The Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Missouri is teeming with a throng of sweat-drenched music fans. The temperature outside (as happens so often in the region during summer time) has reached a height one might think had been conjured up by the author of a magical realism short story, while inside the heat is downright dizzying. But that hardly matters, the faithful have come to witness a show that would have seemed unlikely roughly one year before: Queensryche and Dream Theater (with Fates Warning opening).

And the customers get exactly what they want: A brilliant show from both bands, then a jam session at the end that’s as much about the music as seeing both bands united on one stage, playing each other’s music (and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). Queensryche are surprisingly raw live, especially with the addition of guitarist Mike Stone, who, in a hooded, sleeveless t-shirt, seems nearly sinister as he and the other members bang out ‘Ryche classics such as “Revolution Calling,” “Empire,” “Best I Can” and “Jet City Woman” with muscular accuracy. (The show has only two faults that approach major: “I Don’t Believe In Love” is absent, while “Silent Lucidity,” feels surprisingly out of place and mildly dated amid the other, raucous affairs. It should be noted, too, that tracks such as “Empire” and “Revolution Calling” seem impossibly up-to-date and are performed with incomparable vigor.)

The show ends much too quickly and the band exits until the jam with Dream Theater. Scott Rockenfield and Mike Portnoy share a kit, while Geoff Tate and Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess share a moment of voice and piano on the stage before everyone comes back out. (The pair have a readable chemistry and it would be a shame if they didn’t work together down the road.) The show over, members of the Ryche greet fans in the backstage area: They sign massive amounts of merchandise, snap photos with whole families and seem genuinely pleased to have contact with the folk on the other side of the stage.

Maybe that’s part of what has kept Queensryche rolling all these years, the genuine nature of their music and as people as well. In the following interview, conducted roughly one week before the Kansas City show, I gained a sense that Queensryche, through all their various phases, have been and are about five people finding their way in the world and happy to be doing it.

Jedd Beaudoin: The current tour you're on with Fates Warning and Dream Theater has really had people talking. How's it been going?
Scott Rockenfield: It's been going really well. I don't think any of us could be any happier with what's been happening. We put this whole thing together a few months back. We, as Queensryche, had been talking about doing something like this for a long time. This tour, for the summer, felt like a good time to connect with some people. So we got in touch with Dream Theater and opened up some channels of communication with them and then Fates Warning. Everybody thought it was a really good idea to go out and do this thing together. So, we did. There are some common musical things that exist between the bands but then I think we also have a lot of different things to offer with each band. Then there's a thread of fans who like all three, then some who like one of the bands in particular but who are coming to the shows and enjoying the whole thing as a package. It's been really good, really successful and pretty much sold-out across the board, pretty much through the whole tour,which ends in Seattle. The fans are going nuts.

We've been doing this thing where Dream Theater and Queensryche play together. We unveil all the drums, all the tiers and both full bands get up and play a bunch of songs together, which is really becoming the huge closing of the show that everybody in the audience has really been crazy for. No complaints, man.

JB: Is that one of the perks of being a musician, that you get to meet people who, once you realize you admire them, you're then able to go out and play with them?
SR: Absolutely. It's been one of those things where our paths have never really crossed. We'd met the guys a few times but in all of our travels, those times have been very few. Maybe once or twice I've met just a couple of the guys from Dream Theater. But obviously we've known of each other for many years and like I said, I think we have some common ground in the music industry for what we do as bands and now we have the chance to get to know each other and everybody's been really enjoying each other's company and along, with that, we get up to play and really get to know each other. I wasn't all that familiar with Dream Theater's music until but now I've got to try and figure it all out so that we can play together. [Laughs.]

