Top Of The World

Since forming in 1985 at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Dream Theater have constantly broken new ground for the progressive metal genre they pioneered. Seemingly immune to line-up changes, evolving musical fashions and commercial pressures, on their 15th studio album A View From The Top Of The World their genre-fluid, virtuosity-packed sound is as fresh as ever. John Tucker talks to keyboard player Jordan Rudess and bassist John Myung about “the best job in the world”.

Asked if there is an album that best defines Dream Theater, keyboard player Jordan Rudess thinks for a moment as he chats with RC from his home in New York. “I would say that this new one, A View From The Top Of The World, represents us very well. Dream Theater is a progressive metal band – progressive meaning there’s a lot of stylistic influences that come into play. When you think about all the members, there’s me coming from my prog rock and classical roots, and the other guys come from a prog background, yes, but they also have a metal Iron Maiden-Metallica-Queensrÿche kind of foundation. And Rush, absolutely. You mix everything together and you’ve got this combination of styles that go into our albums. And there’s the virtuosic element that everybody’s very serious about – their particular craft – and that’s our mix. And this album definitely has that mix. There are songs, like the first one we released, ‘The Alien’, where if you said to someone, ‘Check out this group Dream Theater,’ it would be the perfect song because it has all these elements in it. There’s melodic elements, there’s virtuosity, there’s intensity from the metal side, there’s also interesting rhythms, and it’s prog. Not every song shows that, obviously; we have really, really gentle mellow songs. But an album like A View From The Top Of The World definitely showcases who we really are.”

Since the release of their debut album, When Dream And Day Unite, in 1989, Dream Theater have been at the forefront of the progressive metal genre, pushing boundaries and opening doors through which a number of other acts have followed. Their influence on the development of the genre has been immense, and their contribution to it cannot be overstated.

Their story starts in September 1985 at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where two friends, guitarist John Petrucci and bassist John Myung, encountered drummer Mike Portnoy. “We were playing in bands prior to that moment, in high school,” the also New York-based Myung recalls, “but that’s exactly how it happened. As fate would have it, the first day we were there we were just walking around checking out all the different practice rooms, seeing who was playing, and in one of the rooms we saw Mike. And the next day, I think, John met up with him in the cafeteria, you know: ‘Hey, do you want to jam?’ And the rest is history.”

Taking the name Majesty, the trio started working on rough power-trio style demos on a four-track Tascam recorder, and the following spring worked up the basic tracks for a second batch of material. This time, though, they knew Petrucci’s former bandmate, Kevin Moore, would be joining on keyboards, and they’d discovered frontman Chris Collins. This demo was completed in May 1986 and made available on cassette, although the band in later years would become self-archivists and The Majesty Demos 1985-1986 was put out on CD in 2003 as part of their Official Bootleg series (and has recently been re-issued under the Lost Not Forgotten Archives banner.)

In November 1987 Collins gave way to Charlie Dominici, and as Majesty in Las Vegas had threatened legal action over the name, the band became Dream Theater, referencing their former name with the instrumental track ‘The Ytse Jam’. Their debut album, When Dream And Day Unite, was released in March 1989, and while it didn’t set the world on fire it was an intriguing foretaste of what was to come. Dominici left Dream Theater in November 1989, after they’d supported Marillion at The Ritz in New York, and the band then spent the best part of two years looking for a suitable replacement before recruiting Canadian singer (Kevin) James LaBrie in 1991. Dream Theater unveiled their second LP, Images And Words, in July 1992; suddenly people started to take notice of their unusual and quite innovative Yes-meets-Metallica approach.

“It’s just something that made sense to us,” explains Myung. “You know who the bands you love are and it’s great working with people who have the same sort of reference points and like the same sort of music.

We were very much influenced by the progressive 70s. Those bands that we grew up listening to had a certain style and it became like a language for us. Prior to that moment we’d spent years and years practising – pretty dedicated rehearsals Monday through Friday, getting together and working on stuff. So up until that album coming out it was very much just that. The album came out and we started hearing that people were calling up the radio stations to ask who the band they were playing were, so that was an indication that we had something. And then with the video [for ‘Pull Me Under’] on MTV, that’s the moment when things changed.”

The bassist recognises that the band had something special with Images And Words. “It did strike me that ‘Pull Me Under’ felt like it had this undeniable quality,” he says. “I didn’t know about everybody else but I was thinking, ‘Something really cool is happening.’”

“What is really cool about the Dream Theater story,” suggests Rudess, “is that timing has a lot to do with everything. That stylistic blend, the Rush and the Yes and Metallica, everything the guys – and I wasn’t in the group back then, obviously – had in mind at that point and were able to assemble, was really unique. No one had heard that before, and it had a big impact. It was like a lightbulb moment: ‘Oh my God, what is this? It’s heavy but it’s progressive and it’s virtuosic...’ It was like, ‘Boom’! ‘Pull Me Under’ was successful – MTV and everything – and that initial ‘boom’ impact allowed us to keep all that going.”

