“Give me a break. Of course we’ve got frickin’ soul”: Dream Theater vs the haters

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Dream Theater have done more anyone to turn progressive metal into a genuine commercial force, but they have plenty of critics. Shortly after the release of 2013’s self-titled album, they sat down with Classic Rock to face their detractors and attempt to convert the haters.

It’s halfway through our interview when James LaBrie inadvertently nails the problem with Dream Theater. “The worst thing anybody has said about this band?” The singer’s voice rises above ‘polite’ for the first time in our 40-minute conversation. “That we have no soul.”

It was a reasonable enough question, and an unexpectedly forceful answer. The New York band split the vote like few others. To some they’re the greatest musical technicians, a collection of academy-trained virtuosos who prove intelligence and success aren’t mutually exclusive in the 21st century. To others they’re anally-clenched muso spods so far from rock’n’roll’s elemental foundations that they may as well be from Saturn.

The three members of the band on press duties today are never anything less than friendly. Guitarist John Petrucci laughingly describes himself as a “music nerd” never more than one room away from an instrument (he even confesses he’s doing today’s interview standing on a carpet emblazoned with guitars). Paintbrush-bearded keyboard player Jordan Rudess – a child prodigy who trained at Juilliard from the age of nine – is equally engaging, and no less aware of his band’s place in the scheme of things.

And then there’s LaBrie. A transplanted Canadian, he may describe himself as having “a short fuse”, but he’s the most mild-mannered, pleasant rock star imaginable. He doesn’t even go in for profanity, substituting ‘fricking’ for ‘fucking’, which makes him sound a bit like Dr Evil from Austin Powers. At one point he even utters the phrase “Holy smokes!” But for all that, it’s clear that LaBrie cares about how his band are perceived. And he gets narked when people say their music is soulless.

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe they heard an instrumental like Hell’s Kitchen, or maybe they heard Metropolis. But they didn’t listen to Spirit Carries On. They don’t have an overall sense of the spirit of the band. Especially when you have a frickin’ guitar player like John Petrucci. I’ve always said that his heart is frickin’ connected to his strings.”

There’s a snort of derision.

“Give me a break. Of course we’ve got frickin’ soul.”

More than a quarter of a century into their career, Dream Theater – completed by bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Mangini – are both flag-bearers and whipping boys for modern prog. When they put out their first album, 1989’s When Dream And Day Unite, these academically trained virtuosos were pitched as ‘Rush meets Metallica’.

Somewhere along the way they became bigger than anyone expected – at least anyone other than themselves. Guitarist Petrucci – the man whose heart his bandmate LaBrie says plugs directly into his strings – recalls the band practising in the basement of a butcher’s shop in the early days, and giving music lessons to make ends meet. In January 2014, they play some of the country’s bigger venues, including a Valentine’s Day engagement at the 10,000-capacity Wembley Arena.

These days, this most unfashionable of bands have an army behind them: a massed rank of people disenfranchised from, or bored with, most modern music. This army is mostly male, many of them aspirant musicians, all of whom couldn’t give a flying polychord about trends or fashion.

“There’s a part of me that thinks: ‘We won,’” says Petrucci, who co-founded the band while a student at the Berklee College Of Music in Massachusetts in the mid-80s. “It was an uphill battle for years, people telling us: ‘Your songs are too long.’ ‘You don’t know how to write music.’ All these different things. Talk about coming a long way.”

They’re an old-school band in a lot of respects. They tour like demons, relying on word of mouth rather than media. Their last three albums have all climbed into the US Top 10 and the UK Top 20. But since 1992’s Pull Me Under, an MTV hit in the long-gone days when that channel still played music, they’ve not had a sniff of TV or radio airplay. Despite their success, you get the sense it grates with some of them.

“People hear the name Dream Theater and they can’t believe there would be any elements of our music, even parts of bigger songs, that would be viable for radio,” says LaBrie, without any bitterness. “There’s always been one or two songs on any given record of ours that would be suitable for radio. You can’t have a song like [2009’s] Wither and say that’s not radio-friendly.”

