little things like that... it’s pretty comical. And one night I got my hair caught in John Myung’s bass strings, that was in the UK and I keep singing the song, and John’s pulling away from me...”

“I remember playing a place in the States somewhere, and it was so hot a couple of us puked or something after the show,” Petrucci remembers laughing. “These horrible, horrible gigs that we’ve done; I don’t miss anything about the conditions...” He stops and thinks for a second, then changes tack: “but I remember playing to, like, no people in a club to then selling out, to hearing ourselves on the radio, to doing internationals. I very specifically remember that shift. That was exciting. I suppose it only really happens once.”

For Petrucci his excitement for music started in Long Island, where he spent his teens playing music with a varied cast of local musos and bands. The result was an eclectic grounding in different styles of playing.

“I’d just go and jam with all of them,” he recalls. “The best was these buddies who liked to jam and we’d just play Hendrix and Santana. These two guys would just get stoned and play guitar, bass and drums, and I would just solo for hours... [laughs] and in fact one of them came up to me recently, coz we’d record everything on cassette, and he gave me couple of CDs and I played them and my wife was cracking up cos she was like ‘you played exactly the same way when you were 16 that you do now!’ You can hear these jams, they’re hysterical, just me soloing for hours.”

LaBrie, conversely, preceded his Dream Theater days in the unlikely world of 80s glam. Growing up in Ontario, Canada, he started out on drums but having found his voice by belting out the likes of Zeppelin’s ‘Rock And Roll’ and Heart’s ‘Barracuda’ (before his sister introduced him to prog staples like Yes and Pink Floyd), he sang in covers band Trance (“Purple, Kansas, Pat Travers, Johnny Winter...”) and local rockers Coney Hatch aged 22, before joining glam metallers Winter Rose. Still, with his quietly modest, serious manner today one imagines he stopped short of embracing the fashion. Or did he?

“Did I?!” he says incredulously. “Oh my god man, I had my hair all pouffed out to frickin’ ‘here’ and I had leopard shoes and really tight, tight leather pants with the nice glam shirts. I didn’t do all the make-up, but if you were gonna do that type of approach you kinda had to look like it to a certain degree.”

Admittedly his look today, and that of his bandmates, is almost defiantly ordinary. Yet on a musical level this youthful gusto plays out on Distance Over Time, alongside robust streaks of progressive flashiness. If you weren’t a Dream Theater fan before, this just might be the album that converts you. And if you’re already on board with their world it’s another layer to the ongoing minefield of their career – one that reminds us that, for all the gleaming dexterity and prog metal, they’re still ultimately a group of guys who started a rock band. And perhaps most pleasingly, they sound like they’re having fun playing it.

“That’s exactly what it is,” Petrucci agrees. “We’re still the same guys that get together and have fun. It’s really the same feeling we had when we were 18, 20.”