Majesty Demos liner notes

Once upon a time...

In September of 1985, 2 boys from Kings Park, Long Island (John Petrucci and John Myung) and a boy from Long Beach, Long Island (yours truly) left to go to college at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Within the first week or two of school, the two Johns saw me jamming in a practice room and introduced themselves. Besides having a common home-base, we had similar taste in music and a common vision of music that we could create together.

We loved progressive complex music (Rush, Yes, The Dixie Dregs, Frank Zappa) and also loved heavy music (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Queensrÿche).

To us it wasn’t some magical, scientific formula that would change the world... it was just 3 college kids jamming for the fun of jamming. Trying to fill a void for ourselves as fans to create the kind of music we’d want to listen to.

Playing a lot of notes, a lot of odd time signatures, heavy riffs, busy playing, the focus always being on the instrumentalists... this was what we were into.

The fact that I can sit here 18 years later and still be playing with these 2 guys and the fact that we actually “did something” with this outrageous, over the top music is absolutely astounding to me! The memories we’ve created and the road we’ve traveled between then and now is a very long one... one that is still being built... and to try and share them in a simple liner note is impossible. But maybe through this new series of CD’s, spanning our whole career and taken from my extensive archives, we can tell some of that story through the music...

The music on this very 1st edition is the very first music we ever created together. It is very raw (and sometimes even very embarrassing!) The audio quality is usually fair at best. We had very limited recording resources available to us at the time. In fact, we had only one resource at all: my trusty old Tascam 244 analog 4-track recorder that I received as a high school graduation present from my grandmother!

Back then, I was the only kid on the block that had one of these and making these very recordings was my/our first experience in home recordings/demos. So we were making it up as we went along!

I hope you can look past the occasional audio distraction and enjoy a glimpse of where we were at, what we were doing and where we were going...

Enjoy!

MP

1. Particle E. Motion

This is literally the very first thing I ever recorded on my 4-track. It was a little piece that John and John had that we used to experiment with breaking in my 4-track to see if we could figure out how to use the damn thing!

2. Another Won

This is where it all began ... the very first song the 3 of us ever wrote together! We sounded like 3 over the top, over-adrenalized musical animals just trying to squeeze in a million ideas into one song (not much has changed in 18 years!).

It is interesting to hear on these first batch of Berklee demos, how we sounded as a “power trio”. Once Kevin joined up with us months down the road, we would forever be a band with keyboards... but these early demos are so raw because it is only 3 of us.

3. The Saurus

Another opportunity to use the 4-track and throw an idea on tape. This one being a little guitar piece John had...

4. Cry For Freedom

Song #2 for the Berklee boys . Another interesting thing on these demos of us as a 3 piece band is how much of a lead instrument the bass is on these songs. John’s early Steve Harris, Geddy Lee and Billy Sheehan influence shining through very heavily.

And on that note, it’s also interesting how much the guitar is not predominant, but more chordal and Alex Lifeson influenced.

5. The School Song

Song #3 for us. This is one of those lost gems that got left behind... we never played this song beyond this version. It’s never existed with keyboards or vocals or was ever played live. In fact, this is the only song in our entire history that I can say that about...

The middle section is soooo Iron Maiden and there is a little bit in there as well that we nicked and later put into another lost gem to come in 1987 called “Resurrection Of Ernie” (but that’s another CD!)

6. YYZ

One of the things we would do all night long in rehearsals back then was jam Rush tunes. La Villa Strangiato, The Spirit of Radio and this one especially was a big one for us. This is what Rush probably would have sounded like if given 20 cups of coffee before a recording session! (and BTW – that’s me on keyboards!)

7. The Farandole

One of my favorite bands during this period (and JM’s as well for obvious reasons) was Billy Sheehan’s Talas. On their “Live Speed On Ice” album they did a rendition of this classical piece, so we decided to give it a whirl ourselves!

8. Two Far

Original song #4 for us. We wrote this when we went home for Christmas break and were joined by Kevin on keyboards for the first time, so this was his first musical collaboration with us. He doesn’t appear on this demo though, as we recorded it without him once we returned to Berklee in January.

9. Anti-Procrastination Song

Our rendition of the S.O.D. classic (weren’t they all?)

10. Your Majesty

Our first stab at writing a more straight ahead, commercial song. There always seems to be one of these in the bunch!

This track was resurrected 16 years later and played live in Paris in 2002 as a tribute to all of the members of the French Fan Club which bears this song’s name.

11-17. 7 Mini Guitar Songs

I guess our S.O.D. fix wasn’t enough! This is me and John having fun with the 4 track one night... It’s amazing how incredibly tight John can double track his guitar leads (and still is a master of that today!)

18-23. The 1986 Majesty Demo

This is the “famous” 1986 Majesty Demo.

Sometime in the spring of 1986, the 3 of us began this demo project. We were helped by 2 of our friends at Berklee, Paul Falcone and James Hull, who had a Tascam 246 4-track recorder. So we put them together to give us a whopping 8 tracks and set off to make a “real” (hahaha!) demo. We knew Kev was gonna be joining the band once school let out in May, and we were talking with a singer that the guys knew from back home, Chris Collins, that was into singing with us.

We had a tape of Chris singing “Queen of the Reich” from a band he was previously in and we were in AWE of how perfectly he could hit those Geoff Tate notes!!! (unfortunately, it turned out that was about all he could do!!) But I remember me and the 2 John’s listening to this tape of Chris over and over and over and being soooo psyched... this is OUR singer!!!!

Anyways while still at Berklee, the 3 of us wrote 3 more songs: the heavy and progressive “March of the Tyrant” and 2 more ballad-esque songs, “Vital Star” and the 11 minute epic power ballad “A Vision” (which I still think has some really beautiful moments, not to mention an AMAZING guitar solo)

Armed with all of this material and a complete line-up waiting for us when we returned home, we began tracking the basic drum, guitar and bass tracks at Berklee and then when school finished in May, we joined up with Kevin and Chris at home and added them to the tracks.

Once again, my grandmother (bless her lovely heart) came through in the clutch and fronted us the money we needed to press up 1000 cassettes of this demo and we were on our way!

We started playing live shows throughout the summer of 1986, and began selling the tape at the shows and distributing it wherever we could. I was sending them to all of the hard rock and metal magazines from around the world in hopes of getting write-ups and in turn getting mail/requests from people interested in hearing it.

We were written up favorably in Germany’s Rock Hard magazine which sparked a lot of interest and mail for us at the time... and I was giving the tape to any other musicians I could come in contact with. (In fact, that is how our relationship with our friends Fates Warning began, as I had given Jim Matheos a tape at one of their shows and he called me the very next day to say how much he loved it!)

After playing live all summer long, it soon became apparent to us that Chris Collins wasn’t going to work out and we decided to let him go and begin looking for a new vocalist. (A trend that would plague us for the first 5 or 6 years of our career)...

Which leads us to our next chapter...

Coming soon to Ytsejam Records!