John Petrucci interview (excerpts)

Robb Flynn: How are you man?

John Petrucci: I’m good. Did I tell you I’m coming to you all the way from the mountains of Norway?

RF: I love it! The mountains don’t look very snowy. Norway looks quite summery right now. [laughs] Did you take this picture or is this just something that you created?

JP: No. This is actually the album cover of the new Dream Theater album. Hugh Syme did the artwork and it’s these two big massive kind of mountainous things on the left and right, and then this giant rock stuck in the middle, like suspended. I didn’t know this, but apparently it’s a real place in Norway; it’s like a tourist attraction that people trek to, and some of them stand on the rock in the middle if they’re daring.

RF: That’s pretty cool. Yeah that would be pretty daring to stand on that! Hugh Syme of Rush, Megadeth fame – that dude’s been doing album covers for a really long time.

JP: Absolutely! Decades and decades. Because I’m such a huge Rush fan, just the conversations that we have about art and stories and origin... it’s so cool. One day he told me, “Oh, you know the Permanent Waves cover – that guy in the corner? That’s me!” [laughs]

RF: It’s pretty unusual for an artist to last that long in an album cover music business.

JP: Exactly.

RF: I’m trying to think, maybe the Slayer guy from Reign in Blood to... I don’t even know. It’s pretty wild. You’re talking about Permanent Waves - it was ‘79?

JP: Yeah, exactly. That’s ‘79, but never mind that – when was their first album?

RF: Do you remember what’s his first album is that he does art for?

JP: No. I don’t want to get this wrong as Rush fans will kill me, but I assume he started with the very first one and has done every one since.

RF: Really? You think he did the first ones?

JP: I assume. Obviously, he did the starman in 2112 and all that, but even before that.

RF: What’s the naked guy with a butt cheek?

JP: You’re talking about Hemispheres. That’s actually one of my favorite albums of all time.

RF: Yeah, that’s a great album. That must have been – for the time – such an edgy album cover.

JP: Totally.

RF: A naked dude! [laughs] Done super-artistically, almost like one of those famous statues.

JP: Yeah, but it’s on the brain so it’s OK. [laughs]

RF: It’s smart. That’s really cool you guys continued to use him, and it’s amazing that he continues to put out album art. I would imagine it is maybe his main career.

JP: Absolutely. I know he does other artwork, he does galleries, he has a whole art career. I love working with him because I call him up, the first thing is, “Are you interested in doing another album cover?” He’s always like, “Yeah, absolutely.” And then we just have great conversations about art and music and lyrics, and it just gets so deep and intense. In the case of this album, we were trying to think of a cover that would fit the title of A View From the Top of the World, but not be so blatant – like some sort of a drone shot or something. So he came up with so much art and the pieces were all beautiful. So even if they didn’t end up being a cover, they ended up being in the layout, because we end up always doing these extensive 40-page layouts that come with the deluxe set. So none of that art is wasted. It’s just a great process and I look forward to it just as much as I do making the music and producing; it’s so much fun.

RF: I love that you’re that you still get off on that, like putting out an awesome package for people, even if we’re in a majority streaming world at this point. There is something when you see your concept come through, it makes you feel proud.

JP: Absolutely. I mean, at least I’m this way. I know the other guys feel this way, Hugh is like this, a lot of people who are friends of ours are like this as well. We remember the process of getting a new record, holding it in your hands, going to the store, opening it up, diving into all the art and finding little Easter eggs and things, and that’s not lost on us. So the experience – we don’t want that to go away – so we just we perpetuate it, whether or not it’s the normal thing to do or bucks the system. To us it’s gratifying and it’s fun, and you find that there are a lot of people that feel the same way out there. It blows my mind how huge vinyl is now and how much of a comeback it came. So we stayed our course and it’s like coming back. [laughs]

RF: I know you’re talking about before Dream Theater though, like the vinyl era. When Dream Theater came out I mean vinyl might have been dead at that point, wasn’t it? Was it just CDs and cassettes at that point?

JP: It was CDs and cassettes. There were records still, there was still vinyl; CDs were definitely the preferred media at that point.

