JOHN PETRUCCI's Dream Lives On
July 11, 2003Rafer Guzmán of Newsday reports that if the name John Petrucci doesn't immediately ring a bell, that's OK. The Kings Park (Long Island) native is used to it.
"A lot of times, I'll meet somebody new, and I'll tell them what I do," says the guitarist for DREAM THEATER, which plays at the Tommy Hilfiger at Jones Beach Amphitheater tonight. "And they've never heard of us, so they say, 'How can you be headlining Jones Beach?'"
Petrucci laughs. "Pretty cool, right?"
Last year, DREAM THEATER hit a zenith of sorts with "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" (Elektra),a 97-minute opus that sprawls across two CDs. One disc consists of a single song, broken into eight acts, that lasts 42:04.
"We were laughing about that," admits Petrucci. "Our one song on one CD was like the length of an entire YES album."
A virtuoso in the mold of Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, Petrucci says he frequently writes guitar parts that he's actually unable to play. On "The Glass Prison", he asked keyboardist Jordan Rudess to transcribe a complicated arpeggio passage and then attempted to play it on guitar.
"That was a mistake," Petrucci says, admitting that the riff was tougher to play than he realized. "A lot of keyboard parts don't translate very well to guitar." Read more.
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