1. What are your top 5 prog bands? I'm gonna take a not-so-wild guess and say: Yes/Genesis/ELP/Gentle Giant/Kansas.
Pretty close. Yes is definitely #1, with Genesis a close second. After that, it often depends upon mood. ELP is good for Prog excess at its most ridiculous, and is a good contender for third, but Pink Floyd gives them a run for the money and goes completely the opposite direction. Kansas is up there. As much as I love Gentle Giant, my love for them is mostly focused on a couple of albums which really resonate with me and take me back to a very important period in my life. They're farther down the list. I think Frank Zappa and/or The Mothers would round out the Top 5.
2. What are your top 5 NON-prog bands?
Ooh, this is actually much tougher. Chicago would be #1. Their early stuff was so complex that it was Prog in some ways, but I'm pretty sure most people just consider them Rock or even Pop. Robert Lamm has always considered them "Pop music with horns". Stone Temple Pilots rock me; I love those guys. Deep Purple for similar reasons. Good, heavy Rock and Roll with great vocals. Black Sabbath. And now for something completely different: CSN and sometimes Y. Best vocal group ever in the history of the universe.
That's all within the Rock/Pop area, though. I also listen to a lot of Motown and R&B type stuff. Earth, Wind & Fire blow me away. The Spinners, The Temptations, The Four Tops, them classic "well choreographed black groups". Then there's the Jazz/Fusion. Return to Forever, Brand X, Weather Report. Killer chops, killer compositions. Gotta have 'em.
3. How did you get into DT and do you still listen to them?
In 1994, I was living in Maryland and visited my best friend John who was living in Tennessee at the time. After burning a few, he played a CD for me called
Images and Words. It fucking blew me away. Progressive Metal did not exist yet as a genre, but here it was. The crunch of Metal guitars, the vocals, but with Prog sensibilities and attitude. Keyboards? No way! Yep, keyboards, too. I had no idea such music existed. It was like Metallica and Yes had a baby and named it Dream Theater. "Metropolis, Pt 1" was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard in my life (and I mean that in a good way). 10 minutes! Ha ha, remember when that was the longest DT song? Then he played
Awake. As far as we knew, those we the only two albums they'd made (he didn't know about
When Dream and Day Unite, and of course neither did I), but as soon as I got home, I bought both of them, and they were my new favorite band. They stayed that way for a long time.
I still listen to them, but they've rather lost me lately. At some point, they seem to have decided (1) if a long song is cool, then even longer songs must be even better, and (2) we have established our sound, and cannot really stray from that, as much as we'd like to. This changed with
The Astonishing, which is definitely a departure from their core sound, but honestly, not in a way that I would prefer.
The Astonishing lived in my car CD player for two or three weeks after I got it, and it's all very nice, but I can't say that I like it, not really at all. The ballads bore me, the Metal is too sparse and too far between, and the Nomacs sounds distract and annoy me more than anything else. As a concept and artistic statement, it's pretty cool, but the execution just doesn't work for me.
But
Images and Words,
Awake,
A Change of Seasons,
Falling Into Infinity, and
Scenes from a Memory still get regular play from me. To me, this was their prime. The 90's for Dream Theater and Prog Metal in general were like the 70's for Classic Prog. After that, it seemed to become a contest to see who could play the most notes per second and who could write the longest songs. Those are both impressive within context, but are meaningless to me if I don't like the songs, and very little since around 2000 has really grabbed me.
4. Following on Scorp's bucket-list question, if you could choose one celebrity to make love to, who would that be?
Diane Lane. She's still a stunning woman, but since we're already outside of reality here, I would go back in time to when she absolutely smoked and give her the best 30 seconds of my life.
5. Old-fogey question: do you have any specific plans for retirement?
None. When I was younger, I honestly did not expect to live to retirement, plus I was an idiot, and therefore never saved anything. I got married, and wised up a bit, but before we could stabilize ourselves financially, we started having kids, one of whom has special needs, and the doctor bills combined with my lousy teacher's salary put us deep into debt. We're still a financial mess. I still therefore do not expect to retire, though for completely different reasons. The job I have now has a 401(k) which I've been dumping as much into as I can, but we started late and there's maybe a couple of years' worth of living in there now.
My "real" retirement plan is totally morbid. My dad is much, much better at investments and if/when he goes, my sisters and I each stand to inherit quite a chunk, enough to pay off our house, our credit cards, our daughter's college, and then some. The later that happens, the closer we'll be to paying off the house (seven years to go right now) and the less debt there will be, so the balance of that will be our retirement. A totally shitty plan, but from what I understand, not particularly unique these days.