RF: I think we were on the same label at one point when I used to be in Vio-lence and you were in Majesty, which was on Mechanic, right?

JP: That’s hysterical, that’s awesome.

RF: Steve Sinclair...

JP: Steve Sinclair, that’s right; the whole gang!

RF: We did put out a vinyl and then the first time that I ever got a CD or saw a CD was for the Vio-lence record, and I was like, “What the f*** is this supposed to play on? What’s this?” [laughs]

JP: I remember at the time too they had the big long packaging, so they had some art that was on there. It wasn’t the way it is now with the digipaks and stuff.

RF: Majesty was essentially most of the guys from Dream Theater, right?

JP: It was, yeah. Majesty was like our first band, so when John Myung and I graduated high school, we went to Berklee College of Music; we met Mike there and we formed our band. We called it Majesty, so in the early days the little demos and stuff that we did and passed around all said Majesty.

RF: Did your logo have hooks on the side of it? Because everybody had to have hooks. [laughs]

JP: Exactly! I designed the first Majesty logo and it’s pretty adolescent. I think I used the crown to top the – it’s pretty cheesy – to top the ‘J’ or something. When we got signed to Mechanic, Steve Sinclair signed us as Majesty, and then when we went to put out the first album, it was like, “Oh, you can’t use that name. Somebody trademarked it.” And I’m like, “Really? Oh man!” and we had the hardest time trying to come up with a new name. It was impossible – we had the worst, stupidest names that we almost used.

RF: Give us the worst, stupidest name that you almost used.

JP: All right. I don’t know what we were thinking, but we had an attorney at the time, and her last name was Glasser, and we almost named the band Glasser! [lots of laughs] Just at randomly after our attorney’s last name – that’s how desperate we were!

RF: Portnoy didn’t come up as band name? [laughs]

JP: Well actually, close. His father came up with Dream Theater. Oh, do you mean the name Portnoy didn’t come up as a name? Yeah, we ruled out our own names, but only attorney last names. It’d be too much of a fight to see whose name was going to be the band...

RF: ...to pull off the Van Halen. It helps when you get two guys.

JP: If there were two brothers, then that would help. Mike’s dad lived in northern California, and there was a movie theater up there in Monterey called the Dream Theater that he used to go to. It’s not there anymore, it closed down. But we were so desperate and struggling to find a name and one day he called Mike. He’s like, “I think this would be a great name,” and we heard it and we were like, “That’s an awesome name! Yes!” Like no second guessing and that was the name of the band. So we redid the first Mechanic Records art with Dream Theater and it came out.

RF: So you had already gotten that far though, like you had album art and recorded the music.

JP: Oh yeah. In fact, Mike being the collector that he is, I’m sure has an album with Majesty instead of Dream Theater, like our first album. I guarantee he has that if it exists.

RF: That’s not the ‘Pull Me Under’ record though.

JP: No. That was our first record and then the second one was Images and Words and that’s when ‘Pull Me Under’ came out. I don’t know how it was for you, but [our first record] came out, and people seemed to like it in those circles and said we sounded like Rush. That was about as far as it went, and then just nothing really happened. We never toured, we never had any radio play or anything.

RF: You would play locally?

JP: Yeah, if that. It was so limited what we did, and then we decided, “All right, something’s not working here. We’re gonna change our singer.” And then for like a year and a half, we search for a singer and wrote the music that would be Images. But at Mechanic at that time, there were a lot of bands doing really well. I mean you guys were doing great, there was Bang Tango, Trixter and Voivod, so who were we?

RF: It was a very eclectic match of bands. Yeah, we did pretty good. He put a lot of money into us. It was like the second coming of Led Zeppelin if you opened a magazine. We’re like, “Look, we’re not that good. Keep your expectations low.” [laughs] I want to say we met Mike around that time at the label, or maybe all of you guys – I can’t remember, it’s a little hazy for me. I was hoping you might remember, but if you don’t...

JP: I don’t.

RF: I couldn’t tell. Did you go to Mechanic’s office?