But talk to them further and there’s a degree of mixed messaging. In 1997, when then-label EastWest foisted Bon Jovi associate and superstar hitmaker Desmond Child on them to work on a song for their album Falling Into Infinity, there was nearly mutiny in the ranks.

“I just thought: ‘What the hell is this?’ We’re not a frickin’ radio singles band,” says LaBrie. “We fluked out with Pull Me Under. That’s not meant to happen.”

It certainly hasn’t happened since. But, despite that, they’ve amassed an army of devotees who ardently follow every note, every micro-tonal keyboard run, every 13/8 time signature. It’s turned them into one of the biggest cult bands on the planet.

Put it to LaBrie, Petrucci and Rudess, and they all come up with different answers. For the singer, it’s simply a matter of “relentless touring, constantly wrapping ourselves around the globe”. For Jordan Rudess, it’s down to “the emotion behind the music – a lot of other prog-metal bands, they try too hard. It gets very academic.”

For John Petrucci, it’s down to the fact that their music is a lightning rod for what he calls “a certain kind of person”.

“We were those kids who were listening to Rush and Yes and Metallica at high school,” he says, “and so we were doing it for ourselves when we started. Then we realised that there were like-minded people into the same thing everywhere – they love progressive music, they love metal, they love guitar, they love playing, they love the gear, the tone. And they connect not only to the music but also to the ideals of musicianship and that whole thing we’re into.”

The uncool kids, basically.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Which makes Dream Theater uncool.

“[Laughing] Oh, we’re definitely an uncool band. I have no problem with that.”

Petrucci has a theory, which is that his band’s continued success is partly down to the explosion of videogames such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band a few years ago.

“You’d have all these young kids playing a videogame based on guitar playing and drumming, where the more notes you play, the better you are; the better you are, the higher your score; the higher your score, the more you’re respected. And what kind of music is that associated with? Technical, progressive music.”

The more notes you play, the better you are, the more you’re respected. Sound familiar? It’s exactly what Dream Theater have been doing for the last 25 years.

Dream Theater haven’t had it all their own way. The years either side of Falling Into Infinity were, by general consensus, rough. They were at loggerheads with their label, on the verge of breaking from their management and getting through keyboard players like shit through a goose – a dire predicament for any prog band. Thinking back to that period is enough for James LaBrief to break his no-swearing rule, albeit with characteristic politeness. “It was,” he sighs, “a clusterfuck, may I say.”

Things weren’t helped by an increasingly strained relationship between LaBrie and drummer Mike Portnoy. The latter was instrumental in recruiting the singer in 1992, after they got rid of original vocalist Charlie Dominci, and the pair initially enjoyed a good relationship. But things went downhill when LaBrie ruptured his vocal cords after getting food poisoning in Cuba in the mid-90s. Matters didn’t get any better over the next few years.

“The band came close to ending when we were touring [on the back of] Falling Into Infinity,” says LaBrie. “Mike, at the time, was drinking a lot, and there were other substances, so we weren’t seeing eye to eye. There were a lot of arguments. We could see the whole thing crumbling.”

That it stayed together is testament to their will to succeed, though even now the shadow of Mike Portnoy looms large over the band he co-founded. The drummer quit the band under confused and confusing circumstances just over three years ago, leaving a bitter taste in his bandmates’ mouths. While Petrucci and Rudess have since spoken to Portnoy – the former by email, the latter at a gig by one of his side-projects in Philadelphia – LaBrie hasn’t spoken to him since the day he left.

What would you say if you bumped into him in the street?

“‘What’s up?’” LaBrie says with the enthusiasm of a man who’s just been told he’s got to wank a tramp and clear up the mess with his own sleeve. “I’d say that… and that’s it. I’ve moved on. Mike had a hard time accepting my struggles as a vocalist when I was having problems, but that doesn’t mean I have any animosity towards the guy. What am I gonna do? Give him a shot in the head?”

It says something about a band when the biggest talking point is their drummer leaving. Or maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe by avoiding the clichés of sex, drugs and everything but the odd bust-up, Dream Theater set themselves apart from everyone else. Maybe sometimes it has to be about the music and just the music, and all the other stuff that comes with it is irrelevant.

