Author: uylrjp

Upon hearing that Done With Mirrors is being reclaimed as one of the great lost albums of the 1980s, Joe Perry’s reaction is one of surprise. Or perhaps outright disbelief would be a more accurate description. From when he first begins speaking today at his home in Florida, the guitarist can barely form a coherent sentence to encapsulate his thoughts on Aerosmith’s eighth studio album.

At the time it was also a contender for their least well-regarded, an ignominy it then shared with its immediate predecessor, Rock In A Hard Place, made without Perry and when the great Boston band were at their lowest ebb. After wandering up several grammatical blind alleys, with much huffing, puffing and sighing, Perry eventually settles upon a question: “Um, whatever possessed you guys to pick that one?”

More than once, Perry himself has listed Done With Mirrors as his least favourite Aerosmith album – which, considering the dubious merits of, say, 2001’s Just Push Play, is going some. And yes, when it was released back in 1985, critics set upon it like a pack of wild dogs. The Rolling Stone writer’s judgement, for example, amounted to this withering sentence: “The work of burnt-out lug-heads whose lack of musical imagination rivals their repugnant lyrics.” Nor could it be said to have won favour with the greater body of Aerosmith’s fans. Done With Mirrors arrived on the Billboard chart at a lowly 36 with an anchor attached to it and sank fast.

It was a short, slight-seeming work, a mere eight tracks in its original form (a ninth, Darkness, was added as a ‘bonus’ on the CD version), and it ran to less than 36 minutes. As soon as 1987’s Permanent Vacation followed it, and then Pump two years later – both of them slick, polished and commercial smashes in all the ways Done With Mirrors wasn’t – it was forgotten, brushed under the carpet like an embarrassing mess.

Distance, though, has been good to Aerosmith’s bastard child, allowing it to grow and assume substance and weight. Three decades having passed, it can now be seen for what it is: arguably the band’s most pivotal album, a staging post between their 70s glory days and the cleaned-up incarnation that was song-doctored to multi-platinum success from the late 80s and through the 90s.

On Mirrors, Aerosmith, backed against the wall by their own dalliances and demons, came out spitting and fighting, wild-eyed and desperate. This was the same raw, unrefined version of the band that had made the seminal Rocks album in 1976, and also 1979’s volatile, unhinged Night In The Ruts. That latter record was a close cousin to Mirrors – on each there’s the tangible sense that the band are walking a tightrope, grasping for a euphoric release, and at the same time just one misstep from plunging into an unfathomable abyss. Done With Mirrors is the album that found Aerosmith down in the gutter, muddied, bloodied, with dirt under their fingernails but looking up at the stars.

1975’s Toys In the Attic, home to Walk This Way and Sweet Emotion, and after it Rocks, had seen Aerosmith assume the mantle of America’s greatest living rock band. Undisputed classics, these were albums with a knowing, cocksure swagger. Wellsprings of inspiration for everyone from Axl Rose and Slash to Kurt Cobain, on the back of them Aerosmith sashayed into being a stadium-filling act in their homeland. Yet they were soon to be brought crashing back down to earth. It was a combination of hubris and their own prodigious drug intake that did for them, and most especially for Tyler and Perry, who with good reason were by then christened the Toxic Twins.

Their next record, 1977’s Draw The Line, was a mostly ragged mess. Recording it at a disused convent in upstate New York, Tyler got so discombobulated from epic substance abuse that he later reported seeing in triplicate. Taking a break from making Night In The Ruts to headline a stadium gig in Cleveland on July 28, 1979, Aerosmith came apart. Backstage during a heated argument, Perry’s then-wife Elyssa threw a glass of milk over bassist Tom Hamilton’s wife, Terry. Afterwards, Tyler confronted Perry about his wife’s behaviour. The upshot was that Perry walked out of the band (his version) or he was sacked (Tyler’s). Either way, and as Tyler later remarked dryly, Aerosmith had actually split over spilt milk.

The years that followed were lean indeed. Not long after, Tyler crashed his motorcycle and was hospitalised for two months. No sooner had he healed and the band started work on their next record, Rock In A Hard Place, than Brad Whitford followed Perry out of the exit door. That record tanked, and Tyler sank into a black depression, strung out on heroin and to all intents broke. Perry fared no better. He launched his own band, the Joe Perry Project. Their first album, 1980’s Let The Music Do The Talking, was a modest hit, but subsequent efforts were ignored, while at the same time Perry too tumbled deeper into drug addiction. By 1983 he was divorced from Elyssa, their split perhaps hastened by her biting him on the face during an especially tempestuous set-to. He was so hard-up he was reduced to sleeping on his manager’s couch. Both men were ripe for the picking by enterprising promoter Fred Bohlander, who offered to book a reunion tour should they bury the hatchet.

But the early indicators weren’t good. On New Year’s Eve 1983, Perry visited Tyler in his dressing room, before the singer’s dead-men-walking Aerosmith played one of their last dates together, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Literally, the two of them had a high old time – so much so that not much later on that same evening Tyler tottered unsteadily out on stage and promptly collapsed, unconscious and out for the count.

Dubbed the Back In The Saddle tour, and with the other prodigal Whitford also back in the band, Aerosmith’s 1984 comeback was a qualified success. Tyler had more mishaps on stage and there was still a chemical fug surrounding the band as a whole, but they managed 58 shows in six months, and across the States people turned out to see them, drawn by the ghost of their 70s past.

