Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Similarly, Fish’s first solo record, 1989’s Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors, contains material that the band had been working on prior to his exit. “If Vigil and Seasons End had been combined in one album, it would have been an incredible,” says Fish. “But you have to look at the time—it was 1988. We ... started writing in May 1988. I left the band in September and didn’t finish writing the Vigil album until June the following year [1989]. We never would have been able to take that much time to write another album with Marillion. Both parties were forced to work the way they did.”

  Some will debate what ranks as Marillion’s post-Fish pinnacle. They’ll point to the concept album Brave; Anoraknophobia for its eleven-minute centerpiece “This Is the 21st Century” (an ode to the mysteries of life); Marillion.com because of its use of recording technology to create such varied music as the dub/reggae track “House”; Holidays in Eden for its flirtation with pop music (“Splintering Heart,” “The Party,” “No One Can,” “Cover My Eyes”); This Strange Engine (album cut “Estonia” hints at the Mediterranean romanticism of the Italian progressive rock, while “Memory of Water” bridges epic rock and electronica); Seasons End, which features crowd-pleasers “The Uninvited Guest” (about global warming) and “Easter”; 2004’s double album Marbles for its Eastern-flavored grandness (“You’re Gone,” Marillion’s first Top 10 single in Britain since “Incommunicado” in 1987; “Fantastic Place”; “The Invisible Man”; the symphonic-soul arena rock of “Neverland”; and “Ocean Cloud,” dedicated to sea voyager Don Allum, the first man to row the Atlantic in both directions); 2007’s Somewhere Else (on which the song “Faith” recalls the melody and acoustic guitar work of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and the Mellotron flutes of “Strawberry Fields”); or 2008’s Happiness Is the Road, a 110-minute double-disc set that sees the band experimenting, once again, with atmosphere and odd instrumentation, such as glockenspiel, harmonium, zither, and dulcimer. Virtually none of these records sound like the 1980s version of Marillion.

  Script for a Jester’s Tear (1983)

  Fugazi (1984)

  Misplaced Childhood (1985)

  Clutching at Straws (1987)

  B’Sides Themselves (1988)

  Less is More (2009)

  Afraid of Sunlight (1995)

  Afraid of Sunlight is one of the more coherent albums in Marillion’s post-’80s catalog, which struck upon what prog rock had always strived for: a blend of soulful melodies, sonic expansiveness, rock’s energy, and European symphonic influences.

  Fans clutch tightly to nostalgia, hoping for a time when Fish will return to Marillion. But this seems unlikely. Fish warns that, for various reasons, a reunion tour “just has never happened.”

  “I am totally independent now, and it’s great,” says Fish, who says he has faced some serious financial burdens since going solo. (Circa 2000, the Fellini Days album period, Fish says he was more than “nine hundred thousand pounds in debt.”) “I don’t sign on for the fame and stardom stuff. It is just not me. So I am very grateful to have maintained a fan base. That was one of the reasons why I don’t get involved in sausage-machine album writing. There are some people out there who think they have to make an album every twelve months and people will buy it no matter what because they’re fans. I don’t take that approach. If I’m going to do something, it has to be at least as good as what I did before.”

  (Mick Hutson/Getty Images)

  DREAM THEATER

  The Soul of Prog?

  HERE’S A BAND THAT SURELY SITS BETWEEN MODERN AND postmodern while presenting a strange and intriguing dilemma. They synthesize the various aspects that made Yes, Genesis, ELP, Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, Queensrÿche, Pink Floyd, Dixie Dregs, Metallica, and Rush such successes (individual technical prowess, a command of odd times, the willingness to expand song form in the pop arena) while injecting venom, adrenaline, and a certain musical athleticism into their craft.

  It should be noted that Dream Theater suffers from bias on some level as being perceived as a “music school” band. There is some truth in this, however. “I went to Berklee after high school,” guitarist John Petrucci told the author in 2001. “[Bassist] John Myung, who I grew up with, went to Berklee too, and where we met [drummer] Mike [Portnoy]. He was from Long Beach, Island], and that was the core of the band when it started in 1985.”

