Mike Portnoy – 2009 US Leg of Prog Nation

The date is August 29th, the last day of Progressive Nation 2009 in North America at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. There’s a lot going on backstage with this being the final show of this leg of the tour, and especially due to the special events that later unfold during the evening. And yet Mike is kind enough to take the time (no pun intended) out to sit down and do an interview with me. As we have all arrived together, Rai “Weymolith” Beardsley, Bob Sackter and Bob’s friend Scott are also there to listen in and inject a thought when there’s a moment.

Having been over 5 years since the last time I conducted a formal interview with Mike, there’s been a few questions that I’ve been meaning to ask him, including one I first touched on in the last interview I did with him:

Scott Hansen: To begin with, going back to 2004, we had discussed the possibility of you releasing many Dream Theater shows via download similar to bands like Umphrey’s McGee –

Mike Portnoy: No progress in that department, and in a way I’ve enjoyed being able to hand pick what is released via Ytsejam Records, being able to select sets that seemed to have a historic purpose. As you know, we have yet to offer that and it’s a cool idea, but I don’t know if it will ever truly take off.

SH: Moving up to the Chaos in Motion live package that you released last year, I noticed that Blind Faith and Surrounded were alternate versions on the CD as opposed to the DVDs –

MP: There is a real story behind that, and I’m shocked that I’ve never been asked until now, although I should have known that if anyone was gonna ask, it was gonna be you! Putting together that set, I had based the song picks on the video footage I had. I looked at what was best represented on video and I picked the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. I had my list of all the videos that were being edited for the video and I sent Kevin Shirley the list of what to mix the audio from. And he mixed what we thought was the Toronto show for Blind Faith and Surrounded. We synced it back up to the video, only to find out that it was from a completely different show – somebody sent him the wrong tapes, and we couldn’t find the Toronto audio. So the audio for Toronto was missing and here we were with this mixed audio of Blind Faith and Surrounded, and we had no idea what show it was even from. So even to this day, I have no idea of what show those specific performances are from.

SH: Yeah, because I noticed there’s no credit listed for them!

MP: You guys could probably go through the [audience bootleg recordings of the] shows and figure it out, but I have no idea. But we already had the video edited and so it was either cut the songs – which I didn’t want to do for the video – or we just go with the live audio mix for the video and we’ll use these mixes for the CD.

SH: The reason why I was asking was because I was thinking “if you’re picking out different performances for those songs, why didn’t you go ahead and hand pick each song for the CD as opposed to the DVD?”

MP: No – it was a total mystery. The Toronto tapes were missing, Kevin Shirley mixed the show, we lined it up, and I was like “why isn’t this matching?” We were trying to move the video and ultimately found out that it was a completely different show.

SH: Speaking of videos, with the high definition format war being over and Blu-Ray winning, when are we gonna see high definition versions of Scenes From New York, Live at Budokan and Score?

MP: Did he give you this question? [referring to Bob, who works on video professionally and has worked on Score and several Ytsejam video releases]

SH: No.

MP: I’m waiting just as much as you guys are. At this point, Rhino owns the back catalog and I told them I would love to do all three of those. Right now, my plan is to do a Scenes From a Memory/Metropolis 2000 10th Anniversary. I don’t know if it will contain Blu-Ray but I definitely want to do a 5.1 mix, have the whole concert and stuff like that. But right now, the industry is suffering so hard, so even Rhino is hesitant to commit to any projects right now. With the state of the industry just going down the tubes, even Rhino who will normally put everything out, even they are being gun shy with how much money, time and budget they put into projects. So we’ll see, but they own the back catalog and all three of those are on my “to do” list for when we can.

SH: Very good. Do you think we’ll get audio commentaries at least on Budokan and Score since there never were any on the DVD versions?

MP: Well, you know I say “never say never” but right now I don’t plan on it.

SH: Moving on to another live release, I’m sure the fans would like to know your opinion on why there have been all these issues with the LTE box set.

MP: It was a big undertaking, overseeing a video edit from two different shows, and audio mixes from two different shows, as well as the bonus material. It was a big undertaking to oversee every step and in some cases I had to trust the people working on the project with me – in this case Bob on the LA DVD and we had another guy for the New York DVD – I just had to trust that all the pieces were in place. Now I would oversee the cut, make changes here and there and oversee the mixes with Paul. But at some point I had to put trust in others – I couldn’t watch 6 hours stuff for every run through. So I’m not passing the buck, but after a certain point, you gotta hope that everyone’s doing their job. And I have no experience with Blu-Ray – I’m disgusted to say I don’t even have a Blu-Ray player.

