When Scotty Met Charlie Part 1

After a chance meeting at Spreckels Theater in San Diego in March 1994 and with the help of Rich Wilson (writer of the in-progress Dream Theater biography) Scott Hansen was able to set up an interview with former DT vocalist Charlie Dominici (who coincidentally now lives in Scott’s hometown of San Diego!) They met for lunch earlier this year and afterwards Charlie took Scott back to his house to do the interview. What ensued was a conversation that amounted to close to three hours’ worth of material. We have decided to use this as the basis of a regular column, featuring snippets from the interview.

CD: I saw an ad in the paper and I was right in that limbo period when I was doing wedding and I was trying to write. And I was realizing that it wasn’t working; the weddings were affecting my mind and polluting my music a little and I needed something real. I hated the Frankie and the Knockouts thing – that was like a professional wedding band. There was a little ‘rock’ about it, but it wasn’t really me. The closest thing that I felt to being creative again (not that Dream Theater was my roots), was when I was in Dream Theater. I felt that the creative part of me was being able to express. And there was a lot of input that I had with the band. They had written a lot of the songs, some of them we wrote together, but a lot of the music was written already, and we kind of worked it together, and we tweaked it together. I added some parts and we wrote some lyrics together, and there were some musical parts, but for the most part, that first album came from the past I don’t know how many years, 5 years of writing for them. So when I joined the band, there was just some room for me to maybe add a little and add some parts which is why I got some credit as writer on most of the songs. I was given credit for co-writing but I didn’t sit down and write those songs with them from scratch. They had a lot of the stuff written. I got some credit for co-writing because either I worked on melodic lines and parts of the music or we wrote the lyrics together. The only song where I didn’t have anything at all to do with was Ytse Jam, so if you look at the writers’ credits, that’s the only one I’m not credited to writing. And there’s some where I added more than others, and we had a little discussion and decided it was only fair to say that I was co-writer on the stuff.

SH: I remember you touched on the fact that you suggested the whole guitar intro to The Killing Hand.

CD: Yeah, it was little things like that, but what I’m really trying to say in this interview is I’m trying to say that I have to come clean and say some people might think that I co-wrote and I didn’t co-write the music. I added some things here and there, and there were some songs where I actually added a little more; enough to say ‘well wow, you wrote some of the music.’ And there were others where I only added a little bit. I always wanted to clear that up, so people didn’t say ‘You’re trying to get credit for writing’. I added a lot of stuff but there were a lot of ideas I had that didn’t get used, but a lot of them did.

SH: Like what just out of curiosity? What were some of the things you wanted to suggest for adding to some of the songs that they decided against?

CD: It’s hard to pin-point stuff like that. I can only really remember the stuff that we did use. Like I know in Status Seeker when we were doing the music part, it was funny because Kevin got a kick out of the fact that I had musical knowledge, that theory knowledge. So Kevin and I had this funny little thing where when we would come into the studio to practice, Kevin would give me this music quiz. ‘Ok, what is this?’ [hums a part] and I’d be like ‘That’s a mixolydian mode’ and he’d be like ‘Ok, how about this?’ and try to stump me. ‘What’s the difference between this scale and this scale?’ [hums two scales] and I would tell him what the difference was musically, and he would say ‘How the hell do you know that s***?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know how I know that stuff... I don’t know.’ I didn’t go to school – in fact I dropped out of school. And we were doing Status Seeker and it starts out [hums the melody] and I remember a specific addition to that was I told Kev ‘Do it fully one time and then cut it in half and then kind of change the key’ where it almost changes key. So that was one of my additions. Being the musical guys that they are, musical – dare I say geniuses, but let’s say ‘well adept’ musicians – they could see when something is good, when it makes sense musically and when it improves. It’s a synergy, you know the whole equals more than the sum of its parts. So if you suggested something to them musically... and believe me, suggesting something musically to the guys in Dream Theater is like trying to stand next to Brad Pitt and say that I’m good looking, too! [laughs] There were times when they inspired me and they brought things out in me musically that were deep inside my musical psyche from back when my mom used to sing to me, from knowledge that was buried deep in me in a primal way. And I would be able to express it just because I was opening up creatively and we did a lot of stuff that way together.

We kind of glossed over what I first heard about the band...

