On The Beat: Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci talks about his Friday Royal Grove show

L. Kent Wolgamott

Nov 10, 2022 Updated Nov 11, 2022

It was about three hours before Tuesday night's show was to begin when John Petrucci called in from Sacramento’s Crest Theater to talk about his show coming up Friday at the Royal Grove.

Behind him, Meanstreak, the all female thrash band that’s opening on The Dream Theater guitarist solo tour was soundchecking, prompting me to tell him of the stupidest interview I’d ever done – trying to talk to Henry Rollins during a Black Flag soundcheck at the Drumstick. Let’s just say, the tape didn’t turn out too good.

Meanstreak’s background noise wasn’t that bad, so we got down to business, with the obvious question of how’s the tour been going.

“It’s been totally awesome,” Petrucci said. “There are a couple different aspects of this that are so cool. It’s the first time I’ve done a headlining solo tour and have been able to promote my two solo albums. It’s the first time me and Mike Portnoy have performed together since 2010.

“And we’ve got the reunited Meanstreak with my wife (Rena Sands) and Mike’s wife (Marlene) on guitars, which is great. The vibe has been really really cool. The response has been great.”

I rarely get to talk to bands near the close of tours – most interviews are done before the tour begins, sometimes weeks to months before the show. So I wanted to know how the show had changed since Petrucci, bassist Dave LaRue and Portnoy, Dream Theater’s founding drummer, hit the road in early October.

“What’s been fun with this is – at the start of the tour, I worked a few moments into the show where I’d get to improvise and stretch out or Mike would or Dave,” Petrucci said. ”Those were pretty incredible and we started adding more and more. When the tour started the show was 90 minutes. Now it’s 1 hour, 45 minutes, nearly two hours on some nights because of those moments.”

That show, no matter how long, is made up entirely of material from Petrucci’s two solo albums – 2005’s “Suspended Animation” and 2020’s “Terminal Velocity,” all of which showcase different sides of Petrucci’s prodigious guitar work that’s got him tagged as one of the all time greats and the prog metal standard setter.

“It’s very different,” he said. “People have seen this side of me if they’ve got to one of Joe Satriani’s G3 shows. I’ve played a million of those. But I’ve never done it to this extent. I purposely wrote the set only comprised of my own music. We could have included some Dream Theatre songs, some Liquid Tension Experiment, and some covers. I really wanted it to be about my solo music.”

Petrucci, who is known delivering his technically proficient ultra fast picking and riffing that’s cleaner more precise than most metal guitar on six, seven and sometimes eight string guitars, a distinctive style he’s developed over the four decades since he and two other Berklee College of Music students put together the band that became Dream Theater.

“When you’re younger, you take all those influences and people can hear them and tell who they are,” he said. “ If you keep doing this, hopefully, you have your own voice. Sometimes I can still hear my big influences, Steve Morse and the Dregs, Rush, Al Di Meiola. But maybe that’s just me.”

So, what’s the major difference between playing Dream Theater’s prog metal and your solo stuff?

“The biggest difference is with Dream Theater there’s keyboards and vocals,” said Petrucci, who’s Dream Theater’s primary songwriter and lyricist. “With my solo stuff, I basically carry everything, the rhythm, the solos, the melody and all the themes, it’s a lot busier on guitar. It’s fun but it’s really challenging.”

So, another one from the obvious file: Is “Terminal Velocity,” your pandemic album?

“Not on purpose,” Petrucci replied. ”I had planned on doing it in early 2020. When everything shut down, I was able to have the time to finish it. The guys were available and we figured out a way to record it. It wasn’t like “There’s a pandemic, what am I going to do? Let’s make an album.’ It was already planned.”

Petrucci’s out on tour now, two years after “Terminal Velocity” was released because, first, the pandemic kept him off the road, then, he has this little band he co-founded nearly 40 years ago that has some touring to do as well.

“I was able to slot it in during a Dream Theater break,” he said. “We had to do it now. Dream Theater is still in the midst of a world tour in support of ‘A View from the Top of the World.’ “That’s the album we got the Grammy for. We’re headed to England in January and will be touring the rest of the year.”

Again, I had to ask, what does it feel like to win a Grammy? I was shocked when I saw you won (for best metal performance for “The Alien,” a song from the new album.

“It was really surreal, coming from our genre,” Petrucci said. “When we got nominated the first time (in 2012) I said I can’t picture people in that world giving something to a prog rock band. I still can’t really. It’s a surreal, humbling, magical feeling. Especially because it’s the Grammys. We can get awards in our world. But that’s something your mom will tell her friends about.”

With Meanstreak’s metal getting even louder, it was time for me to bail and let Petrucci get out of there. But he stopped me during the goodbyes, asking me to deliver a message.:

“I need you to tell people in Lincoln that once this tour is over, this won’t happen again, for years,” he said. “If they want to see me like this, they better come on out.”