JB: How has touring changed for you since the early days?
SR: Age has made a difference. I was 18 maybe the first time we went on the road for the first tour. I was a free-willed young kid with no real responsibilities. So, I had a different approach to life than I did back then. But now, I just turned 40, I have a wife back home, I have three kids. I have responsibilities. It's definitely a lot of the same thing, though. The concept of touring is the same. I'm in a hotel room right now in Hartford, Connecticut and I think I've actually been in this same room before. [Laughs.] We stay in a lot of the same hotels, just because we have relationships with certain places after so many years of doing this and so a lot of it remains the same. The scheduling and how we do things on a daily basis is the same: I wake up, I do a bunch of interviews, check out at the same time, do soundcheck. That's the same. Life changes are much different. It's a job, we're out here to give people what they're paying for and it's not sex, drugs and rock and roll. Not that it ever really was with us.

JB: You guys were something of an anomaly on your way up: There were the hair bands and then the early thrash bands: Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and then Queensryche was somewhere in the middle of all that.
SR: We tend to take the road least traveled by. For us, it was really just a matter of [doing that]. When we first got together around 1981 and started to work on music together and then made the EP and decided that we didn't want to be cover band, we did it for ourselves. We wrote for ourselves. We didn't know we were going to sell records and nobody can ever predict what's going to sell and we couldn't chase what we thought people were going to buy, so success to us was always geared upon just making music for ourselves, having fun and not putting limits on ourselves as Queensryche and not trying to emulate what other people were doing. And, I think, to come back to your comment, I think every record has just been another part of our evolution as Queensryche and we've never done anything to chase other people or become part of something. We've been our own movement and survived 22 years now.

JB: One of the points in that evolution was, of course the Rage For Order album, which may actually be my favorite Queensryche album.
SR: Right on. Good.

JB: It was a different step for the band. Do you have any reflections on it today?
SR: I think that we use the record to use that as a point of reference when we're talking to fans or people like you to talk about what we've done in our career. When we first got together, there were some common threads of music that we all liked when we did the EP. There's definitely some more commonalities between our music and the music we were listening to there. It was just four songs, we didn't really know each other or what we were going to do. We didn't know ourselves really well enough. It was a thing, it was cool and it got us a record deal. Then we did The Warning which is really our first definitive record. We were still young. We lived in Europe and made the record but it was still an invention thing and about getting to know each other. Rage was a turning point and I think we'll always remember that and hold that close to us. It got to know each other and know what we wanted to do and it was a total turning point of realizing that Queensryche was about evolution and finding our own path. I think that was the birth of true Queensryche, which is about evolution. It was massively experimental and I think to this day people still consider it to be on the cutting edge with technology and different instrumentation. Even our look was pushing the limits.

JB: Was that really the moment where songwriting jelled?
SR: Absolutely. We really started to understand each other and really understand how to work on our chemistry and feed off each other. We were really focused on that. Then there was Operation: Mindcrime, which has become a huge icon, became a definitive Queensryche record. That's not the most successful in terms of sales, Empire was, but Mindrime and Rage are the two that stick out with people as being the most defining moments of Queensryche, which is cool.

JB: We talked a little bit about the early days, the band finding itself. Now, some years down the road, you're sitting down to make the new record, Tribe. What's it like to sit down to make a record when you have all the chemistry behind you? I think that, probably, at some point the door swings both ways: You've known each other for a long time and you know the chemistry and then you've known each other for a long time and then you know which buttons to push with certain people.
SR: Absolutely. Sometimes that can assist. We've been together for 22 years and it's like a long marriage. It's compromise. Whenever we're doing anything in particular, whether touring or making records, we know how we work and we know which buttons to push and the ones not to push. There's a compromise. We're all willing to do that within the band because we have to. We don't all agree on things all the time and after 22 years of evolution as a band and as people, our interests are different. My musical tastes are different than those of the other guys. We all have different things that we like in our lives. But we allow for the freedom for all of us to have those. But it's not really a chore. It all becomes pretty easy once we fall into what we want to do.

This time we fell into a concept, a theme that Geoff wanted to work on. So, we sit and have brainstorm sessions and talk about stuff and start evolving songs into musical support for the themes of the record. It just seems to work.