  Keyboardist Kevin Moore, who’d known Myung and Petrucci from is childhood days in Kings Park, New York, had attended SUNY Fredonia in western New York in the 1980s, where he studied music. When he left Fredonia to come back to Long Island, he hooked up with Portnoy, Myung, and Petrucci to form the band Majesty: The name was reportedly inspired by Portnoy’s description of the climax to the Rush song “Bastille Day” as “majestic.”

  “We have known each other for a long time,” says Fates Warning guitarist Jim Matheos. “I first met Mike when Fates Warning was playing on Long Island back in 1986 or 1987 on the Awaken the Guardian tour and Mike was out in the audience. I guess he was a big fan and after the show he gave me a Majesty tape with his phone number on it. I went home and listened to it and I was just blown away by it. We became friends and have stayed friends.”

  The modern prog supergroup, Liquid Tension Experiment. Left to right: Jordan Rudess, Mike Portnoy, Tony Levin, and John Petrucci. (Courtesy of Magna Carta Records)

  Majesty then recruited singer Chris Collins, but when he proved inadequate for the vocalist job, he parted ways with the band. After a year of auditions, Majesty found Brooklyn singer Charlie Dominici, who joined the band just before it changed its name to Dream Theater after answering an ad that ran in (as Dominici recalls) The Island Ear, a Long Island music paper. Before long, the band hit the club scene as Majesty—blowing the crowd away with its prowess and volume.

  Chroma Key: You Go Now (2000)

  “As Majesty, the crowd always loved us,” says Dominici. “The gigs were fun, but I always had to contend with the volume onstage. I had a hard time hearing myself above the band.”

  Pumping up the volume appeared to work, in any case. Majesty had gained a small following and even impressed competing and friendly bands alike on the Long Island–New York City live music circuit. So much so that there was a complaint: The name Majesty was already being used by a Nevada-based band.

  “It was Mike’s dad who gave us the name Dream Theater,” Dominici remembers. “It was the name of a movie house [in California]. We all liked the name because it was very suggestive and also just sounded pretty cool.”

  Dream Theater continued to perform the New York area clubs until they got a break. “Chuck Lenihan, a guitarist formerly of the Long Island hardcore band Crumbsuckers, also of the Genitorturers, knew of us, and that led us to getting signed to Mechanic/MCA,” says Dominici. “He told the label about us and they came to one of our rehearsals. They signed us pretty much immediately.”

  Before long, Dream Theater’s debut, When Day and Dream Unite, was released, and there was little doubt that the band had patterned themselves after the Dixie Dregs, Iron Maiden, Rush, and Yes.

  On one hand you could say that Dream Theater are an outgrowth of white-boy music run amok: pure headbanging adrenaline featuring shredding but little soul. There’s a feeling floating out there (and quite insulting it is) that middle-class white kids—especially middle-class white kids from Long Island—have no life experience to draw from, so one of the ways they can excel in music is to become technical wizards, nothing more.

  On the other and, they, as progressives had before them, soared where angels fear to tread. Hearing current vocalist James LaBrie sing is a bit like experiencing Otis Rush’s guitar playing—it’s so brash, dramatic, even passionate, and yet so strident at the same time, it slices your brain. These are great (and very different) talents—you have to be prepared to fully appreciate them.

  SCENES FROM A MEMORY

  Sensing his voice and songwriting approach weren’t appropriate for Dream Theater’s ever-increasing musical aggressivenes
s, Dominici exited the band. Dream Theater then recruited a new lead singer, James LaBrie, who’d worked with prog metal band Fates Warning as a guest vocalist on the song “Life in Still Water” for the band’s 1991 breakthrough record, Parallels. On the strength of LaBrie’s booming, almost operatic vibrato, and the band’s new material, Dream Theater were signed to the Atco label (a division of Atlantic Records), releasing their sophomore record, Images and Words, in 1992. (Gentle Giant’s Derek Shulman, then an executive at Atco, signed the band.)

