Ex-DREAM THEATER Singer Discusses New DOMINICI CD

Mark Carras of RockMyMonkey.com recently conducted an interview with ex-DREAM THEATER vocalist Charlie Dominici about his new band DOMINICI. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: Was it just 9-11 and the events that surrounded that that inspired this story, or was there something else?

Charlie Dominici: No, it goes way back. It goes way back. I don't know if you remember, there's been stuff going on in this country, as far back as the Iran Contra affair. Even before that, when Jimmy Carter was president. All these things, all these years, our foreign policies and all the things that have been going on in the world, and us being told one thing, and then finding out ten, fifteen years later that it was a bunch of bull, and that it was really this, and that's what's really happening and this is why this country we thought was that when it's actually this. As these things have been coming out, and the truth comes out, and as time goes by, I start to see, the tangled web starts to become a little bit more clear. I've been noticing a lot of things, and watching a lot of things. And not that I'm coming to conclusions, but what I've been writing about and basing all this whole story on is the fact that they're probably a lot of conclusions that can be drawn. I'm not sure which are the correct ones, just like most other people aren't. It's kind of cool to get this insight, and to start thinking, what if it was this, and what if it was that? And that's a lot of what the story is about, really, because I always thought to myself, even back in the old days, the first time you heard about a sleeper cell, I mean it was maybe in the '80s. I just thought to myself, a sleeper cell in this country, they put them here and they stay here for years, and they blend in and they have to actually become an American to be able to stay secret. What would happen if this person started to realize that hey, being an American, being free, and making money-I got a nice car now, I'm not living in the sand anymore, I have freedom, I can where what I want, I can buy CDs and play whatever kind of music I want. I have money and a job and I fell in love. What would happen if that happened to a sleeper cell? And then what would happen if they got called after that? They were torn. So that idea was in my head for many years. Then recently, as of the past four or five years, watching things, events as they occurred, seeing it in the news, reading it on the website, reading it in the paper, world news, and CNN, and things like that. And also starting to piece together a whole story about the radicalism about… what if there was a group that was so radical that they were just the mother of all radical religious groups, where they not only had their own beliefs, but their belief was that the whole world is a toilet bowl, and that man is a virus, and that man has had thousands of years to get it right, and it's just worse than ever? And they just decided that they were just going to end it all because in their crazy religious belief that would be the only way that god could be realized, is that the whole mankind and human race and everything in the food chain was completely wiped out. So that would be the realization of god. That being the most radical thought that I could come up with. It's so radical that it's not entirely impossible that it actually exists out there. And that was the basis of my premise, that these people existed and they came up with this plan. And then I took a chart and I did a lot of research. Like, what would be a plan that could be so possible, but not possible enough so that terrorists would actually follow my idea, and actually do it, which happens a lot in the world. You see a movie, and then all of a sudden a year later terrorists are doing what they saw in the movie. So I didn't want to do that. So I came up with a plan that was chemically and scientifically probable, had a possibility to it, but only if one particular phase of it could be achieved, which actually was impossible. And that would be changing O2 molecules into O3, and that would create a chain reaction. But as any chemist could tell you, or anybody who knows anything about chemistry would tell you that when O3 is created by splitting the molecules of O2 into molecules of O1, and then one of those O1 molecules bonds with an O2 molecule, creating an O3, which is a kind of a chemical agent that's an antibacterial. They use it to put into water to kill bacteria. What happens as soon as it hits O2 again it starts to break back down into O2, which is why it doesn't become a dangerous poison. It's very temporary. But my idea was that these guys had a chemical formula where they could alter it and introduce a catalyst to make it do the opposite, where everything that the O3 touches would become O3, so that every molecule of water and every molecule of air, which is all connected on the earth, would just spread, and the whole world would just turn into this blue, toxic oxygen O3, which would kill everything. That's the plan at this point.

Check out the entire interview in text and MP3 format at this location.