Most of the time, you’d see ads in the paper that’s say stuff like ‘Band destine to make it, no a******s’. ‘A******s need not apply’. And I used to want to call them up and say ‘Yeah I’m calling about the ad... oh man, s***, it says no a******s – nevermind!’ The funniest one I ever saw was one that said ‘No alcoholes’. What’s an ‘alcohole’? [laughs] Something about their ad just struck me, so I called up and the guy that was managing them at the time met me on a rainy night at a gas station halfway, gave me a tape and it was that Majesty tape. And that tape was a little sloppy. I couldn’t tell if it was really great musicians that were young and weren’t there yet, or if it was a bunch of guys that have been playing for a long time and were never going to sound good. But somehow I heard that they were just reaching for something and they were almost getting it and it could be confused with sloppiness. Kind of like genius bordering on insanity, and it was there that I said ‘Yeah it’s just a really rough version of something really...’ I had never really heard anything like that before – it was really pretty new to me. So it took me a while to get down there to do the audition. I was busy with my wedding band and this and that, and I used to call up and go ‘Hey, I’m gonna come down and audition’ and Mike would be like ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, well we told you before, bring a PA and...’ ‘I ain’t bringing nothing. When you get a PA call me and I’ll come down and audition.’ They were teaching at the music store and I ran into John Myung one day, and he didn’t know who I was because I hadn’t met them yet. And I just walked up to him – I recognized him from the photos – and I started singing “Do you need the walls to spread apart?” you know, from Your Majesty... And John of course, he’d just look at you and shake his head like ‘You’re out dude.’ John and Kev were teaching at the music store. Finally, I don’t know how, I ended up, I brought my PA head down and I think I brought my speakers, too. I went down there to Mike’s house in Long Beach, and in the end it’s the typical audition thing where they want me to sing these things that were sung by other singers and I’m like ‘Ok’ and then they played me Ytse Jam and for some reason it was way better than anything I’d heard on the Majesty tape. When I heard them playing Ytse Jam, that was when I knew that this was not some folly. This was not some guys that were trying to sound like somebody else, trying to be really cool. These were real musicians that really had something real and original and personal, and I wanted to be a part of it.

They were just about to say ‘OK, don’t call us, we’ll call you...’ So I said ‘Look, give me some lyric sheet that nobody ever sang before that you’re not comparing to this guy or that guy.’ So John handed me, in fact the sheet I had, The Killing Hand. So right from the first time ever seeing it, they started playing the music, I just listened to the verse part, ‘Ok, start it again’ and I sang the verse. They were like ‘Hey, that was right! That was cool!’

SH: So you came up with the vocal melody for The Killing Hand right then and there?

CD: Yeah, that one was one that I just came up with. Later there were songs that John wrote the lyrics to that he spoon-fed me melody lines occasionally. And then there were times when we worked on them together, and then there were times that I came up with them myself. But that particular one I remember specifically because it was at the audition. And I was just like “An angel’s kiss now fallen...” and “Descending scarlet cuts the sky”, etc. These guys want to hear like operatic, so I sang a little operatic thing and apparently they liked it. They didn’t say anything then because that’s the way these guys are; they’re very careful about what they do, despite the fact that they hired me! [laughs] Actually Mike got back to me about a week later and I was informed that I would be allowed to be a part of the band on a probationary basis. I don’t know how I got past the probation period! [laughs] I don’t know how I did that!

And then we just started going down, we had that studio that we practiced in, and we just started doing the songs, working on the songs for the album and the rest was pretty much history. Chuck from the Crumb Suckers – at the time it was called the Crumb Suckers, I guess they changed their name to Heavy Rain – and he knew Steve Sinclair and brought him down, and Jim Pitulski and Holly Lane and all those people that heard us and...

SH: Oh Jim Pitulski? Even back then?

CD: Yeah, I think Jim was among the three. It was Holly Lane, Steve Sinclair and Jim Pitulski, if I remember correctly, were the three that came to hear us.

SH: And that was before he started managing Dream Theater?

CD: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I guess he was ‘Roundtable’ for a while and now he’s running InsideOut Music and I noticed that James LaBrie’s on there now, isn’t he? [with his solo album]

[On the subject of solo albums... – Ed.]

CD: The thing is that after Dream Theater, I’m in a little bit of a limbo period because there’s no band that I put together or join that’s gonna compare to Dream Theater. And I don’t really expect to go out there and be the ‘other’ Dream Theater. That was the band that I was in. Again, I did it for the same reason that people climb mountains. It was there so I did it. And I come from a lot of other stuff and it just seemed natural to me. Now that I’m thinking about that, I’m doing my new album on my own. It seemed natural to get back to my roots and to do something that people have no need, let alone be able to compare to Dream Theater because it’s more me and a more natural way to get back to my roots and get back to what I did all those years, which was just play the acoustic guitar and sing voice. So I wrote this whole album that I’m doing now, which is just one acoustic guitar and one voice for the whole album. And it’s either going to be a complete bore or it’s going to be interesting! [laughs] Whatever it is, it’s got to come out – it’s coming out.