JP: Yes! That was like in the village somewhere. I don’t remember exactly.

RF: So I think we crossed paths at that point and kind of became fast friends after that.

JP: Nice. It was weird back then, because for us it was our first [time] we got signed; like, “Wow! We got signed! This is the big thing!” And then we did a record and nothing happened. I remember everything was just so weird in the world, and we were afraid of getting drafted. Nothing was happening with the label and we were auditioning singers and teaching and holding down day jobs, and rehearsing every night in the basement of a like a pork store type of thing. So it was weird.

RF: At this point, where are you based?

JP: Long Island. Then we eventually got James LaBrie as our singer and he was a Canadian, so that threw everything off! Now we weren’t all local. [laughs]

RF: But you guys must have gigged locally during this time.

JP: We did. Our gigging was so far and few between. We did a few cool shows. I don’t know why my memory is so foggy during that time, as far as what happened and when. I remember like opening for Marillion and Iron Maiden, and playing places like the Ritz and stuff.

RF: You opened for Iron Maiden?

JP: I don’t want to get this wrong, but eventually Dream Theater did open and tour with Iron Maiden.

RF: I just meant back then though...

JP: But back then, I feel like I remember a show at the Ritz or something and us opening. Maybe I dreamt it! [laughs] I’m pretty sure that happened! [laughs]

RF: You’re starting a rumor that you opened for Iron Maiden on your first album.

JP: “What the hell’s wrong with John?!” But we didn’t tour. We had just these one-off kind of shows.

RF: It must have been good times though, that must have been exciting.

JP: Absolutely. It was; it was very exciting. The beginning of it all. Our first van tour wasn’t until Images and Words came out. The first album was ‘89, Images was ‘92, so a few years past. We got a singer, we got signed to a new label, and then we went on tour.

RF: Did you guys get dropped from Mechanic?

JP: No, we requested to leave. It wasn’t anything too dramatic.

RF: Who did you sign with? Who’s the next label?

JP: So then we got signed to Atco Records.

RF: Pantera’s label.

JP: Exactly, that whole scene. In fact I remember it well when Pantera just blew up and they like were number one, selling a million records in the first day, something stupid. And what we did being an inexperienced young band is we did what you should never do, and we signed an eight-album deal.

RF: Holy moly!

JP: Oh yeah! The funny thing about it was first of all the person who signed us is Derek Oliver; he was a journalist for Kerrang. He loved the band and he ended up being head of A&R at Atco, and the president of Atco was Derek Shulman, who, me being ignorant at the time, didn’t realize was the singer to Gentle Giant, one of the biggest prog bands from the UK. I didn’t know really who they were because I was just a Long Island kid, like, [taking on goofy teenage voice] “Rush! Maiden!” Anyway, we signed an eight album deal, and they renewed the option for every single album of the entire deal. They never dropped us; the label changed names, and A&R guys and presidents just constantly... It was like Atco, then it was Atco EastWest, then it was EastWest America, then it was Elektra; it was all under the Warner thing. They literally renewed every option; we did all eight albums on that deal. Is that insane? [laughs]

RF: For anybody listening who’s not in the music business, that doesn’t happen.

JP: It does not happen. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, so if you’re young and signing a deal, don’t sign an eight album deal – it’s not really smart. [laughs]

RF: Derek Shulman was my label president for a year or year and a half or something. He worked at Roadrunner for I want to say in 1999.

JP: Oh wow I didn’t realize that. Roadrunner was the label that we went to when we finally finished out that Warner deal.

RF: You put out a couple albums through them, right?

JP: We did. We put out a whole bunch of albums, it was great. The funny thing about that I remember getting signed to Roadrunner and at the time who was Roadrunner distributed by? It wasn’t Warner at the time, it was like another...

RF: They were with Island Def Jam for a minute, they were with...

JP: Was it Universal or something? So we finished the eight album deal and the whole Warner Atlantic Group and everything, and we’re like, “Ahhh finally, we’re done with that, and we’re gonna be with a whole new label, all different people and everything...” and I think like a week after we signed, they announced that Warner bought... [lots of laughs] It was totally like the Al Pacino, “Just when you thought you were...”

