Dream Theater’s John Petrucci on band never relying on income from record sales, more

Founding member John Petrucci takes a look back at Dream Theater's formative years with the release of the band’s box set, 'Dream Theater Vol. 1.'

By Ken Sharp

October 28, 2024

Acclaimed prog-rock practitioners Dream Theater are the celebrated with the release of a new vinyl box set, Dream Theater Vol. 1, culling the albums Images and Words, Awake, Falling into Infinity and Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory. Celebrating four decades of sophisticated forward thinking prog rock, we sat down with founding member John Petrucci for a look back at Dream Theater's formative years.

Goldmine: For the new box set, Dream Theater Vol. 1, what story does this tell in terms of the band's career arc?

John Petrucci: Well, I did listen to all of it again. In fact, since this is the vinyl set, I listened to approve the audio of the vinyl and to make sure that fans that picked up these box set series are getting the best audio we could deliver. So I did revisit all that stuff again. For me, they're like time capsules of your life. Sometimes you measure things by where you are in your life or the age of your kids or whatever it is. Every time I hear an album, I immediately go back to where we were, how we recorded it, what point in our career we were at, what was going on in the world at that time, what were our influences. You could really hear a progression of that, and you hear the band growing and maturing and refining our sound as you go. What's interesting with our entire catalog is that, yeah, there are some albums that are overwhelming fan favorites that stick out a little bit like Images and Words and Scenes From a Memory and stuff like that. But depending on the fan, their favorite might be completely different from somebody else's. Sometimes it has to do with how old you were when you heard an album. Some people were a lot younger and it wasn't until way later they first heard us, so that's their first album. Some people have been with us from the beginning and discovered us when we came out and those early albums are their favorite. It's really interesting. It's something to be proud of for sure.

GM: When you were growing up and thinking about making music your career, and when it happened, what were the surprises for you?

JP: I definitely always had that drive. I knew what I wanted to do very early on. I was just a young teenager, and I would just idolize bands like Rush and Iron Maiden and go see them play live in concert every time they came through New York. I watched all the DVDs, and I knew that's what I wanted to do, not really knowing what it took, but I've always been a very driven and disciplined person. You learn really fast, especially as a young band. I'll never forget our first tour just in a van, driving ourselves and playing to nobody and building things up. But yeah, you realize it's a lot of time away from home, a lot of travel. You also realize very early on that you need to be pretty on top of your business as well because that's something that could run away from you if you don't have the right people or you're just not on it. Typical things that young musicians learn and survive.

GM: Well, the paradigm back when you started out was certainly different, and now the whole music business landscape is different. Now, touring is really the main driver and the records are secondary where it was the opposite years ago. How have you been able to navigate that change through the band's career?

JP: Well, here's the interesting thing about that. For Dream Theater, we didn't really have a lot of commercial success. We did have a song on our second album Images and Words (“Pull Me Under”), which was a rock radio hit and garnered a gold record for us. But other than that, we couldn't really rely on selling millions of records at first. We started our career with the mindset that our future lies in touring and in live performances. So we did that very early on. We were an international band, and we developed an international fan base from the get-go. So we didn't feel any paradigm shift that you just mentioned because we had already established that. We were a major touring band, not reliant on income from record sales, but reliant on income from touring and merchandise and all that stuff. So it worked in our favor as far as that's concerned. It's not like we were a pop band who were just selling millions and millions of millions of records, and then we could play a couple of shows a year. We had to play 150 shows on tour all over the world. That's how we made our money. Yeah, so that never changed, thankfully.

GM: It's also interesting that because you established yourself as a touring act, you weren't relying on a record company saying, "Well, where's the radio hit?" Knowing that you already had that fan base, with the albums comprising this new box set, was that freeing that have that freedom where you weren't beholden to a record company's commercial dictates?

