Second Edition Extracts

Here are a couple of extracts from the second edition of the book for you!

Firstly, a section from the appendix (which covers the side projects) on the Chicago LTE show, when the keyboard broke down mid-set

With the keyboard written off, and Jordan feeling disappointed for himself and all the audience, he decided on a radical and unexpected solution – wandering onstage and trying to persuade John to let him use the guitar.
“I decided that rather than just have the disappointment of having the keyboard go down, I would just go out there and do a bit of jamming on the guitar,” smiles Jordan. “So I remember getting the courage up to go out on stage when they were playing. When I walked on stage, John was doing this thing where he was playing so fast, playing with two hands on the fretboard and was looking down. And as I got close to him, I realized he was really wrapped up in his own world. He looked up and was like ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ So I kind of said ‘Give me your guitar,’ and he realized and thought ‘OK what the hell’ and passed his guitar to me. He went over and played bass while Tony was playing the Chapman Stick. I hadn’t played the guitar in a long while and his guitar was like some wild animal and was screaming. I was doing my best to control the beast and play some riffs. I think I did a few good ones but I could definitely have done with some practice. It was one of the most dreadful nights of my life but I think the fans got a kick out of it, and we all ended up having some fun.”
“If you can’t play keyboards, alright play my guitar. That’ll work,” laughs John at the memory. “Obviously I felt sorry for Jordan because having a technical problem that you really can’t solve really sucks because you are just in panic mode. And because we were only out there for five shows, it was low budget and you aren’t going to take out back-up rigs. You are just trying to do it inexpensively and have fun. So if I was in that position, and my amp blew up and there was nothing I could do, I’d be like freaking out. I also felt bad because there were only a few shows and the people in Chicago didn’t get to see the whole thing and it was going pretty well until that point. But what are you going to do? We made the best out of it in the spirit of improvisation which was how the whole project was born.”

And here is a section from the mammoth chapter covering the making of Black Clouds & Silver Linings

One of the criticisms levelled at Systematic Chaos was that lyrically – certainly in terms of those written by John Petrucci – there was a tendency to dwell on supernatural tales. Although there was unquestionably a proportion of the Dream Theater fan base that lapped up songs about dark masters and vampires, there were those who found those lyrics incongruous and impossible to relate to. Perhaps recognising that fact, John deliberately veered away from fantasy worlds as a subject matter.

“Yeah, this album is all reality for me,” explains John. “I thought I’d try something different, went in the exact opposite direction and I wrote about real experiences. I was talking to my wife before I started writing the lyrics, and she was saying that I have so many interesting stories that I’m always telling. She was saying ‘Why don’t you think of some of those events as you have such colourful stories.’ And it seemed so obvious but I guess I’ve never really done that. I’ve written songs that are fantasy based, and even early on in our career, I’d done that with songs like ‘Metropolis’ or ‘The Killing Hand’. But at the same time, I’ve also written songs that are reality based about my own experiences. So those are songs like ‘Take Away My Pain’ or ‘Another Day’. But I realized that I’ve never written stories about things that actually happened to me. You know, about situations that I went through that were unusual or bizarre, or interesting. Whenever I wrote about reality it would always be more emotional. It would be about a loss, a feeling, a philosophy or generalisation about something. So this album, I wrote about experiences and I started to think back ‘What are some interesting stories that I’ve told my friends’. You know, like ‘Guys, you’ll never believe what happened to me!’ So I started to realize that these were really cool stories. And when you do that you are able to really write from your heart and you’re not making it up. You are just reflecting back and thinking about what happened. All these people that seem like really weird characters are actually real people. And when you hear the lyrics you will be like ‘What the hell happened here?’ Who the hell are these people?’”