“That tour was as much for us as the fans,” says Perry. “We went out on the strength of word of mouth and figured we would see if there was still something there for us, and even that we could still play together. And it felt good. We had just signed a new management contract, but then we had to buy our way out of our old record deal. We owed Columbia Records money and they didn’t want to make another album with us.”

Another label, Geffen, were persuaded that the band were upright enough to take on, and so Aerosmith set to the task of making a new album. At the time, the music business was going through one of its periodic shifts towards a new era. The four-year-old MTV was tightening its grip on the attention spans of a new generation of music fans, and rock’s predominant sound was coming out of the Los Angeles thoroughfare of Sunset Strip. The summer before Done With Mirrors emerged, Mötley Crüe’s Theatre Of Pain and Ratt’s Invasion Of Your Privacy soared to the top of the Billboard chart. They, and a glut of records like them, served up half-baked old Perry riffs. Such acts were Aerosmith in one dimension, with more make-up and bigger hair.

Aerosmith themselves cooked up their new songs in a rented rehearsal space in Massachusetts. The others would bring in ideas for Tyler to “wrap his mind around”, as Perry puts it, and then together hammer the most durable into shape. Tyler wanted to revive the Joe Perry Project barnstormer Let The Music Do The Talking, which Perry had taken with him when he flounced out of Aerosmith in Cleveland. On other songs, such as the feral, low-slung blues My Fist Your Face and Shame On You, Tyler’s scattershot, stream-of-conscience lyrics poked into the darkest, most unsettled recesses of his psyche. ‘Somebody tryin’ to take my soul,’ he howled on the latter, and then ‘Nobody gotta hear my rock and roll.’

“I know where some of that stuff was coming from,” Perry says. “It was about the hole we were digging ourselves out of back then. Near the end of the band’s time apart, things had got pretty bad. I don’t know what demons Steven was fighting on a day-to-day basis, but we definitely both had our ups and downs. Part of the reason I wanted to get back with the guys was that I had been through so much.”

When the time came to put the album down on tape, Aerosmith shipped out west to California. They billeted at Fantasy Studios in the relatively sedate Bay Area college town of Berkeley, away from the nocturnal distractions of Los Angeles and New York. They had recorded five of their seven previous studio albums with veteran producer Jack Douglas, but Geffen’s A&R executive, John Kalodner, insisted that in order to make a fresh start they must now work with someone new. That someone was Ted Templeman, who had honed Van Halen’s sound to a sharp, cutting point, working with the band from their epochal 1977 debut onwards.

Templeman’s vision for Aerosmith was to capture the essence of their 70s live sound, a barrelling noise that was thrilling to ride along with but also as precarious to manage as a runaway freight train. To that end he removed the bulb from the red ‘Recording’ light in the studio so the band wouldn’t know they were being taped, and he caught them as they played. Years later, Templeman bemoaned how his own unfamiliarity with the room resulted in him muting Perry and Whitford’s guitars and Joey Kramer’s drums. But on more than one occasion he bottled lightning.

Let The Music Do The Talking hurtled the album into life, summoned into being by a murderous Perry slide guitar riff. The Hop and Gypsy danced on a razor’s edge, Perry and Whitford slashing across Hamilton and Kramer’s propulsive R&B back beat as Tyler hollered over the hard surfaces. Shela had a jitterbug ebb and flow to it; Darkness evoked gathering clouds and rolling thunder.

From Dream On on their 1973 debut to the stately Kings And Queens on Draw The Line, Aerosmith’s albums had been marked by evocative ballads, and in this regard Done With Mirrors was no exception. At its centre was The Reason A Dog, a sweeping, bracing breath of air. ‘The reason a dog has so many friends,’ Tyler observed sagely, ‘he wags his tail instead of his tongue.’ A knowing nod and a sly wink, it was a welcome moment of brevity among the seedier, sleazier hinterlands he occupied on the rest of the record.

“I had loved the way Ted got those Van Halen records to sound and was hoping he would light a fire under us,” Perry says. “Technically and dynamically, he set the stage for us and recorded the band real well. It sounded good to me at the time, like a very solid record. But I feel that we were holding back. If he had got us as a baby band we would have cut loose a little more.”

One distinctive feature of Done With Mirrors is how so many of the tracks simply fade out, the band playing on. It’s a matter of record that Aerosmith’s bad habits lingered on throughout the recording – as was implied by the album’s title. And it was subsequently posited that certain members remained too far out there for Templeman to be able to corral them into properly finishing the songs. Perry dismisses this last charge.

“From my point of view, we took the time we needed and the record felt like it was done,” he insists. “It wasn’t like someone was standing over us with a clock either. We were cleaning up our act personally, and the basic songs were good, but what I think was missing from that album was some of the edgier stuff we were getting into around, say, Night In The Ruts. That was because of the way the band was at the time. We had just got back together and were afraid to step on each other’s toes.”

Whatever the case, before the next year was outthe others and their new manager, Tim Collins, had staged an intervention with Tyler, compelling him to go into rehab. Nor was he the only member of the band to have to do so. By then, Done With Mirrors had been and gone. Released in November 1985 and received with at best general apathy, it would take almost eight years for it to limp to Gold status in the US, making it at that point Aerosmith’s slowest-selling record. It wasn’t helped by its cover art, rendered in backward-facing block lettering that could only be deciphered by holding it up to a mirror, and without the band’s instantly recognisable flying logo.

“The cover concept came from the record company’s art department,” Perry recalls. “Everybody thought it was a great idea, so we were all on board. It seemed quirky, like a magic trick. But as it turned out I don’t think it helped with the spread of people hearing the record.