JB: There are probably some bands where the musicians might not have a concept of what's going on lyrically but it seems like Queenrsyche, where lyrics are important, that there's some sort of give-and-take with the lyrics.
SR: One of the things we've always tried to do as a band is work as a band not just a bunch of musicians getting together and playing. I think once things started to kick in and we started looking at what we wanted to do from record to record, it's been very much about looking at what the lyrics are doing and writing stuff that will compliment that. Geoff will sometimes write lyrics to a song that we've got musically together and we'll say, “Gosh, this makes me feel a certain way and this'll work.” With the Tribe record, there was a song that I gave Geoff and he said, “I think I've got some lyrical ideas for that will totally sing what the music is about.” And it works the other way. Geoff will sometimes have a lyrical content idea and we'll try to paint some music for it and say, “Will this work? Would your theme, your lyric, go on there?" It's all one.

JB: I always think of Queensryche albums as being these entities where there are individual songs but they all build on each other, from one end to the other.
SR: We deal a lot in concepts and themes and I think that's been an inspiring thing through the years and Tribe is another evolution of that. I think there is a common theme through this record and I think that, musically, you get a record with 10 songs on it and people listen to it and say that they love the songs themselves but then also the journey of the whole record. The songs become chapters of the overall book, so to speak.

JB: Well, I think Tribe is an appropriate title for this record and that goes for the music as well. There's something a little more primal here.
SR: When we started to put the record together and brainstorm in the fall of last year, Geoff had some ideas [that struck us]. We always look for something to spark a record. This time around it was Geoff's idea of a tribal concept of the world. Societies are becoming tribes. There's a lot of tribalism going on in different ways. The European Union, things like that. So, he worked on those and presented them to us. And it was interesting because I, Michael and Eddie had been working on some musical ideas on our own to get stuff together and funnily enough we were all in that headspace. I was working on a lot of tribal, percussive, rhythm-oriented stuff at the time and Michael was writing songs that, melody-wise had some nice ethnic melody things going on. We were on the same page.

When we approached the actual making of the record, we kept that in mind. We wanted to keep it tribal and primitive and not over-think everything and overwork everything, both in the sounds and the feel. We wanted to make it as Queensryche-primitive as possible. A lot of the stuff was recorded at home and then brought it into a big studio to bring it all in and centralize everything. We tried to leave it as spontaneous as possible and I think that that helped add to the element of the tribalism.

JB: It occurs to me that you've never been a drummer who tries to fill up every space.
SR: I think it's kind of been my thing from day one. Our early records aren't as defined as the stuff we started doing from Rage For Order on. But we've always been a band that's thought that way. The most important thing to us is the song. We always write for the song. What does it require? A lot of our stuff doesn't require being filled up. I think there's a bigger challenge in doing that. Less is more is very difficult. I think it's very easy to write songs where you fill everything up and everybody does their own thing. I'm not sure you achieve a good song by doing that. We look at the song. Does it need a good groove or does it need to be some bombastic four-on-the-floor thing? Groove is a big thing to me. I like hearing a good groove and I look for that in the stuff I listen to. I think that that requires putting the breaks on every now and then. The Tribe record is another good example of that.

JB: Chris DeGarmo came back for this record but not for the tour. Does it seem like he'll be back or do you think you're just going to leave it open?
SR: I think “open” is our take on it right now. Chris got ahold of us right when we were going into make the record and was curious as to whether we'd be interested in collaborating on a couple of songs. We thought it was an interesting idea and a few of the songs he'd had sitting around for a while actually fit with the theme of the record. We co-wrote the songs together, he did three on the record but, after that, he's not really interested in being in a band. He's got other things that he does in life. He doesn't want to commit to going on the road. So, we got Mike Stone and when the next record comes around we'll keep the door open. I think the band is me, Michael, Eddie and Jeff. We may pick up a fifth guy, it might be Mike Stone. We don't really know. We kind of have this open tribe thing going for ourselves where we're always expanding our own thing as a tribe.