The success of Images And Words saw the band touring Europe in 1993 and slotting in two UK tours, playing clubs in the spring and returning in November to bigger halls. Their third album, October 1994’s Awake, was their first to chart in the UK, peaking at No 65, although at the end of the sessions Moore left the band. A showcase gig at Concrete Foundations Forum in Burbank, California, on 9 September 1994 saw Jordan Rudess on keyboards, but by the time the tour kicked off the following month they’d recruited Derek Sherinian.

During a break in touring in May 1995 an EP, A Change Of Seasons, was recorded. Two further albums, the more radio-friendly Falling Into Infinity (released September 1997) and a double live CD recorded at the Bataclan in Paris on 25 June 1998 and released in October as Once In A LIVEtime, followed before Derek Sherinian left. Jordan Rudess was offered the job again, and this time he took it.

“When Kevin Moore left in 1994, they called up Jan Hammer’s manager to ask about Jan, I guess,” Rudess says. “Jan Hammer’s manager just had this experience of working with me and he said, ‘Oh, you should talk to Jordan Rudess.’ I understand that Kevin Moore had also spoken about me somewhere along the line. The other thing the guys told me later was that they looked in the magazines. Being virtuoso musicians, they’d all won ‘Best New Talent’ or something like that, so they looked in Keyboard magazine to find the equivalent and there I was that year as Keyboard magazine’s ‘Best New Talent’. I’d actually heard their music not long before that and thought, ‘Wow, this is some really great stuff.’ We all got along instantly very well. I auditioned with ‘Take The Time’ and ‘Pull Me Under’, two classic Dream Theater songs, and I also showed them one of my songs, ‘Over The Edge’, which was recorded with Rod Morgenstein on a Rudess/Morgenstein album. Actually, Rudess/Morgenstein had opened up for them at some point as well which was an interesting kind of thing. So, I did the Foundations Forum event and they asked me to join but I said no – my wife and I had just had a baby, they were like a relatively new group in my mind, I had a gig with Kurzwell, the synthesiser manufacturer... All kinds of stuff. I ended up joining the Dixie Dregs for a tour, which was really, really fun, and then instead of joining Dream Theater I got a call to join Liquid Tension Experiment.”

A side project featuring Mike Portnoy and John Petrucci alongside bassist Tony Levin, Liquid Tension Experiment released two albums of prog instrumentals in 1998 and 1999 (with the quartet’s LTE3 following much later in 2021). “Somebody representing Mike Portnoy called me up and asked if I wanted to do that,” Rudess continues. “It was very exciting. It was a great side project for them, it was a great project for me, and I ended up working really well with Mike and John and having a blast doing these albums, to the point that at the end of the second album they asked, ‘Hey, Jordan, what do you think now? Do you want to join Dream Theater?’ And that was it. Almost 23 years ago now!”

If Falling Into Infinity had suffered from label pressure to be more mainstream, with Rudess on board Dream Theater recorded one of their most creative and enduring albums. Released in October 1999, Metropolis Pt.2: Scenes From A Memory is the band’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, and a firm fan favourite to this day. “It was a really exciting time for me,” admits Rudess. “It was all new. John and Mike, yeah, I’d worked with them before, but I’d never worked with John Myung in the studio, and I’d never worked in this particular way. In Liquid Tension Experiment everyone kind of does what they want, and we create something new, but Dream Theater was an established band and things were set in the way that they work. I walked into the studio and had something like 50 ideas; I was so excited I had recorded and written down a bunch of things. I think Mike went ‘Wow’ when he looked at all these ideas but then said, ‘We usually write music together in the studio.’ So I learned something there. At the same time, though, they were really excited about checking out my ideas – Mike was and is all ears and he wanted to know what the hell I did so he went through them all and made notes, and we ended up using some of them, which was cool. But they also had ideas that they’d brought in from before because they’d been working on this concept a little bit, I guess, here and there as time went on.

“But I really didn’t have the perspective of this being a special, unique Dream Theater album,” he adds. “I was just buzzing on the whole thing. All I knew is that we’d put out this album and we were getting a great response. Every album to us is like a child, something that we produce, and they’re all special. So why is that one more special to somebody than another one? It’s just us, really, making music.”

Dream Theater had never been averse to slipping in a few bars of other bands’ material onstage, but they took this to a whole new level in 2002 on the World Turbulence Tour (or World Tourbulence) in support of Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence (which was not only their longest album to date, clocking in at over 96 minutes, but which also opened with the scratched record sound that closed Scenes From A Memory). If the band played two nights in the same city, it was agreed that the second night would feature a shorter set of original songs followed by the recreation of another band’s album in its entirety. So, on 19 February 2002 in Barcelona, having played their usual set the previous night, LaBrie, Petrucci, Rudess, Myung and Portnoy romped through Metallica’s Master Of Puppets from start to finish. In the same way over the years, they have tackled The Dark Side Of The Moon, Iron Maiden’s The Number Of The Beast and, perhaps most surprisingly, all 79 minutes of Deep Purple’s Made In Japan.