“It was almost as if we wanted to hide it away. You know, by calling it Done With Mirrors in the first instance, and then releasing it in a cover that people needed to figure out. It was like we were saying to ourselves: ‘Okay, we’re back, but first we’ve got to get through this record and then work out a new paradigm.’ And that would take us another couple of years of being on the road.”

The faithful did come out for the ensuing tour, an eight-month trek around the US that climaxed in front of a crowd of 24,762 at the Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. And then in 1986, like a bolt out of the blue, producer Rick Rubin invited Tyler and Perry to appear in the video for his charges Run DMC’s reinterpretation of Walk This Way. That summer, Run DMC’s version leapt to No.2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and with MTV saturating the accompanying clip Aerosmith were exposed to a new, younger audience.

Geffen wouldn’t let them make their formal introduction unaccompanied. Songs for Permanent Vacation and Pump were crafted with help from writers including Desmond Child – who in 1986 had contributed to the songwriting on Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet blockbuster – and Jim Vallance, then Bryan Adams’s co-writer. After Done With Mirrors, Aerosmith were never again allowed, or else had the collective will, to be driven entirely under their own steam. The album was fast written off as a misfire and a failure.

Certainly it was only afterwards that Aerosmith were resurrected and made into a household name. Yet more than 30 years on, it’s also clear just how much was lost in that transition from the old into the new. Like the best of their 70s work, Done With Mirrors has about it a whiff of danger and the promise of things illicit and intoxicating. Their latter albums had gloss and hooks to burn, for sure, but they were safer and more sanitised brews. Done With Mirrors, like Rocks and Night In The Ruts before it, was undiluted and corrosive. As such its potency has endured, become stronger even, so that when the needle hits the wax on track one, side one, Let The Music Do The Talking, it still seems as if it might burn to touch.

“Given the backdrop at the time, Done With Mirrors was the best record we could have done,” Perry says. “Without doubt it was a stepping stone for us. And after doing it in the way we had, it was as obvious that we needed to revamp our thinking as the balls on a tall dog.

“The whole thing about bringing in outside songwriters, none of us liked it at first and we had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point of embracing it. But ultimately we realised it was going to bring new energy to the table, and was part of what was going to keep us going.”

According to Perry, he still listens to Done With Mirrors once or twice each year, less than other Aerosmith albums and purely for business reasons. Indeed he had it on as recently as just the other day. With a farewell tour of as yet indeterminate length looming, he says he’s seeking out deeper cuts with which to pepper the band’s live sets next year.

“Right now I like the sound of Shame On You, and The Hop might get played again too,” he says. “We still do Let The Music Do The Talking every once in a while, but that could get moved up from the B list and on to the A. It would actually be a lot of fun to revisit those songs. I even wish we could record them again now. Hell, they would get to be a hundred per cent instead of eighty-five per cent on the Richter scale.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 232, December 2016

Paul Rees been a professional writer and journalist for more than 20 years. He was Editor-in-Chief of the music magazines Q and Kerrang! for a total of 13 years and during that period interviewed everyone from Sir Paul McCartney, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen to Noel Gallagher, Adele and Take That. His work has also been published in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Sunday Express, Classic Rock, Outdoor Fitness, When Saturday Comes and a range of international periodicals. 

Halestorm are one of rock’s great success stories of the last 15 years. In 2015, as the band prepared to released their third album Into The Wild Life, frontwoman Lzzy Hale looked back on the band’s rise from teenage metal band to genuine contenders.

Back in 1998, if you’d scoured the bowling alleys and coffee houses, talent shows and ice cream parlours of Pennsylvania, you might well have stumbled across a 13-year-old girl with an astonishingly powerful voice, channelling her all-time idol Ronnie James Dio at the lip of a stage while her 10-year-old brother spun and whirled behind her, strapped perilously into a rotating, upside-down drumkit fashioned by their mechanic father out of old tractor parts.

If you were very lucky, you’d have had your eyebrows singed by their homemade flashbombs, too. If there was ever any doubt that the dynamic duo in question, singer Lzzy Hale and little bro Arejay, were set to follow their metal heroes on the route to stardom, it’s not one that ever entered their own heads. But now, 17 years later, their BabyCrüe antics are paying off as Halestorm strut the line between classic rock and heavy metal to Grammy-winning, globe-conquering effect.

“It is every big sister’s dream to have what is basically a torture device for your little brother,” says Lzzy today, laughing at the memory. “We’d snap him in with four seatbelts and just let him fly!”

All of this just goes some of the way to explaining why Halestorm have been so thoroughly embraced by the metal community. Musically, the band are accessible and streamlined enough to break into the charts, to attract young fans dipping their toes into rock for the first time, but as well possessing one of the best voices you’ll hear anywhere in music, Lzzy also has a heart that’s pure metal. Rob Halford’s been a vocal supporter and Avenged Sevenfold are buddies. They performed at the Ronnie James Dio tribute gala last year and Lzzy has collaborated with David Draiman on a cover of Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford’s Close My Eyes Forever. No wonder she says “sometimes I feel like a little sister in the community.”

Lzzy Hale, to put it bluntly, is living the metal fangirl dream.

The obsession began in the womb. Born to parents with a record collection to die for, Lzzy and Arejay grew up on a diet of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe, Heart and Alice Cooper.

“I’m pretty sure Panama by Van Halen was my parents’ song, if you need any indication of what sort of parents they were,” says Lzzy, who has Mastodon’s latest on her own turntable as she chats to Hammer over the phone. There were always musical instruments in the family home, and Lzzy admits to standing in the mirror pretending to be Tom Keifer from hair metal stars Cinderella when she was a little ’un – someone she now considers a friend in her adopted hometown of Nashville.