  The song “Pull Me Under” reached the Top 10 of the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and saw rotation on MTV; other songs from Images and Words such as “Another Day” and “Take the Time” fell within the Top 30 on the same chart the following year. The album itself reached the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, climbing to number sixty-one, and the Heatseekers chart in 1992, landing at number two.

  Though the band’s two subsequent studio records, Awake and Falling into Infinity, reached higher chart positions on the Billboard Top 200 (thirty-two and fifty-two, respectively), Images and Words, which plays like a loosely held-together concept record (revolving around the idea of eternity and the passage of this world to the next), is seen, rightly so, as the band’s commercial breakthrough, even peak. Images and Words stands as the only record that has gone gold in the U.S. Like Yes’s “Roundabout” or Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” Dream Theater’s “Pull Me Under” is perhaps best remembered as a defining moment for a progressive band that more often than not only flirted with pop music success.

  Rush references abound in the Dream Theater universe. Even as late as 2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings, the band dabbled in Rush tribute in “The Count of Tuscany.”

  “Mike Portnoy is so in love with the idea of constructing drum parts,” says Paul Northfield, who engineered 2007’s Systematic Chaos and 2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings. “At a certain point, drummers who love Neil, what they like about Neil is that his performances gave them something to aim for. It is much harder to play like [session drummer] Steve Gadd, in my opinion, because... to play like Steve Gadd you almost have to be Steve Gadd. Sometimes it’s about the push and pull and the feel. Unless you can go back to Steve Gadd’s influences and learn to love the music he loves, you won’t capture that feel. Neil offered complicated drum parts that they could learn.”

  Flash forward to 2004. Dream Theater opened for Yes at an outdoor arena in New York and I noticed something startling: A group of middle-aged men—they took up half a row of seats—were knocked out by Dream Theater’s performance. They were so amazed that when Yes came out they exited promptly. These guys were old enough to remember Yes the first time around and yet appeared more excited about Dream Theater. There was certainly something more than meets the eye about Dream Theater.

  Not long after the band’s tour with Yes, I asked Yes guitarist Steve Howe to comment on Dream Theater’s appeal. “I’ve probably heard them more than the other guys, because when I get to a gig, I usually stay there,” Howe said in 2005. “I don’t leave, go to the hotel room and come back again in a fleet of limos. I’ve heard them... and sure, they have made some very heavy records at times, but what they did on our tour was try to accommodate a Yes audience—tried to please them as much as they pleased themselves. They did a nice set, I feel. In there was the drama and individual prowess of each individual member, and I think that is what the progressives were good at, like ELP were... and Yes were... trying to show off that side.”

  And there was no drum solo that reminded the writer of Neil Peart—that was long gone. While Dream Theater are still impacted by Rush, the band has worked hard to develop their own vision. Portnoy, in particular, has worked to develop his own style.

  “Neil [Peart] is in many respects more meticulous,” says Northfield, who worked with Rush on classic albums such as Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures. “Mike is a true obsessive-compulsive, as he would freely admit, and he is first of all a music fan. He likes to do things quickly and off the cuff, and he has phenomenal technique and just sort of blasts through things effortlessly, which is his strength.”

  Nineteen ninety-nine’s Scenes from a Memory and the subsequent Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (2002) are dense and dark. It isn’t hard to respect a band that has (with the exception of the crossover attempt Falling into Infinity) taken a stance to steer clear of commercial music.

  Dream Theater have brought the audience to them, not the other way around. I asked Portnoy prior to the release of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (a double record with one disc dedicated to a single song) about criticisms of the band going commercial.

  “My God!” raved Portnoy from Frankfurt, Germany, where he was on tour with supergroup Transatlantic, in mid-November 2001. “If an album [composed] of a forty-minute song is an attempt to be more accessible, then we are the luckiest band in the world. I mean, we have done things on our own terms this time around. In the past we probably have been accused of trying to go ‘accessible’ or scale down, maybe at the request of the record company or pressures from the outside industry. I think this album is a very brave step in the opposite direction.”

