Dream Theater’s Extended Run

“There’s almost a prejudice,” guitarist John Petrucci concedes.

He’s talking about Dream Theater, the contemporary prog-rock band that’s constantly compared to bands whose heydays were in the ‘70s. Bands like Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Rush. Bands given to lofty themes, grandiose arrangements and epic songs featuring dollops of instrumental strutting. Case in point: Dream Theater’s new “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” a two-CD set whose six tracks include a seven-part, 42-minute, disc-long suite on mental illness and 14 minutes of “The Great Debate,” possibly the first pop song about stem cell research.

After 16 years, Petrucci says, “our staying power sometimes means getting lumped in with something that happened already a long time ago and isn’t happening now. We’re in a very weird position, for so many reasons.

“One is that the style of music that we’re playing is just not popular,” he explains, noting that Dream Theater has a larger following in Europe and Japan than here at home. “We’re a heavy metal-rock type of band, which never really goes out of style but changes a bit, so in one way we’re normal.

“But we have this style that’s not in vogue, where we’re playing 42-minute songs and having long solo breaks and improvs and cerebral lyrics, all these things that were more the style of Yes or Genesis or Pink Floyd. The combination that we do is probably an original thing, but it leaves us in this void where there’s not really a lot of music like that out there.”

Dream Theater’s sound is actually a meld of the progressive art-rock of the ‘70s and the equally progressive speed metal of ‘80s bands like Metallica and Megadeath. It’s music full of odd, shifting time signatures and complex rhythmic patterns, and the instrumental virtuosity required is abundant. That’s hardly surprising since three of the band’s founding members – Petrucci, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Portnoy – met as freshmen at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, while the newest member, keyboardist Jordan Rudess, is a Juilliard graduate.

“John and I grew up together and went to the same high school in Long Island,” Petrucci says. When he and Myung headed to Berklee in 1985, “one of our goals was to play with a lot of different people and ultimately to make it in the music business. We stumbled across Mike when we heard him playing in a practice room – when we looked through the window, he was wearing a Rush T-shirt and playing great. We got to talking to him and he happened to be from Long Island as well. We had all these common bands and interests and we really hit it off.”

So much so that regular curriculum courses occupied their days, and forming a band their nights.

“We were out of our minds,” Petrucci recalls. “You’d have to wait in line at 7 in the morning to reserve a room for that evening, so we’d take shifts and then practice every night. We realized after two semesters how demanding the school was and that we couldn’t do both, so we decided to do the band 100 percent and drop out. At 18, our parents weren’t too happy about that, but it worked out.”

Especially after the dropouts were all invited back to Berklee to teach master classes.

After finding another band had already trademarked its original name, Majesty, the group became Dream Theater, after a movie house offering art films and midnight madness. Their 1989 debut album, “When Dream and Day Unite,” barely made a ripple, but the tide started turning with the arrival of singer James LaBrie on 1992’s “Images and Words.” Things picked up even more when Rudess joined the band in 1998 after playing with Petrucci and Portnoy on a side project, Liquid Tension Experiment.

Aside from LaBrie’s soaring vocals, Dream Theater’s most distinctive sounds are the alternately interwoven, doubled and harmonized passages featuring Petrucci’s guitar and Rudess’s keyboards. Conservatory training – with Berklee jazz-focused, Juilliard classically oriented – has proven useful, according to Petrucci. “First, you have to technically be able to play the part yourself, otherwise the whole thing is screwed up. Then you have to be in sync, not just with Jordan but the whole band.”

In performance, Petrucci and Rudess relish extended displays of instrumental prowess, something of a lost art in today’s pop-driven short-form formats.

“Maybe it’s a Berklee thing, but I like to stretch out and improvise,” Petrucci says. “That’s what Zappa was doing and the Dead, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin – that’s the time when you can experiment and express yourself on the instrument. Is it self-indulgent? To a certain extent it is, but it’s also communication with people watching you and there’s a whole challenge to being able to do that live, on the spot. That’s very appealing to me. I don’t understand why that’s not in more music.”

Petrucci got a chance to do even more of that last year with the G3 tour that teamed him with rock guitar gods Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. Other band members have done solo projects – LaBrie’s recent “MullMuzzler 2” is his second album apart from the band, while Rudess followed up his solo debut, “Feeding the Wheel,” with session work on David Bowie’s upcoming album – but G3 was Petrucci’s first major step outside Dream Theater (though Portnoy tagged along on the drum kit).

“I’ve always been a guy in a band, and this was receiving recognition as an individual, which was a great feeling and experience for me,” Petrucci says. “Steve and Joe are both major influences on my playing, and it was great to be included in that circle.”

Particularly rewarding were the three-guitar jam finales featuring ZZ Top’s “La Grange” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” and “Little Wing.”

“That was awesome!” Petrucci gushes. “At our last show, we had four guitars when Steve Morse came up – I could have been done at that point.”

Early on, there was some thought about Dream Theater being a purely instrumental band, “but we felt you could only take something like that so far, and we had bigger aspirations,” Petrucci says. “You can’t just be a band full of chops and guys improvising – you’d be kind of limited. There have to be songs. All of my favorite bands, the reason people like those bands is because of the songs.”

While Dream Theater has yet to fully embrace that hoary collection of songs known as rock opera, they clearly favor the long form. Few of their songs clock in at less than 10 minutes, which is why their recent “Live Scenes From New York” concert album was a triple CD. That one got some media attention because it was released on Sept. 11 with a cover depicting a bombed out New York skyline with the twin towers and the Statue of Liberty in flames. At the band’s insistence, the set was immediately recalled and the artwork replaced.