“He had such an amazing, crazy, raspy voice. He was an amazing guitar player, he was the reason I started going after Les Pauls,” she reveals. “I remember wanting to wear my hair in the same way, trying to copy his stage moves, and – this will sound so creepy – I’d turn on the record and sing in the mirror, and I would lip-sync to his songs and try to have the same intensity that he had in the videos.”

For all intents, Lzzy was a shy child – unlike her outgoing brother – but the magnetic pull of music, and her natural vocal talent, brought her out of her shell. She now calls herself a “reformed introvert”, so when the siblings started begging for the chance to perform, the Hale parents hit the talent show trail. Their first saw them lose out to a tap-dancing cowgirl (“who was much cuter than we were!” admits Lzzy with a chuckle. “The judges were all grandmas, I think we scared them a little”), but the metal bug had bitten down hard, and any time they weren’t in school, Lzzy and Arejay were on stage wherever they could blag a spot.

“My parents always said, ‘You always have time to get a real job’,” she recalls. “As far as influences go, we were very lucky to have parents who had this childish, reckless abandon. It was pretty cool.”

Soon, the pair of them were discovering music outside of their folks’ collection, hoovering up Sevendust’s Home, Disturbed’s The Sickness (“I loved David Draiman’s voice, and it was so new and fresh and outside of the classic rock era, that’s maybe what pushed us in a harder direction”) and Tool’s Lateralus. In fact, such was Lzzy’s love of the latter, a potential young romance was scuppered through loyalty to Maynard James Keenan and co.

“Tool was the first show tickets I’d bought for myself,” she says. “Technically, my dad says that I went to Cheap Trick with him when I was three, but I don’t remember that, so that doesn’t count. I went with a guy friend of mine, so I guess it was kind of like a date, and he ended up falling asleep. I don’t know how you can fall asleep at a Tool show, but long story short, we didn’t date after that. Well, that’s a dealbreaker!”

While Lzzy cites the likes of Joan Jett, Heart’s Ann Wilson and Lita Ford as inspirational, most of her influences come from male singers. Her desert island discs are Black Sabbath’s Mob Rules, Dio’s Holy Diver, Alice Cooper’s Love It To Death and British Steel by Judas Priest. “I couldn’t do without them. If it’s a desert island scenario, they’re coming with me! I don’t even care about food at this point, just let me have my music!

“When I was cutting my teeth in the scene there was really only two types of girls,” she continues. “There was the ones that wanted to be Jewel, the singer-songwriter, and then there were the girls that sounded dudeish, the more metal, screamy people. And so I think my niche was to meet it in the middle a little bit. I wanted to be powerful and to be tough, but I had no problem being a girl.”

Things have moved on a lot in the last few decades, though, and Halestorm are proof that the fastest way to earn respect is to remain true to yourself. Metal has always been there in the band’s persona; in their riffs, in their attitude, in their ingrained knowledge of the music. But as to where they think they sit on metal’s wide and ever-evolving spectrum, it depends on whose eyes you’re viewing it through.

“That’s the amazing thing about metal music: there is so much diversity to it, but there is that one core thing, that heartbeat that keeps us going, and that is that rebellious nature, and in this community you’re allowed to be yourself no matter what side of the spectrum you are,” believes Lzzy. “There are no real rules, and that’s the beauty of it. We have such a weird, diverse crowd that comes out to our shows. You’ll have these 80s rocker guys who think that we’re bringing metal back, and then you’ll have these kids. I met a girl the other day, she was so cute. She was 11 years old and she said ‘You’re like the rock’n’roll Pink’, because that was how she related to it. So the same guy that might think that I’m Lita Ford reincarnate might not have the same opinion as an 11-year-old, but they all come to the same show.”

It’s this mixed audience that puts Halestorm in a privileged position. It gives them the opportunity to nurture and encourage the next generation of rock stars to stand up and sing their souls out. Their new album, Into The Wild Life, was recorded as live, in a converted church, with the band standing eyeball to eyeball with each other, jamming out their bluesy brand of hard rock in the same way their heroes did in the 70s and 80s. And, with its huge choruses and fat riffs, it’s the perfect stepping stone for kids whose ears are just becoming attuned to the joys of heavy music. Just as Dio was to her, Lzzy Hale stands to become their inspiration.

“It gets me so excited to see young kids getting into music and playing, because I remember being there myself,” she beams. “I remember being 13, 14 and knowing this is all I want to do with life, and you’re so gung ho about it. It gets me so excited to see this next generation really taking that by the horns, so I’d love to be that gateway drug! Because there’s something about it, man. When you discover music, it becomes a part of your personality and your identity, and when you find it, it’s so euphoric, because then all your life, that’s the mission. It becomes your thing and something that you’re proud of. So just to have more kids find that in themselves? I’m stoked about that.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 269, April 2015

Emma has been writing about music for 25 years, and is a regular contributor to Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog and Louder. During that time her words have also appeared in publications including Kerrang!, Melody Maker, Select, The Blues Magazine and many more. She is also a professional pedant and grammar nerd and has worked as a copy editor on everything from film titles through to high-end property magazines. In her spare time, when not at gigs, you’ll find her at her local stables hanging out with a bunch of extremely characterful horses.

After their wildly elaborate and fan-dividing album The Astonishing in 2016, no one was quite sure where Dream Theater would go next. The answer was sign to a new label, decamp to the wilderness and write a new album in three weeks. In 2019 guitarist John Petrucci and vocalist James LaBrie told Prog about Distance Over Time.

