Dream Theater – Learning to Live

1989 was a formative year in my life. I was not fully aware of the significance of the regime change in Hungary, but was preparing for my graduation and admission to the university, plus Metal Sides fanzine published my first reviews about Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood and Testament’s Practice What You Preach. A long line of personality determining albums were released in that year: Joe Satriani – Flying In A Blue Dream, Fates Warning – Perfect Symmetry, King’s X – Gretchen Goes To Nebraska, Masters Of Reality – The Blue Garden, Soundgarden – Louder Than Love, Voivod – Nothingface, Coroner – No More Color.

And naturally, When Dream And Day Unite from Dream Theater, who was greeted as a messiah by progressive rock music fans and press alike. They operated with such complex song structures, delivered their tunes with stunning musicianship, and on top of that, they were capable of writing beautiful melodies, so they became one of my all-time favourite bands. I learned the lyrics by heart, checked the unknown words in a dictionary to get the song meanings as fully as possible. I wrote a letter to the band and sent it o the postal address featured in the CD booklet, and to my big surprise drummer extraordinaire Mike Portnoy answered me with a handwritten letter. The following correspondence on the Gödöllő – Kings Park axis still feels surreal, definitely like when dream and day unite. The band was already looking for a replacement for singer Charlie Dominici, and by the time they found James LaBrie, the band led by John Petrucci already wrote the greater part of epoch-maker album Images and Words.

The eleven-and-a-half-minute closing track of that album conditioned me even by its title. It defined my life philosophy for decades. It became a mantra for me: Learn to Live! And it is a lifelong learning process. I love it. And my heroes advised me to put all negative feeling aside in everyday life:

„There was no time for pain
No energy for anger
The sightlessness of hatred slips away
Walking through winter streets alone
He stops and takes a breath
With confidence and self-control.”

When I face any problem, I do not hesitate, immediately start to look for a solution, and there is no doubt that there is a way out.

„I’m learning to live
I won’t give up till I’ve no more to give.”

At that time, I had no clue that John Myung, the infinitely humble bass player of the band, wrote the lyrics under the influence of the frightening AIDS crisis of the nineties, nor I knew that the opening thoughts of the song were inspired by Atlas Shrugged, the magnificent fouth novel of Ayn Rand:

“He had no time for pain, no energy for anger. Within a few weeks, it was over; the blinding stabs of hatred ceased and did not return.”

Brillant disposition. The final, monumental novel of the Jewish Russian-American writer and philosopher is, on the one hand, a romantic realist masterpiece on a science fiction basis; on the other hand, it is a beautiful prelude to her later developed philosophical system she named Objectivism. Her world view built around rational and ethical egoism, laissez-faire capitalism rejected faith and religion. Despite that, she gave attractive and livable answers to the questions of men of our time, so the novel had a lasting impression even on John Myung, who is a practicing Catholic.

At the time of the release of Images And Words, it had no significance for me yet who writes the lyrics. I was devoted to bands. It was a special moment in my life when I met my heroes in Münich during their first European tour, including Kevin Moore, the unparalleled keyboard player, who changed my life for good with the closing track of the next album titled Awake. But this is a separate story. In the autumn of 1993 in Münich, Laszlo Lenard, the editor of Metal Hammer Hungarica, concluded an interview with the band, and I was allowed to participate in the session attended by all the five members of the band, even I was allowed to take pictures with my father’s mirror reflex Zenit camera working on 35 mm film.

From the pictures, a friendly, smiling musician is looking back at us, who was born in Chicago to Korean parents but raised in Long Island near to John Petrucci’s home. At the age of five, he started to play the violin, and he only switched to bass when he turned fifteen years old. The good friends went to Berklee College of Music together, where they met Mike and started the band called Majesty in 1985 that evolved into Dream Theater soon.

After the interview, we headed for the concert hall, where former Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland’s Damn The Machine played a nice set, followed by a majestic performance by Dream Theater, which easily made us forget the inconveniences of the 1300 kilometer drive to the concert. I still have the recording of the gig somewhere in my room at my parents’ house. We had a hearty laugh with my friend, Zoltan Bencsik, whom I met via Laszlo because my dictaphone captured our vocal parts as well.

Chances are that John Myung is not a prolific lyricist. I believe his bandmates claiming that they have to work too much on his ideas for their songs. Malicious ones can say that he wrote the lyrics for the instrumental pieces nowadays. Still, Learning To Live is one of the most influential songs in my life, and it gave me the pleasure to read Atlas Shrugged, which resonates with me deeply. I closed John Myung in my heart, follow his work with Dream Theater and with King’s X mastermind Ty Tabor in Platypus, then in The Jelly Jam. He is a good teacher aging with dignity, not denying the child within us, showing us now to preserve purity.

(Artwork by Csaba Mester)