RF: Although at that point, that was kind of that golden era of Roadrunner where it was still an autonomous label, had its own offices worldwide, had a staff of 140 people. It really was like its own f***in’ label.

JP: It was. It was phenomenal. I loved it, I loved Monty, I loved the whole experience there. Everybody that we worked with on all the records were awesome. We had a great time on that label.

RF: You guys are distributed by or partners with Sony or somebody else?

JP: Yeah. Actually we resigned with [Roadrunner]; we had signed a couple of deals. They were like a couple of albums each. Then we decided to make a change; we signed with InsideOut who is distributed by Sony. The story with InsideOut is that it’s basically like the biggest sort of prog music label. That’s their whole identity, and the president of it – the head of it – his name is Thomas Waber. He’s a German guy, was a fan from the beginning, came to like the first Dream Theater shows, and we knew him forever. Just as our career was moving along, his career was moving along, and he’d have different labels and things. Eventually he got it to the point where it was this great label and a great home, and he pitched it to us, “Hey, I think it’s time.” So in some ways, it was kind of like coming home, because it was like one of the original guys who was there from the beginning. We signed with them. So that’s been great, Thomas it’s been great. We just got some great news today: we just got nominated for a Grammy, which is nice.

RF: Damn! Congratulations!

JP: Thank you. On Roadrunner, we got two nominations, which was a lot of fun, and so exciting especially because a prog band from Long Island playing 20-minute songs – we’re never gonna be in that world. So getting kind of into that was really cool. We haven’t had one for a while.

RF: Your record just dropped, right?

JP: Yeah it came out in October.

RF: That’s pretty amazing.

JP: Yeah. Well, this is for the first single that we did; it’s called ‘The Alien’ and it’s in the ‘Best Metal Performance.’ It was fun because I don’t get my hopes up, but it’s also interesting and fun to watch. So they were doing the live stream of announcing the nominees, and I was like, “Ehhhh...”

RF: Did you know?

JP: No. So I went out and ran some errands. [laughs] I was like at the bank and my manager was like, “Congratulations!” I’m like, “What?!” [laughs] So he’s like, “Billie Eilish just announced that you’ve got the Grammy nomination!” I’m like, “Of all times I miss watching it live!”

RF: Is it a 20-minute song?

JP: It’s not a 20-minute song, but it’s not a short song either. It’s called ‘The Alien’; it opens up the album. Here’s the funny thing, and the ironic thing about this whole thing: it’s in like 17/8 time. It’s really bizarre, but somehow it broke through. This record that we started more than a year ago, we did as a result of just being home and not on tour because of the pandemic and being like, “What do you guys wanna do?” [laughs] We weren’t supposed to be making a record. Normally we would have still been on tour. So we didn’t really know what kind of album we were going to make and the direction. We had some talks, but we’re like, “Let’s just get together in October. Let’s see what happens. We’ll have fun, we got a new espresso machine.” [laughs] We built our own Dream Theater headquarters a couple of years ago. I had recorded my solo album there; actually Mike Portnoy played on that, called Terminal Velocity. Then we did Liquid Tension Experiment over this summer with Mike and Jordan and Tony Levin, and then we’re sitting there like, “OK we know we could record albums here; it’s a new place, but it all sounds great. Let’s do a Dream Theater album there.” And I guess the point of my story is ‘The Alien’ was the first thing we wrote when we got together and just had too many espressos and we were like, “What do you guys wanna do?” “I don’t know. Let’s just see what happens.” So it’s kind of fun coming full circle now to get that nomination; it’s sort of a nice nod that sometimes that works.

RF: When you’re getting together, is this the first time that you’re putting together music or have you emailed ideas to each other?

JP: Normally we would probably have prepared a bit more, if it was a normal cycle and we knew we were going in. We’ll text ideas in their most basic form, like on your phone as a voice memo or it’s just like a quick video, whatever, and some things will fly back and forth. But this time we weren’t really supposed to go into the studio, so none of that really happened. Even in a normal situation, if ideas weren’t flying back and forth in that way, we’ll at least have collected ideas so then we have a list to go through, but we didn’t even have that. We were like, “Ehhh. Let’s just not put any expectations, see what happens.” We didn’t even know when the album was gonna come out, how long it would take and all that stuff, so it was cool in a way.