---

Each and every progressive rock band deserving of the mantle, those prepared to take chances and really mess with our heads, have that one difficult album. Melody Maker called Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut “a milestone in the history of awfulness”. Genesis could almost do no wrong until Abacab sent them down the pop path. Tales From Topographic Oceans was so divisive that not even all of the members of Yes liked it. With Dream Theater, it was The Astonishing.

More than two hours of music broken down into 34 chapters and two separate acts, the US/Canadian band’s double album tale of “a retro-futurist post-apocalyptic dystopia ruled by medieval style feudalism” set on Earth was, perhaps inevitably, received with a mix of joy, despair and complete confusion.

Circa its release in 2016, guitarist John Petrucci was unapologetic, telling Prog: “This might sound clichéd but to us, the art is all-important. It really is. We are lucky enough to write the music that we want to, and people will either enjoy it or they won’t. We hope that they do, but it’s not our motivation.”

Looking back, Petrucci still regards The Astonishing as something that Dream Theater simply had to get off their collective chest.

“From beginning to end it took three years of planning, but it was immensely satisfying in a creative sense,” he says. “The live show took another year to develop and since then a novel was written based on the story. There was also a video game. I found all of that extremely fulfilling.”

Perhaps surprisingly, reviewers welcomed The Astonishing. Metacritic.com, a website that aggregates the responses of leading writers, calculated an 80 per cent rating. But there’s no disputing that some people really, really didn’t like it.

“We kind of knew they wouldn’t,” agrees the guitarist. “I mean, some of its songs were just noise. For the typical Dream Theater fan, especially those more in tune with the metal side of what we do, it was always going to be tough to digest. But at the same time we had faith in our audience as being open-minded.”

Were there nights when we realised we had bitten off more than we could chew? Oh yeah!

“It was a rock opera, and when I listen to it I still hear all of the elements of Dream Theater music,” pipes up singer James LaBrie. “In a world of soundbites, we elected to push everything to the maximum. Some people simply chose not to get it, and that was fine, too.”

Online reports suggest that The Astonishing sold as little as 164,000 copies in the US; fewer than the band’s previous two records, A Dramatic Turn Of Events and Dream Theater.

“I’ll take your word on that,” Petrucci responds good-naturedly. “But I will say that, of course, record sales overall have dwindled.”

“Had you told us that 20 years ago we’d have gone: ‘Whaaat? Holy shit, hang on a second!’” LaBrie laughs. “But now it’s par for the course.”

“Back in the 1990s, to get onto the Billboard Top Ten – a list we’ve been on many times – you had to sell in the region of a million copies in the first week, now it’s like 36,000,” Petrucci adds. “Things are completely different.”

To promote the album Dream Theater played around 100 shows throughout 2016 in relatively intimate halls by their usual standards, using theatrical props to re-tell The Astonishing in what Petrucci had termed a “sci-fi-meets-Game Of Thrones but almost medieval” manner. This would prove a bigger undertaking than they had anticipated.

“Were there nights when we realised we had bitten off more than we could chew?” LaBrie muses, before erupting with laughter. “Oh yeah. Had you seen us backstage at the first show at the London Palladium you’d know the answer to that question. We were so nervous.”

Playing Images And words again in its entirety was a lot of fun – it was great to relive that same tour again 25 years later

“It had taken a year to get the animation together, and then the effects had to be timed with the music,” Petrucci reveals. “In rehearsal, getting those things synced, well… it almost didn’t happen. We were elated that things went so well at the Palladium, and by the tour’s end things ran like clockwork. I think those shows were pretty special.”

Next up, Dream Theater eased back into their comfort zone via a year-long tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the group’s celebrated second album, Images And Words.

“Playing that album again in its entirety was a lot of fun, especially as it hadn’t been done since a gig in Germany back in 2007 – it was great to relive that same tour again 25 years later,” LaBrie states.

“The most frustrating thing about that tour was the time constraints,” Petrucci smiles. “In between the Images And Words songs and the encore of A Change Of Seasons [which lasts for 23 minutes], James would tell stories of those days. They were fun to hear but it was a lot to squeeze into one night. Eventually we had some popcorn made and threw it at him to hurry him up!”

Following the sprawling excess of The Astonishing, the birth of Dream Theater’s 14th studio album could not have been any simpler. Distance Over Time was written very succinctly, in less than a month, as the bandmembers – completed by keyboard player Jordan Rudess, bassist John Myung and drummer Mike Mangini – lived, worked, cohabited, drank wine and enjoyed barbecues together in idyllic surroundings.

“I must thank my wife for the idea,” Petrucci reveals. “The last tour had been a long one and she suggested we go away together, reconnect and re-bond. Either that or she was trying to get rid of me. But it was a great suggestion.”

Dream Theater headed to a place called the Yonderbarn in Upstate New York, not too far from Woodstock.

We wanted to keep things raw and organic, and emphasise the fun side of the band with some jamming

“It couldn’t have been more perfect,” Petrucci enthuses. “It was a five-acre property with a farmhouse where we all stayed. What we were not looking for was a recording studio: all we needed was a place to write.”

Nevertheless, when the band arrived they found the premises had a barn suitable for recording, but no equipment that would allow them to do so. They were so in love with the place that bringing in the hardware to lay down their new music was, in the words of Petrucci, “a complete no-brainer”.

“It was an unbelievable setting with large windows and natural light, overlooking a forest full of deer and badgers,” he elaborates. “We’d booked the place for eight weeks, after which we’d move out and record the drums in Long Island and maybe do the guitars in my basement, but having written the record in just three weeks it became obvious – why would we leave?”