  Against the odds, there’s little this band can’t accomplish, thanks to a sense of determination, which has helped propel them throughout the years. Dream Theater, as its name suggests, had once envisioned (as aspiring unknowns) themselves as a band that would tour the world, play uncompromising music similar to the progressive rock and metal of the band’s youth, and stay true to their ideals.

  Mike Portnoy is a goal-driven individual intent on achieving certain benchmarks that seem to appear (to some) as the prerequisites for rock “awesomeness.” Through tribute bands to the Who, the Beatles (Yellow Matter Custard), and Rush (during the tour to support 2002’s Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Dream Theater even dedicated part of their live show to cover Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast and Metallica’s Master of Puppets); his side projects such OSI (with Kevin Moore and Fates Warning’s Jim Matheos), Liquid Tension Experiment (Tony Levin, John Petrucci, Jordan Rudess, Portnoy) and Liquid Tension Trio (no Petrucci); as well as his willingness to perform with a number of other artists (the supergroup Transatlantic being one of them), Portnoy seems to be the soul, one of the driving creative forces of Dream Theater, possessing a lot of energy—like an excitable kid, who’s hit upon the most amazing luck by landing in a rock band. He’s also a kind of managing editor of Dream Theater.

  Transatlantic: SMPT:E (2000)

  “He is,” confirms keyboardist Jordan Rudess, who joined Dream Theater in 1999. “He lives for rock ‘n’ roll and this business, and has a tremendous perspective on so many things that are involved in being a rock band.... He’s into making set lists and goals and recording albums and concept albums. It is his life. By playing in the tribute bands, all his fantasies come true. He just loves the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles. That is one of his talents—to bring things into reality, as he did with this band.”

  “How do I deal with Portnoy?” asks Portnoy’s bandmate in Transatlantic and former Spock’s Beard singer/keyboardist/main songwriter Neal Morse. “Do you mean, ‘Where does the three-hundred-pound gorilla sleep?’ Mike is very New York, energetic, and has a lot of force to his opinions. It’s a different experience working with everyone. I think it’s interesting that everybody in Transatlantic reflects the stereotype of his native land. Mike is loud. [laughs] You really see what a product you are of where you’re born.”

  “He always has a million things going on and a million ideas in his head,” explains Fates Warning’s Jim Matheos, who was initially tapped as the guitarist for Transatlantic but had to back out due to scheduling conflicts. “A lot of ideas. He gets really passionate about stuff, especially in the studio. He really gets into a part and into what he’s recording. I love that about him.”

  Portnoy certainly makes things happen. In 1998, he called Morse about the possibility of forming a new band project. After Matheos bowed out, Morse suggested
the Flower Kings guitarist/vocalist/head honcho Roine Stolt, and Portnoy invited Marillion bassist Pete Trewavas, and this supergroup was born.

  Transatlantic’s 2000 debut, SMPT:E, contains some of the most ambitious (and melodic) material any of the members’ respective bands had ever recorded. And it was Portnoy who’d helped to stretch the elongated first song on the debut—a six-part thirty-minute dynamic opus with a big glorious major musical theme, titled “All of the Above”—to its very limits.

  “I remember that very moment when we were recording that, and it was the very first song we recorded,” says Stolt. “We were in a studio in upstate New York [Millbrook Studios] and we [had] just met. We were putting together this song within the first two days, listening to pieces, and rehearsing pieces and then recording another section and then stopping the recorder and rehearsing some more and doing another piece. Basically, we were recording and writing at the same time. We were building it bit by bit.

  “By the time we were reaching the end of the song,” Stolt continues, “there’s a big guitar solo and a crescendo—a final ending—and after that I just kept doing some guitar soundscapes with lots of echoes and delays. This was going on for maybe a minute or two and the rest of the band had already stopped. Mike was getting up from the drum kit and looking at his watch saying, ‘Keep going. Keep going. We’re trying to pass the-thirty minute mark, because I’ve never recorded a song like this before.’ He really tried to push it. The longer the better, he thought. We even have it on tape. I did a mix of the album, too, and I think on my mix I kept all of [his talking]. I tried to push up the overhead microphones for the drums because I could hear Mike saying, ‘Keep going. This is awesome.”’