Things seemed well settled in the Dream Theater camp with ensuing albums each building on its predecessor’s success (June 2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings hit No 23 in the UK, their best performing album to date), which may be why Mike Portnoy’s departure was such a shock. To many fans Portnoy embodied Dream Theater. A seemingly limitless source of energy and imagination, the drummer appeared to be involved in almost every aspect of the band’s day-to-day existence – from production to sleeve notes – yet in September 2010 he announced his departure from the band he’d founded 25 years previously.

When Mike left it was heartbreaking,” Rudess recalls. “You had this guy who was so instrumental in getting Dream Theater on the map, and Dream Theater meant so many things to him. He’s such a wide, talented, musical, unique human being, great drummer... I mean, Mike and I are to this day really good friends and really close. I remember sitting on the step in my studio and literally crying. I just couldn’t believe it. But then, you know, we move on. I mean, musically speaking one of the reasons that we could move on was because John Petrucci and I write so much of the music. Not to take anything away from Mike because he is amazing, but we just needed to fill in the parts and step it up in certain areas: you know, ‘Mike did that, so how are we going to make that happen?’ John took over as producer and has been doing a really great job and seems to be enjoying that role. And in Mike Mangini we’ve got one of the world’s greatest drummers. Nobody can play like him.

“I remember when we had the idea of the drummer auditions, we had the realisation that Dream Theater can have whatever drummer we want – there’s all these guys out there who would love to be in Dream Theater – and that relaxed us a little bit,” he elaborates. “OK, so we lost Mike Portnoy but, you know, although some people are hard to replace nobody’s irreplaceable. And Mike Mangini came in and aced his audition. We knew it was going to be different, and some people would be like [moaning], ‘Oh, I don’t know, I like Portnoy, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.’ But this is Mike Mangini, one of the greatest fucking drummers on the planet. Life goes on.”

Mangini made his debut on 2011’s self-referencing A Dramatic Turn Of Events and the band have continued delivering exciting, groundbreaking and thought-provoking albums. As if to recognise Dream Theater’s – and progressive metal’s – move to the mainstream the band were up for their third Grammy nomination in April 2022, with ‘The Alien’ in the ‘Best Metal Performance’ category (which they did indeed win). “The first time [we were nominated, in 2011], we got beat out by the Foo Fighters,” Rudess said, talking to RC ahead of the Grammys. “How can Dream Theater beat the Foo Fighters? And the next time we got nominated Jack Black won. [Actually, they lost out to ‘God Is Dead’ from Black Sabbath’s lacklustre 13.] So maybe the third time, as they say, is the charm.”

As for the band’s longevity – 36 years and counting – Myung is quite sanguine. “We’re very dedicated to what we do and it sort of takes care of itself. And you don’t want it to end. You just want it to keep going. It is,” he laughs, “the best job in the world.”

As for Dream Theater’s legacy, he is less certain. “I don’t really know,” he muses. “Too early to tell. Let’s save that for the end.”

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Also Astonishing

Six degrees of inner trivia

Along with 15 studio albums, the band also have nine live releases, 14 fanclub CDs and 22 official bootlegs to their name. And one EP.

That EP is the 23-minute, seven-part ‘A Change Of Seasons’, which was originally written during the Images And Words sessions. Augmented by a collection of covers recorded at Ronnie Scott’s on 31 January 1995 it was released in September 1995 and although it’s not generally included in the band’s album tally, it clocks in at 57:30 and hit No 88 in the UK Album Chart.

Live Scenes From New York was recorded on 30 Aug 2000 at New York’s Roseland Ballroom and features the whole Scenes From A Memory album plus other material on a 3CD set. With unfortunate timing it was released on 11 September 2001, with the original artwork featuring a scene of New York (including the Twin Towers) ablaze, but this was swiftly pulled and replaced. Another live triple CD, Score, was recorded at Radio City Music Hall, New York on 1 April 2006 with full orchestral backing. The title can be taken as an allusion to the orchestral score, or the fact this was their 20th-anniversary tour.

At 130 minutes, 2016’s The Astonishing is the band’s longest studio album. The box set contained no extra tracks but housed plenty of accoutrements related to the sci-fi storyline, and the album was played pretty much in its entirety on the ensuing tour with three or four older favourites as encores.

The band’s live rendition of Made In Japan was recorded in Osaka, where the bulk of the original Deep Purple record was taped, and was mixed by Roger Glover.

‘Pull Me Under’s one-hit-wonder status was referenced, tongue-in-cheek, in the title of their March 2008 “best of” double CD package Greatest Hit (...And 21 Other Pretty Cool Songs) with their breakthrough single opening the collection.

inset (from page 7 about the author)

John Tucker came across Dream Theater and their Majesty demos in tape-trading days and was intrigued, but it was the Images And Words album and ensuing gig at Bristol’s Bierkeller (RIP) that hooked him completely. Fanboy fawning has been edited out of his interview with Jordan Rudess and John Myung.