Speaking with Guitar World, Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci discussed his love of Rush and how guitarist Alex Lifeson influenced his playing. Following is an excerpt.

Petrucci: "I adore Rush, and I’ll never stop geeking out on them. For me, and probably a lot of people from my generation, Rush is a band that has been part of the fabric of my life. And it goes beyond their music and extends into everything they’ve done. They always stuck to their guns and did exactly what they wanted. Their live shows were always presented in a unique and special way. Quite simply, there’s no band quite like Rush.”

Q: Could you name any particular Rush song that was the gateway drug to really getting into the band?

Petrucci: "Growing up on Long Island, I heard Rush on the rock radio stations. I heard 'The Spirit Of Radio' and really liked it, but it was when I heard 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Limelight' that I really started paying attention. Around this time, I had several good friends – they’re still good friends, actually – and they were big-time Rush fans. They’d be like, 'Oh, you’ve got to check out the earlier stuff. Go listen to 'The Trees' from Hemispheres.' Or they’d say, 'You’ve got to listen to 2112.' And that opened the whole thing.”

Q: Can you pinpoint what it was about Alex Lifeson's playing that really spoke to you? His tone? Technique? Choice of notes?

Petrucci: "Just like the band, he had his own thing. Alex’s guitar playing was very different from the normal stuff that was on the radio. Hearing something like 'La Villa Strangiato', I was like, 'What the hell…? Nobody is doing this.' With a lot of guitar players, you can hear the blues rock roots very strongly, but with Alex, even though he had those influences as well, there was other stuff in there. There were chords that I’d never heard before on the guitar. He did a lot of these suspended 2nds and open-string chords. That kind of stuff excited me.”

As I listened more, I began to see his evolution. The first record had that raw Zeppelin thing – I could hear the E, D, G and A chords – but the first chord of Hemispheres, I was like, 'What the hell is that? It’s like F# weird. It was strange, but it hit me as being very cool. And he started orchestrating the guitar in a way that Jimmy Page did. He would use 12-string electrics and acoustics. There would be these mellow sections, and then he’d do volume swells. He just created a landscape on guitar… 

And as a young player getting more and more into technique, I’d hear his solos on 'Freewill' or 'La Villa Strangiato', and I just had to learn them: 'How is he doing that? How is that even possible?'“

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