RF: It sounds like it was almost at the beginning of the pandemic.

JP: It was October of the pandemic ‘20.

RF: OK, six months into it. Things finally started opening up and people could see each other again.

JP: In fact, our singer James, being that he’s Canadian and still lives there, he actually couldn’t come down because he couldn’t travel the US, so we were all together in our space and he was beamed in via Zoom like we’re doing right now which worked out for him. He was in his home studio and he can kinda look at us and listen, and we could talk to him. He’d watch us write and he’d be tapped into his sound system. He could hear what we’re doing, he could talk to us, we can talk to him. It’s funny because he said it actually kinda worked out better in a way than when he’s physically there in person, because if you could imagine the four of us just cranking in a room with ideas going like a million miles an hour, he’s the singer sitting there with his mic like, “Hey guys – I have this idea!” If an idea pops into his head, he has to run out of the room because it’s too noisy and record something. So he was saying at home, it was almost better. Like he had a workspace and if he had an idea, he can get it down. So it worked out fine.

RF: When he comes down normally though, is he staying at somebody’s house or is he in a hotel?

JP: Hotel.

RF: So even more so... You guys are all going home at night after you rehearse, he’s going back to the hotel, so it probably was a lot better in some other ways.

JP: That’s true. It was more comfy for him for sure. He got to eat dinner every night with his family. The album before this, we did something cool. It was different where we all went away together; we did a retreat kind of thing, which we’ve actually never done before. We went into the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York and rented this beautiful barn and just stayed at the house on the barn, and that was our little world. It was during the summer; we barbecued, hung out and made a record. It was a lot of fun. That was a situation where nobody went home at night, and we all just sort of did our male bonding thing.

RF: Did that work good?

JP: It did! It worked out really well. Yeah, it was great. I mean we wrote the album really quickly, like in less than three weeks, and then we ended up staying up there and recording it. It worked out great actually.

RF: That’s incredible. It takes me way longer to write a record.

JP: Yeah, it could. Like with my solo album when it was just me, I’m just in the studio, my engineer’s sitting next to me and I’m like, “I think this is a cool idea. OK, let me record it and then we’ll take it here and there,” and it’s just all being bounced off of myself, so it takes a little more time. With the band – I mean same with Liquid Tension writing – it’s just very fast, it’s like everybody just has so many ideas. I think Dream Theater cultivated a bit more than a project like Liquid Tension, [which] is more like it’s meant to be fast and like get the music written and out, a lot of improv. Dream Theater, we take more time, but even having said that, the writing part happens relatively fast, but the project as a whole – from beginning to end – does take a while; probably takes five months, six months, something like that.

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RF: I was curious – how set is the Dream Theater set when you’re on tour? Is it immovable? Is there jam spots in there?

JP: It kinda turned immovable. I’ll explain why. Early on, it was a little bit more flexible, and we would do things where we would have multiple songs and sets, and stuff like that. Speaking of Mike Portnoy, that was really something he was into. We’d almost get bored really quickly, like, “Let’s not do that, let’s do this tonight” and we had more moving parts. But over the last decade or so, my whole thing was like I really wanted to present shows the way some of my favorite bands did, on the level that they did. An example would be Rush – what would Rush do? And every time you saw them, it would just be this amazing show where everything would be coordinated. When you walked into the venue, you were walking into their world, you were walking into a surreal world that Hugh Syme created based on everything from the merchandise, the tour program, and the set design, the video and everything. And then they pulled off this incredible show where the light show and the video show and everything was just so together. My whole thought was, “There’s no way you could do that if you’re doing this jazz-style or Zappa-style, where you have learned 150 songs and he’s calling out things. Or jam-band style. There’s no way – you’re not gonna be able to put on that kind of show. So I wanted to focus more on trying to put on that kind of show, which, in doing that, makes it more immovable. It’s a rock show, but it’s almost more like a Broadway thing...

