Liquid Tension Experiment – Part 1

Interview with Mike on the whole Liquid Tension Experience.

How did the project come about?

Well, there’s about 4 pages of liner notes inside of Liquid Tension so...you don’t need me to rehash it; anybody that has the album can read the liner notes and know exactly what the hell happened!

But for those who haven’t got it, or cannot get it, a very very brief synopsis on how it came about.

Okay, very brief. The brief synopsis is that Magna Carta Records in America approached me about putting together my ‘dream’ band, and doing an instrumental album. So basically the long and short of it, as you can read in the liner notes, is that I gave them a wish list of people I would like to work with: the two bass players were Billy Sheehan and Tony Levin. The two keyboard players were Jordan Rudess and Jens Johansson. The guitar list had about 20 people on it: everybody from Brian May to Trevor Rabin to the guy from Rage Against the Machine. It was a big long list. Basically, Billy was available, Jens was available, but we could get a guitar player! Finally, months later, our availabilities went out of the window, the whole project was put on the shelf, and six months later Magna Carta came back to me, and tried to get it rolling again. It turned out this time that Tony and Jordan were available, and we still couldn’t find a guitar player, so finally I put my ego to the side and asked John to do it. I wanted to keep it separate from Dream Theater, but it worked out best in the long run, because John ended up being a really good part of it. And believe it or not, that’s the short version!

How was it decided amongst the four of you where you wanted to take this project musically?

Originally, we all wanted to go completely and spontaneously improvised, with nothing but jams. There’s a song on the album called Three Minute Warning which is like a 28 minute jam. So our idea was to do the whole album that way: don’t preconceive any single riffs; hit record and for a couple of days just go for it. But Magna Carta was really nervous about that; they wanted some songs. So what we did is left it open and got together one day at my house, just for one rehearsal, and threw some ideas out so that we would have some concrete licks and riffs to work with. So, that first day we ended coming up with skeletons for three songs: Paradigm Shift, Kindred Spirits and Universal Mind. We had the skeletons of songs to work with, and then left the element of spontaneity open for a lot of the songs like Three Minute Warning, Chris And Kevin’s Excellent Adventure, and The Stretch. Those were improvised, and also as a back-up, I chose two songs for us to cover; so in the worst case scenario, if we didn’t have enough material, we could always do two covers. We were going to do Peaches En Regalia by Frank Zappa and Egyptian Dancer by Al DiMeola. So we had those on the back burner in case we needed them, and it turned out that we ended up having 75 minutes so we didn’t even need the covers.

When you finally got into the studio, did you and the other guys have other bits written to use as on the tracks, or was it again just basic ideas and go for it?

We just went for it. We knew we had 3 or 4 concrete songs to work with, we focused on those first, and the first or second day we ended up having the jam which turned into Three Minute Warning, so we knew right off the bat that we wanted to include that. So that knocked a half-hour off of it – the writing process.

There are some very Zappa-ish sounds and changes in there.

A lot of that is probably Jordan, because he plays with a lot of xylophone and clavinet sort of sounds on his keyboards, so that has a lot of that sound.

Also the wacky off the wall pieces.

Yeah, the ending of Universal Mind is very like that.

Paradigm Shift has some savage guitar work, and also some exotic keyboards, Jordan really plays some wonderful pieces and textures throughout the album.

There’s a lot of things that people probably won’t even realize that are keyboards, like the beginning of Osmosis begins with all these percussion sounds, that’s all Jordan, not me. Other parts like on The Stretch, I saw some people saying it has a great guitar solo in it, but John doesn’t play on that – it’s all Jordan. He’s not only doing keyboard sounds, but he’s doing bass sounds, guitar sounds, percussion sounds, he’s one of those all around type of keyboard players.

The album contains many different musical styles: jazz, funk, blues and the obvious rock elements. Was it good to move away from the more basic rock sounds?

That was one thing that was really nice for me and John, was to be able to completely stretch out and do whatever the hell we wanted. Cause within Dream Theater, yes there’s a certain amount of independence and we’ve established this band to a certain level of being able to do anything we want, but realistically, there is a certain commercial sense we have to maintain within Dream theater. We’re responsible for creating music and songs that can sustain our career. Through the years we’ve concentrated on songwriting in Dream Theater, and the fun thing with Liquid Tension was that we were able to totally disregard that entirely and throw it out the window; we didn’t have to worry about a single element of commerciality whatsoever. That was fun; we hadn’t had that freedom in a while.

There’s a bit of Kansas in Universal Mind, funky jazz sounds in The Stretch, and Osmosis conjures up, for me anyway, a tropical rain forest feel along the lines of Apocalypse Now!

Osmosis is very Tony. That’s all his. When we were doing that, we felt like we were playing with Peter Gabriel! When doing that you could totally hear Tony’s influence in Peter’s writing, and it does have that. In Dream Theater we will try to create a Peter Gabriel vibe. On ‘Falling Into Infinity’ we were listening to ‘So’ a couple of times, and we would try, be it Lines In The Sand, or Take Away My Pain, there were a couple of moments in making ‘FII’ where we were trying to get that Gabriel vibe. We did it to a certain extent, then when we were doing this and playing Osmosis with Tony, it’s like “WOW!” You don’t get more authentic with a Gabriel vibe than this; this is the man that’s created all those bass lines.

The album is very easy to listen to, and has a lot of movie soundtrack-type sounds to it as well.

That’s probably because it’s instrumental. Dream Theater could have very well made a similar album. Three Minute Warning – this half hour jam session – Dream Theater’s done that millions of times; I have so many tapes of us at rehearsal just going right off jamming.

Who are Chris and Kevin, and what was there adventure?

That’s mine and Tony’s duet. When we were doing the photo sessions for the inside of the booklet, for some reason the photographer kept calling me “Chris”, and kept calling Tony “Kevin”. He did it several times, so finally looking for a title for the duet, I suggested that.

Any chance of live shows off the back of it? Time being the factor.

Obviously the Dream Theater schedule is priority, inevitably DT has down time, and would love to do it. One obstacle is that when DT is down, people understandably want to spend time with their families, but we’ve talked about it, we’d like to do it. And as you know Derek and John M have done a side project, so to me, the ultimate would be a Liquid Tension and a Platypus tour; with something like that, we could play in all different formations: Jordan and Rod could do some songs together, Platypus could do some songs, Liquid Tension could do some and Dream Theater instrumentally could do some – the possibilities are endless. That’s my dream tour.

I can give you the inside scoop on Three Minute Warning. Well, Tony just wanted to jam and improvise, so for some of the songs it was really me, John and Jordan spending time arranging and constructing them. Tony wasn’t interested in writing; he just wanted to perform, improvise and play. So towards the end of the session, we were working on doing some proper writing, and Tony just got very impatient. It was about 7-8 at night, and he said: “Look, no offense, but if we’re not gonna jam in the next three minutes, I’m out of here. See you guys tomorrow – you carry on writing.” So he gave us a three minute warning and we put the song to the side and hit the record button, and what you hear is what happened.