At just under 57 minutes long, excluding its bonus track of Viper King, Distance Over Time is the first Dream Theater studio album since Images And Words with a playing time under one hour. It’s also only their third to feature no songs of longer than 10 minutes. It’s sleek, super-powerful and fat-free. Had they felt under pressure to deliver something a little less demanding than The Astonishing?

“We were not really that conscious of that, but everyone was on the same page,” Petrucci considers. “We knew that we wanted to keep the writing concise but keep things raw and organic, also to emphasise the fun side of the band with some jamming.”

With Distance Over Time set to be Dream Theater’s debut for their new home of InsideOut Music, LaBrie adds that the band felt conscious of beginning a new chapter in their history.

I remember being a fan, cranking and appreciating an album – that euphoria can get lost when people dissect every little nuance in an audio sense

“That was conducive to how we felt entering the studio,” the singer enthuses. “We were stoked by what we’d written and the label felt the same way. Those feelings really lent themselves to making a heavier, more stripped-down album.”

Since the departure of co-founding drummer Mike Portnoy in 2010, Petrucci has been a sole producer of Dream Theater’s records, a duty that the pair had previously shared. This has attracted its share of criticism from certain fans, some of them expressing the view that Portnoy’s successor, Mike Mangini, just isn’t audible enough. Distance Over Time sees this problem being addressed.

“Oh, I’m very much aware of the topics of discussion that revolve around the Dream Theater universe,” Petrucci acknowledges with a semi-smirk. “Whether it’s the sound of the snare, or that the albums have been over-compressed, or maybe you can’t hear the bass. I was done with all of that. What I wanted to do as a producer was remove any of those distractions.

“To me that’s exactly what they are,” he elaborates. “With the first few Dream Theater records nobody was concerned about those issues. I don’t want them to be talking points anymore, only the excitement of how it used to be with those early records.”

Are some people a little too picky? “Yeah,” Petrucci fires back instantly. “But that’s the nature of our fanbase. It’s a double-edged sword – who else is going to appreciate this kind of music except somebody that’s discerning? But that brings a big contingent of technologically minded audiophiles who listen to music in a different way.”

LaBrie is in firm agreement. “I can still remember being a fan, cranking and appreciating an album – that euphoria can get lost when people dissect every little nuance in an audio sense. To me, it misses the whole point. It’s kinda stupid.”

Mike Mangini sent us massive emails for when somebody else wrote the lyrics. But he had a try at writing them himself and they were really good

In another first for the band, Distance… introduces Mike Mangini, who contributed the quirky Room 137, as a composer for the band. With its life-questioning themes (‘What’s the message?/Am I running out of time?’), it’s an interesting song.

“Mike had this whole story about how the number 137 is a prime repetitive number in the universe, like Pi or something,” Petrucci explains. “It’s behind everything in physics. This philosopher guy Wolfgang Pauli drove himself crazy trying to figure it out. And he died in hospital in Room 137.

“So Mike sent us these massive emails of research about Wolfgang Pauli for when somebody else wrote the lyrics,” he continues. “But later he had a try at writing them himself and they were really good.”

Elsewhere, LaBrie supplied a track entitled At Wit’s End, which might even be considered the first progressive rock song of the #MeToo movement.

“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but now you mention it is about women being mistreated, disrespected and taken advantage of in a sexual sense,” nods the singer. “I had read an article which revealed the high percentage of couples that break up after the female is raped. More often than not the relationship doesn’t last because the woman believes that the man will no longer be able to look at her in the same way. And as much as the man tries to convince her that it’s okay to carry on, she never quite believes him. So the rape ruins the lives of two people.”

The album closes with its longest track. Penned by Petrucci and inspired by Carl Sagan’s 1994 book of the same name, Pale Blue Dot is an eight-minute piece that pleads for responsibility towards the planet. ‘Adrift in space we’re on our own/Who’s out there/ To save us from ourselves?’ wonders the ecologically aware guitarist in the song’s final line.

“The story behind that song is quite serendipitous,” explains Petrucci. “My father was a big fan of Carl Sagan and there was a weird series of events. My daughter graduated from New York University and at that ceremony they gave honorary degrees to the scientists and astrophysicists of the Voyager Mission [of 1977]. It inspired me to dig into that whole thing, also the Golden Record [a time capsule that contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth].

The mix of a song would come back with a message saying, ‘You’re not going to like this, there’s no guitar in verse two’

“A while later, my daughter and I happened to see a TV documentary on Voyagers 1 and 2, so the subject just kept on coming back to me,” he continues. “The title of the book and the song stems from a photograph taken of the Earth from space, and how our planet is a nothing but a little tiny speck. Everything that has ever happened on it in human history – all of the things we consider so important such as wars, relationships and bloodspills – are of negligible consequence in the grand scheme
of things.”

For LaBrie, having portrayed multiple characters on The Astonishing, Distance Over Time represented a far easier day at the office.

“I really wanted to keep this album clean voice-driven,” he agrees. “There were a couple of moments where I considered going raspy and seeking a Chris Cornell-type approach, but I decided against that.”

Some of the tracks (Untethered Angel and Room 137, for instance) even have heavily treated vocals, which is another first for Dream Theater.

“That’s all down to Ben Grosse, our mixing engineer,” Petrucci enthuses. “He did a phenomenal job. Normally I would be present at that process, but Ben was in LA and we had just spent four months in the studio because that’s the way he likes to work, so I left everything in his hands.”