RF: ...almost like a play.

JP: Yeah. It happens the same every night on purpose because all the dramatic stuff that’s going on, when somebody’s over there and all the lights shut off and there’s a light only on him, and then this thing happens and some weird lightning thing... You can’t do that off the cuff – that has to be planned and rehearsed – and because of that, the payoff is you get one of the best shows that you’ve ever produced live. People watch it and hopefully – if you do it right – walk out of there being like, “Oh my God! That was so cool!” The trade-off is that you don’t have really the ability to change it up. You can have a couple of revolving sets; that’s a way around that. Maybe there’s a set A, B and C, so they’re slightly different, but you don’t have those opportunities where you could just go off and change everything completely, because then it throws off the entire thing you’ve worked on. So it’s a bit of a trade-off. I don’t know what people prefer or what excites people more, but to me creatively, that’s the kind of Dream Theater that I’d like to present: the very best live presentation that we can do. So it takes some discipline; the trade-off is that you don’t get that ability to change things too much.

RF: Dream Theater and Machine Head did a Graspop Festival a decade ago, and you guys did Master of Puppets, in its entirety, and I was just like, “Wow!” I heard the first song and was like, “Oh s***! Dream Theater is playing ‘Battery’? What? F***ing cool!” And then you went into ‘Master’, and I was like, “Holy s***! They’re doing the...” Was that something you were doing the whole tour or was it just a spontaneous thing for Graspop?

JP: We had this thing that we were doing. Again, I give him all the credits, another Mike Portnoy thing that he was really into, because he was bored of doing the same songs, he was like, “We’re gonna cover the whole album!” And I think he said at the time... was it Phish that was doing it on New Year’s Eve or something? They’d play a whole album.

RF: Somebody else’s album?

JP: Yeah, exactly. Some band was doing that. Again, all my facts are mixed up. So we started doing that, and we covered full albums, like Dark Side of the Moon, Number of the Beast, Made in Japan. And we decided to do Master of Puppets. We didn’t do it in many places. We did it in Barcelona, and I guess we chose to do it at Graspop, which is kinda funny because here we are playing a festival, and the whole point of festivals is so that new people get to see your music that wouldn’t necessarily see. So what do we do? We play Metallica songs! [laughs]

RF: To your credit, everybody went crazy because you were playing Master of Puppets. They’re like, “Who cares how Dream Theater sounds like?!” Maybe they checked you out because of that.

JP: Exactly. Especially because in that part of the world, we’ve been there so many times so often, so it was probably a nice change.

RF: Do you recall the most challenging part of that set?

JP: Yeah! ‘Battery’ was so hard!

RF: That down-picking is f***ing beastly.

JP: Totally beastly. I had to use a whole different set of wrist muscles to play it. [laughs] It’s fricking fast! ‘Battery’s fast and ‘Damage’ as well. A lot of down-picking. It’s just not something that I do all the time. I remember I had to be really focused, more on that rhythm playing. You really gain a lot of respect for what James and Kirk were doing there. Like I said, those songs are not easy; they’re fast, ‘Battery’ is fast.

RF: Yeah. That whole thing is down-picked. It doesn’t sound too bad when you’re doing it for 10 seconds, but you realize the whole song’s seven minutes long.

JP: Exactly, the whole song is seven minutes long, and we did the whole album! That’s a stamina game right there. I had to work up to that for sure. It was fun though.

RF: Do you enjoy those things though?

JP: Yeah. It’s funny because it’s both nerve-wracking and fun at the same time. [laughs] You know how these things go: you have them planned, you suggest things, but end up not ever having enough time to actually rehearse it. You just always feel like you’re almost winging it when you’re doing it. And so there’s that feeling of being unsure and nervous, but also excited because there’s something in the air, and like you said at that show, “Wait, they’re doing this? Wait, the next song? The whole album!” and you get this energy. So there are two feelings of being freaked out the whole time, but then also having a lot of fun. I suppose if we did that album every day for two months, all of that stuff would go away.