JP: Yeah. That's interesting, too, because I think that our record label... Now, we've been on a couple of different record labels, but the second deal that we signed, not the one for our first album, but the second one we signed that was originally to Atco Records was an eight-album deal, which you never do. But we were young and we were like, "Yeah, sign here." The interesting thing about that is that the label learned very early on that we're self-sufficient. We're a major international touring band. We have rabid fans that just adore the band. We do incredibly well on merchandise. We don't need hit singles to be able to do this. They just let us do our thing, and they renewed all eight options of that deal, which was incredible. Then we started self-producing. We were very independent early on. Yeah, every once in a while, it would come up like, "Oh, it would be great to have another 'Pull Me Under.'" But there wasn't really this crazy pressure. "If you don't do this, we're going to drop you." And at the end, they were like, "Yeah, you guys seem to know what you're doing, so go ahead."

GM: Dream Theater had success out of the gate as a touring act, and that continues to grow. What's your own personal measure of success?

JP: Some of it's a little bit more esoteric where it's like as a guitar player and a musician and artist, I love that I get to do what I love to do. It's what I'm driven to do. It's my identity and my personality and not everybody is able to do that. So I'm very humbled by that and don't take any of it for granted. So just being able to do what I love to do as a creative person is success right there. And then on a practical level, to be able to have a career in the arts is not easy to do and sustain a living. Having a career in the arts that enables you to have a life, to be able to support yourself and your family and live a great life is something that should never be taken for granted because, as you know, careers in the arts are very difficult. So those two things, to me, are a measure of success. And along the way, if there are people out there that relate emotionally to what you're doing and enjoy it, then that's this incredible added bonus. Being able to be true to yourself as an artist and have people appreciate what you do and make a living out of doing it, what could be better? It's crazy. There's a lot of people making music and art all around the world, so to be able to do it professionally is something that I'm always very grateful for.

GM: I assume you had been in bands prior to Dream Theater. At what point did you realize this is the band that's going to make it?

JP: Actually, I've been in no bands before Dream Theater. Dream Theater is my first band. The band started 40 years ago. John Myung [bassist] and I met when we were 12 years old. We went to the Berklee College of Music. When we were 17, we met [drummer] Mike Portnoy there, that was '85. That's when we started. So yeah, Dream Theater is really my first and only band.

GM: I'm curious, who are the artists and guitar players that people would be surprised you're a fan of?

JP: There's so many great musicians and bands out there. Maybe this isn't a stretch because of who he is, but Peter Gabriel is one of my favorite artists of all time. Even just listening to Joe Walsh and his guitar playing. It's not something you maybe hear me say too often, but he's such a great guitar player. There's so many guys like that that have just made such marks in the musical community.

GM: You studied at Berklee. Assimilating all that technical knowledge, how do you get into the zone where you're not thinking too much instead of feeling the music?

JP: I mean, for me, I've always looked at it as just having a larger tool set to be able to do the job. So if you're feeling something emotionally and you want to express it, in this case on the guitar through songwriting, yeah, they're the core approaches that any musician with even basic training can do for sure, any songwriter. But having a larger toolbox, a toolset like that, I don't know, just gives me more options to not be stuck in certain circumstances. I think of it like a classical composer needing to pull all different levels of intensity out of the orchestra, from things that are really sensitive to things that are really fast or intense or dark or happy. Having the ability to call upon that as a trained musician, to me, has always been something that was important.

GM: With the new vinyl box set, pick one high watermark album that resonates with you the strongest.

JP: In this first box, I’ll have to say that it's Scenes From a Memory because it really marked a point in our career that was very important. It was the first concept album that the band did. It was the first album where [keyboardist] Jordan Rudess had joined the band back then. It was the first album that, at the time, Mike [Portnoy] and I produced together, and we were getting even more autonomy from the label as far as using outside producers. There's so many things about that that are these milestones. The fact that we did something where we put a lot of pressure on ourselves because we're such a fan of all the bands, from The Who to Pink Floyd to Marillion, you name it, who have done incredible concept albums. We were like, "How are we going to live up to that thing?" To do something that would end up being something that fans all around the world really love was an accomplishment as well. So that one's a standout for me on this volume one of the box set series.

GM: My last question: if you could be a fly on the wall for any recording session in history and watch it go down, what would you choose and why?

JP: Oh, my God. That's a huge question. I would probably say Pink Floyd's The Wall because it's one of these albums where it's ground-breaking on so many levels. Often I wonder, what were those guys like? What was the process like? What were they thinking? How did they come up with this? Yeah, that would be pretty amazing to witness how that was done.