Five years ago, would you have been able to do that?

“No, I absolutely could not,” John affirms. “It was a bit of letting go, and I’m so happy that I did. Fresh ears can be a valuable thing and Ben did some amazing things. He even cut guitar parts out altogether. The mix of a song would come back with a message saying, ‘You’re not going to like this, there’s no guitar in verse two.’ But what he’d done was really, really cool.”

After 14 albums, that can only be a good thing.

“It’ll definitely be another of those topics of discussion,” LaBrie laughs. “That’s something you can bet on.”

We’re funny to one another, but as a band we’re kind of boring on social media

The build-up towards the unveiling of Distance Over Time began with an online treasure hunt that allowed a search for clues and ultimately the discovery of the album title.

“It was all about trying to engage with the fans, and I liked the idea,” Petrucci explains. “We’re funny to one another, but as a band we’re kind of boring on social media.”

The pair hoot with laughter at the reminder that when the first YouTube teaser clip was posted one wag wrote: “[It’s just] 36 seconds [long and already] better than The Astonishing.”

“Another said: ‘It’s only 36 seconds long and I know that I’m not going to buy this album!’” Petrucci adds. “You’ve got to love that stuff.”

As previously mentioned, this album sees the band leap from Roadrunner, with whom they re-signed two albums ago in 2012, onto Sony Music’s prog subsidiary InsideOut. What happened?

“Our contract expired,” Petrucci shrugs. “Roadrunner treated us incredibly well, and creatively speaking we did some of the best things of our career on that label, but the deal was up and we could either renew again or go elsewhere.”

There was a certain inevitability about where they might end up.

“Thomas [Waber, head honcho of InsideOut] has been lurking for quite a while,” laughs Petrucci. “He made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.”

“We did examine other options but first and foremost Thomas is a fan,” LaBrie insists. “He gets who we are and knows where we want to go.”

In March 2019 Dream Theater will begin a tour that combines songs from Distance Over Time with a 20th anniversary commemoration of their conceptual masterpiece Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes From A Memory.

“It’s unlikely that we’ll play the full-length Scenes From A Memory and also Distance Over Time in its entirety because that would lead to some very disgruntled fans,” LaBrie predicts, “but discussions about the show’s breakdown are not too far away.”

Neither are Dream Theater entirely certain of when they might make indoor appearances in Europe, where they have been confirmed for a string of festivals including Download on June 16.

“It’s a good question and right now I haven’t got an answer,” Petrucci smiles. “But there’s one thing I do know for sure – it’ll happen.”

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.

The late Jack Bruce was one of the greats of British music. A highly respected figure on the British jazz and R&B circuit in the early 1960s, he made his name playing with The Graham Bond Organisation but it was Cream – the late 60s supergroup he formed with Ginger Baker and Eric Clapton – that propelled him to stardom, In 2008, Bruce – who passed away in 2014 – sat down with Classic Rock to look back over at his first encounters with Baker and Clapton, magical times with the doomed Graham Bond, the brilliance of George Harrison and Jimi Hendrix, the bizarre eating habits of man-Mountain Leslie West and the accidental formation of Pink Floyd, something he wasn’t sure whether was a good thing or not.

Graham Bond

When I first met Graham he lived in Romford, he was a salesman and he was very confident. But then as time went on he changed; he became this other person who got into this magic. And then he became very enigmatic, yeah [laughs]. He got into heavy drugs; he didn’t do well behind that one. Things went a bit spong in his life. They came to repossess his organ during one show because he hadn’t paid his maintenance or alimony, whatever.

The next time I saw him after a long time, he came to see me when Cream were playing Madison Square Garden. He showed up backstage with his then girlfriend. He was wearing this robe right down to the ground and he had a magic wand. They both looked very outstanding. I’ve got some of his artefacts that somehow came to me after he died. I think everyone was too scared to take them. I’ve got this five-point star with a ruby in the middle, also a Peruvian magic axe with symbols on it. The guy who gave them to me was terrified of the stuff, and I thought if I said no that could make things worse [laughs].

---

Ginger Baker

The very first time I met Ginger was in 1962. I was playing in a trad band and we were playing at the Cambridge May Ball. I heard this amazing music coming from the cellar, and I went down and there was this astounding band. The first thing I noticed was this drummer. He was the loudest drummer I’d ever heard and he looked so weird as well – like a caveman. And his kit looked weird as well. I went up to Dick Heckstall-Smith, the saxophone player, and asked if I could join.

---

Eric Clapton

I’d vaguely heard of him before, and the first time I met him was at a jam at the Windsor Jazz Festival. That was the first time I played with Eric, and I remember being quite impressed with him then. And then he started coming down to a few of our gigs when I was with Graham Bond.

I’ve recently realised that I’ve had a certain role in Cream. It’s quite funny. I was watching a quiz programme a couple of weeks ago and one of the questions was: “Jimmy Page was the lead guitarist in: a) Cream, b) Black Sabbath and c) Led Zeppelin.” And the contestant said: “I know it’s not Cream, because I used to like that band. That was the band with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and…” I was shouting at the telly: “Oh no! Please remember my name!” “…And Jack Bruce, I think it was.” I breathed a sigh of relief.

Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd

I first met Hendrix when we [Cream] did a gig at the Regents Polytechnic. Coincidentally, the guys that became Pink Floyd were in the audience, and apparently seeing that event made them become Pink Floyd. When I saw them recently, they told me that. I knew they were there, but I didn’t know that we were responsible for them getting together. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I leave that for you to decide. I always thought that Pink Floyd were a band for people who don’t like music or rock’n’roll.