RF: I was watching some footage of you with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai on the G3 thing from when you were a short-haired clean-shaven young man. We could probably just gush about how amazing both those guys are. Steve Vai though to me is like just another planet of guitar playing.

JP: Exactly. For me, first of all, they’re dear friends and I love them to death. but just as the fan [and] kid of me discovering them, I was freaked out by them. Both of those guys – Steve and Joe – are doing stuff that’s just so incredibly amazing, and for me as a player, I was so influenced by them, and just absorbed everything they did. Vai’s whole history with Zappa and everything he did after that; Alcatrazz and all that... David Lee Roth... it’s just wild unbelievable stuff. And of course, as a solo artist. And then, Joe, I remember teaching in a store in Long Island, and another teacher in the store was a student of Joe’s, and he somehow had his early recordings of Surfing, and Joe probably wouldn’t like to hear this, but he was playing stuff for me, probably shouldn’t have. And then he blew up, and he was like the biggest thing and ended up being one of the most influential guitar players of all time. Both those guys. But for me, back in 2001, to get asked to do G3 and go on tour with Joe and Steve, after all that history of me practicing guitar all the time, worshiping those guys. I went to Berklee because Steve Vai went there. These guys were huge in my life. And then here I am touring with them, and I’m on stage and I’m trading solos with them! I’m like, “How did I get here?!” I’ve said this a million times before, but the thoughts that were going through my head as we were trading, and they would come to me, and I was thinking to myself, “I was so influenced by them, they’re gonna know this lick I’m playing I ripped them off from this song!” [laughs] I was so paranoid that all of the licks I had in my arsenal were learned from them.

RF: Is there ever a time on that tour when the three of you would just get s***faced?

JP: No! [laughs] Not on that tour!

RF: There’s no epic cocaine and hookers night on G3?

JP: No, not at all. In fact, it’s a total opposite. They are very, very contained, politely run. G3 is Joe’s organization and it is just run so beautifully. I ended up doing not only that tour with him but so many more runs – me, Joe, and Paul Gilbert; me, Joe and Eric Johnson; me, Joe and Steve Lukather, and Steve Morse. We had Uli Jon Roth...

RF: That must have been awesome. I love Uli Jon Roth. That solo record of his is...

JP: Oh, it’s so great! He’s such a great guy. And we went everywhere too – we toured in the U.S., Europe, Japan, South America, Australia.

RF: And even on all those tours, there’s no nights where you guys get thrashed and play ‘Paranoid’ or something?

JP: No. Sorry I can’t fulfill any rock ‘n’ roll fantasy stories, but it’s pretty damn nerdy.

RF: Are you guys sober, you don’t drink or nothin’?

JP: No, they don’t drink as far as I’ve seen. There’s no partying at all. Everybody’s just like super cool, zen, nice. There’s no weirdness at all, just completely cool; not wild and crazy.

RF: Has there ever been a rager Dream Theater era? Your guys’ reputation’s pretty squeaky clean.

JP: It is clean, I hate to say it. We’re about as nerdy as you get. [laughs] We were cracking up – this wasn’t even that long ago – somebody walked into a dressing room or one of those things in Europe where it’s like a big production room, and there’s long tables, and literally the whole band and tour manager, everybody was on their laptops. It was like literally walking into Starbucks and somebody made [a comment] like, “Wow! This is real rock ‘n’ roll you guys!” [laughs] But yeah, everybody’s fun and everybody’s cool, but everybody’s the serious musician type; everybody just wants to play as good as they could possibly play.

RF: But you guys will crack a few beers after a show...

JP: Absolutely, yeah. The bourbon will come out, drinks will come out, wine comes out. Our singer James doesn’t drink at all during the touring; he does when he’s off tour, but he insists for his voice not to do that. But afterwards on the bus, chilling out, the bourbon and wine comes out, but not on stage, not backstage...

RF: There’s not really groupies for prog bands.

JP: No, not at all.

RF: [laughs] It was like dude groupies.