“I never got involved in drugs and shit like that,” LaBrie says emphatically. “I love my drink, but I don’t drink when we go touring. I’d go out there and get frickin’ sloshed and party.”

When pushed, Jordan Rudess – at 57 the oldest member of Dream Theater – will admit to the influence of psychedelic drugs when he was a younger man.

“When I was learning to play the synthesiser, it was in the days when people were taking acid and seeing that side of things,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t help me understand what creating sounds is all about. I used that as my education, if you will. But the reality is that to play the music of Dream Theater, I couldn’t do it now. I couldn’t be on stage, tripping. I can imagine John Petrucci’s face, like, ‘What the hell are you doing?!’”

You can’t help wishing that Dream Theater had more of that experimental edge to them. No one is arguing that their music isn’t complex and musically dazzling. But when Jordan Rudess – like his bandmates, a very nice man – uses the words ‘wild’ and ‘crazy’ to describe Dream Theater’s music, it’s hard to suppress a laugh. But then prog is the ultimate form of music as academia – and in that respect it’s the exact opposite of everything rock’n’roll was built on.

John Petrucci: “With progressive rock, even the subject matter… it’s not about relationships or sex. It’s not like rock’n’roll, where there’s some debauchery. It’s definitely more conservative. At the same time, and I will say this, it is rock, it is metal, there is a rock’n’roll element to what we do.”

A lot of bands who are saddled with the ‘prog’ tag run a mile from it. Is that Dream Theater?

Petrucci: “I love it. I think it’s perfect.”

But what is modern prog? Are bands like Dream Theater really moving things forward? Aren’t you just rearranging the notes that have been played before, prettying them up a bit, then dragging it all out to 20-odd minutes a time?

Petrucci: “Whenever we write something, there’s always the mentality of trying to do something unique. We’re trying to express a musical thought.”

Rudess: “I guess the argument is that there are only twelve notes. That’s the problem if you’re using the Western scale. You’re somewhat limited.”

You do have to hand it to Dream Theater: they know they’re a polarising band, and they don’t duck the issue.

“I have a thick skin at this point in my career,” says Petrucci. “And since social media, you can see exactly what people are thinking at any given moment. And it’s not always good.”

Okay, so why do you think certain people don’t like you?

“I just think the music isn’t their cup of tea,” says LaBrie, reasonably. “It’s all down to what you want. Do you just want to bang your frickin’ head? Well, you might be able to do that here and there with some songs, but it’s going to be a shock to the system when we start going into the more progressive and complicated areas of our music.”

It’s at this point that the singer brings up the idea of soul. More specifically, the fact that some people might think they’re lacking on that front. He sounds riled at the thought. “I hear people say that there’s no feeling to our music,” says LaBrie. “That there’s no spirit. That we’re just a bunch of self-indulgent musicians.”

Can you see why people might think that, though?

“No. Go listen to The Count Of Tuscany. It shows all the subtleties and intensities of the band, the soul and spirit, as well as the complexities. Saying we have no soul is so frickin’… erroneous.”

In the name of research, I spend a whole weekend listening to Dream Theater’s back catalogue, chronologically, album by album, in order to try to fathom out what they’re about and seek out the soul which LaBrie talks about. While I wouldn’t recommend repeating the experience, it does throw up some surprises. Among the cold, hard musicianship, there are several moments where they sound like a proper rock’n’roll band, one where their ability serves the song, not the other way round. Sometimes these are whole songs, like Wither; more often they’re parts of bigger, more indigestible tracks, like Illumination Theory, the centrepiece of last year’s self-titled album. But actual, true soul? I’ll get back to you on that one.

But then what I think doesn’t really matter. Dream Theater have spent a quarter of a century rallying the prog-metal troops to their flag. And they’ve done it without anyone’s permission.  Even if you hate ’em – and there are a lot of people who do – you have to respect ’em for that.

“We’ve been under the radar,” says Petrucci. “That’s allowed us to have a long career and not just die out after one album.”

“It’s been on our own terms,” says LaBrie. “It’s what we want to do. The day we look at each other and go: ‘We’ve had enough’, that’s they day we’ll pull back and go away.

Dream Theater don’t need soul. Not when they’ve got an army behind them.

Originally published in Classic Rock 193