So anyway, back to Hendrix. We were playing Regents Polytechnic. I was just having a pre-gig pint in a pub across the road and in comes this guy who turns out to be Jimi Hendrix. Now, we had already heard about Jimi on the grapevine. Jimi came up to me and said: “Hi. I would like to sit in with the band.” I said it was fine with me but he’d obviously have to check it out with Eric and Ginger. So we went across to the gig, and Eric immediately said yes and Ginger said: “Oh, dunno about that” [laughs]. So he came on and plugged into my bass amp, and as far as I can remember he just blew us all away.

Hendrix had a positive effect on everybody, especially guitar players. He came to the sessions when we [Cream] did White Room in New York and was very encouraging about the song. He came up to me and said: “Wow, I wish I could write something like that.” I said: “Jimi, what you’ve got to realise is that I probably nicked it off you.”

---

Gary Moore

I love Gary. I’ve played with him on and off over the years. I organised a band with Gary, Gary Husband [drums] and myself. I thought about changing my name and calling it The Three Garys. We wanted to do some more gigs but Gary Husband had some other commitments. So we had to get this other fella, Ginger Baker, in to take his place.

Gary was very meticulous about rehearsals, quite rightly. Ginger always said: “I don’t need to rehearse,” and he always got things wrong. I remember him storming into Brixton Academy where we were rehearsing, I could hear his voice: “I’ll kill that fucking Jack Bruce!” He’s taking it out on me and I hadn’t even seen him yet! But it was my fault we were rehearsing. That’s Ginger. We’re like the Odd Couple. Having said that, he is one of the greatest drummers of all time.

---

George Harrison

I met George during the session Cream did for Badge, and I was very impressed with his playing [under the pseudonym L’Angelo Mysterioso]. I took it for granted that people like McCartney and Lennon were brilliant but didn’t really analyse it. But when you actually play with George you could see what an amazing guitar player he was, doing things that I hadn’t even thought of.

---

John McLaughlin

He was doing sessions but he wasn’t doing great. He’d just made that amazing solo record, Devotion. Both Tony Williams and Miles Davis wanted him to join their bands but he didn’t have the money to get to the States. At the time, I was recording what I thought was a trio. I thought, well, I could get John and make it a quartet, he could get paid and everybody’s happy. When I first knew him he was a good guitar player, but I wouldn’t put him any higher than that. Then I think he got into his meditation, Sri Chimnoy, and it seemed to really work for him. He became very turned on musically. The next time I played with him was with Lifetime and he was quite phenomenal.

---

Frank Zappa

I’ve got a lot of respect for Frank, but it was always the Mothers that I loved. When I was living in Germany [in the early 1990s], I got a phone call from The Mothers and I went to see them. They were living in this one little room, cooking spaghetti on a little hob. And I was thinking: ‘Fuck me! This ain’t right. This is The Mothers we’re talking about here.” It really annoyed me. And what really got to me was that they inducted Frank into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame but the rest of the guys didn’t get any recognition. They were certainly affected badly by that.

---

Leslie West & Corky Laing

West, Bruce & Laing played the late, lamented Rainbow in Finsbury Park. It was a really great gig and the audience went bananas. My manager, Robert Stigwood, came out and handed me a bottle of champagne but it was wrapped up, for some reason, in tin foil. I was so excited that I threw it into the crowd. It must be a thing that I do. As I launched it into the air I thought: “Fucking hell! I’m just about to kill somebody. This is terrible.” And I threw it so hard that it went right to the back and hit the wall and then bounced off. I went backstage and Leslie West’s manager, Bud Prager, comes in with blood pouring from his face and didn’t know what happened. Prager, a terrible guy, got hit by it, so everything was alright [laughs]. Fantastic result! I was really made up.

Leslie West had a lovely sound on his guitar. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. The first time I met him and Corky Laing was with Mountain. What can I say about West, Bruce & Laing? It was a band, it was an experience. It disintegrated into a welter of smack, unfortunately. The 60s were really innocent and nice and romantic; the 70s were a bit heavier, more serious and certainly had worse drug use going around.

I always wondered how Leslie could stay fat while he was on heroin. He used to have a secret stash of food, while the rest of us ‘normal’ folk would have a stash of drugs. If you went for a meal with him he’d never eat anything. That way people might think his size was due to glandular problems. Then later at night he’d have a food roadie that he’d boss around: “Hey, gimme a cheeseburger!”

They’re always trying to get in touch with me and want to play with me. So I get my manager to email back really abusive things like: “Tell them that I don’t want to play that fucking crap music again anymore” or something. And they still keep trying. How do you get these guys to stop

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 120, May 2008

Pete Makowski joined Sounds music weekly aged 15 as a messenger boy, and was soon reviewing albums. When no-one at the paper wanted to review Deep Purple‘s Made In Japan in December 1972, Makowski did the honours. The following week the phone rang in the Sounds office. It was Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. “Thanks for the review,” said Blackmore. “How would you like to come on tour with us in Europe?” He also wrote for Street Life, New Music News, Kerrang!, Soundcheck, Metal Hammer and This Is Rock, and was a press officer for Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Motörhead, the New York Dolls and more. Sounds Editor Geoff Barton introduced Makowski to photographer Ross Halfin with the words, “You’ll be bad for each other,” creating a partnership that spanned three decades. Halfin and Makowski worked on dozens of articles for Classic Rock in the 00-10s, bringing back stories that crackled with humour and insight. Pete died in November 2021.