JP: Yeah, exactly. Our whole audience for the longest time has been mostly musicians and guys. All of us too, we all got married pretty young and started having families pretty young, all around the same time. So it’s like all of us are in 30-year or so long marriages with like two, three kids who are adults now. So that just wasn’t our world. Again, I know that’s like the rock ‘n’ roll sort of stereotype or whatever, but for us, we just were serious from the beginning and we were kind of all family men and we just never had that vibe going on.

RF: I mean it’s a lot less than people probably imagine, and less than other bands have played up to the hilt. I remember we did so many shows with Motorhead, and you’d come up in the Motorhead dressing and Lemmy would just be reading a book. It wasn’t chicks and blow. It was just like he’s there reading a book – for hours!

JP: That’s funny. And then sometimes it was like that and the stories are real. You talked about touring with Pantera and the whole thing, and those guys are definitely partied heavy and hard. I remember playing a festival with them – might have been in Finland or something – those guys were going so hard, it was unbelievable. I was like, “How are they doing this?! How are they standing on stage?” [laughs] It was insane. Some of the stories were true, but the squeaky clean Dream Theater reputation is not a rumor; we’re about as clean, nerdy as you get. But in my book, that’s a good thing. Like I said, we’ve all raised beautiful families, and we have a lot to be thankful for.

RF: I just want to give [Mike Mangini] a shout out; I did a jam with him. We did an ARF benefit, which is Tony La Russa’s (the baseball manager) animal rescue, and every year he has a fundraiser to do it, and I guess he flew Mike in. I was there to do it and that’s the first time I’d ever met him or jammed with him or even seen him play, and I was just like, “Oh my God!”

JP: I know. He’s a total freak. We have so much fun. Going back in time about 10 years or so ago, when Mike Portnoy did leave the band and we hired Mike Mangini, we did these drummer auditions and we had guys come in. We did a whole produced almost like reality show and it eventually leading up towards the drummer being Mike Mangini. One of the things I’ll never forget is these guys had all come in, learn a few Dream Theater songs, we’d play them and then we’d improvise and do some stuff. He came in and we started playing for the first time – we didn’t rehearse, we didn’t jam – we started playing like our own stuff, and it just sounded like we could have done a show. It was insane being in a room with him. Like, “How are you doing that?” [laughs] So we knew he was the right guy.

RF: Did you work on new ideas? Did you try anything new with him?

JP: Back in those auditions? We had a three-part audition, so one of them was playing three Dream Theater songs, another one I think we just sort of jammed to see if the guy was good at improvising or we had a vibe, and the other thing was I had this riff that I would throw out and we wanted to see if there was a creative element. What would this drummer do with this riff? What would it turn into? What was our chemistry? Our ideas going back and forth, or is it falling flat? We did that with all the guys; they all did great, but obviously Mike did better, and he’s been the drummer since then. But yeah, he’s just a monster. In fact, we started talking about the new Dream Theater album and the song ‘The Alien,’ and that being the first song that we did when we got into the studio last October, and he just has this groove in 17/8 and it’s like, “Oh that’s a normal time signature Mike!” He just starts playing all this stuff and all these variations, but what it does is it just starts getting your wheels turning and start putting riffs to it and building it and things start going from there. So it’s great when a drummer has a creative ability as well that can come in with grooves and things and spark ideas. That song was very much sparked by that and here we are.

RF: Congratulations on getting nominated for a Grammy.

JP: Thank you!

RF: Who are you up against? Is it like Green Day? Green Day’s nominated in the...

JP: Well what’s funny about that, the first nomination we had when I was talking about the Roadrunner years, Foo Fighters were on there and they won it. I remember Dave Grohl he had said something like, “Oh, they should have got this,” which I thought was nice, but this time I don’t know if I’m going to remember all of them. I think it’s Gojira and Mastodon, and it’s a cool list. I remember there were a couple years where I was surprised at the nominees; it seemed a little bit strange, but this seems appropriate, so we’ll see. It’s fun, it’s an honor to get nominated. Like I said, doing what we do, in the way that we do it, and getting recognized in that world is something that I never would have expected, and now this is the third one, so it’s cool, it’s a good feeling.