SH: *jokingly* We are SHOCKED and disappointed in you! *laughs*

MP: Well if you ever saw my DVD collection, I have like 10,000 DVDs and the thought of redoing my whole collection scares the crap out of me. I’ve already gone from video tape to laser disc to DVD – I can’t spend another million dollars redoing my whole collection again!

SH: Well not everything’s available on Blu-Ray anyway. *laughs*

MP: It will be! So I just had to leave the Blu-Ray stuff in the hands of Bob and Ethan [who is another video person]. I don’t even know what the issues are cause I don’t have one. We try our best every time, but inevitably, there’s always going to be variables out of our hands.

SH: Since you were able to release the LTE box set without Magna Carta, are there any plans for a new studio album from LTE in the future?

MP: There’s no plans but all four of us would love to do it.

SH: Is Magna Carta still in the way, or is it primarily scheduling these days?

MP: It’s scheduling. I guess at this point Magna Carta doesn’t seem to be a problem because we haven’t heard a peep from them since we put out the live stuff, so I would assume that they realize that it’s an unwinnable fight, and we’ve gone our separate ways. So that doesn’t seem to be an issue for a future studio album – it really’s just timing. Although me, John and Jordan are on the same schedule, when we have time off from Dream Theater, everybody likes their time off or has other things planned, so who knows.

SH: Aside from the spacey interlude on The Count of Tuscany mirroring LTE’s version of Rhapsody in Blue –

MP: That’s true.

SH: – did the LTE shows have any affect on the writing and recording of Black Clouds and Silver Linings?

MP: No, other than what you just said! *laughs* When we got to the middle of Count of Tuscany, I remember saying that we should have this really cool, spacey, Close to the Edge type of thing, and we had just done that with Rhapsody, and it was like “hey let’s try get something like that into a Dream Theater song.” But other than that particular example that you already cited, I don’t know if it had much influence. I mean the LTE chemistry has long been incorporated into Dream Theater for 10 years now, so it’s naturally just part of the same sort of writing cycle. And even when we wrote Black Clouds, the reality is that it’s mostly me, JP and Jordan, so it’s very much the LTE chemistry that writes the music. And John Myung is there, but he’s more quiet, kind of sitting in the background, whereas me, John and Jordan have this fast chemistry, bouncing ideas and working off of each other. So the LTE chemistry is always there with Dream Theater.

SH: You’ve commented that each new album is a reaction to the previous album, so how is Black Clouds and Silver Linings a reaction to Systematic Chaos?

MP: It’s not a contrast like many in the past. When they’ve been a reaction to the previous album, we usually wanted to go in a different direction. I think this time around, it’s the most similar album to album direction that you’ll see in our catalog. Contrary to what many fans may say, we really enjoyed Systematic Chaos. It’s funny because you only see the fans’ true opinions of CDs once you’re on to the next album. Cause I remember when Chaos came out, everybody’s saying they loved it, that it’s great, and now that Black Clouds is out, everybody’s like “well I really didn’t like Chaos, blah blah blah.” Personally, we in the band really liked where we went with Chaos – we like the heavier side. I mean it’s 2009 and we don’t want to sound like a prog band from the ‘70s. We want to have those elements, but the fact is, we want to stay modern and contemporary. So that heavy sound, like it or hate it, is where we’re at. We want to stay contemporary and I think that’s been a big part of our continued growth and success. I’ll go see the prog bands play NEARfest and they’re great, and I love them, but they’ll play to a couple hundred people a night, whereas Dream Theater’s playing to thousands a night. I think a big part of that is because we stay modern; the metal side is a big part of what has made us successful, so I think we really had a great balance on Chaos of the heavy and the prog, the ups and the downs, and we wanted to continue kind of in that dark and heavy vein with this album, but still have the prog elements and still have the ballads.

SH: I was gonna bring it up later, but since you touched on it, the aggressive vocals in Dream Theater’s music have become much more prominent, especially on the last two albums, which has been a turn off for a significant number of long-time fans, myself included. In the past, you’ve criticized bands such as Metallica and Queensrÿche for going beyond their core sound; could the same thing be said for using these type of vocals in Dream Theater’s music?

MP: Yeah, I understand that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I think my last answer still sums this up as well – we want to stay modern. And it’s not like we’re suddenly getting rid of James’ vocals. These are just touches here and there, and the fact of the matter is that if you have this heavy, Megadeth riff, you don’t want to have a Steve Perry type of clean vocal on top of it. I think you really need something heavy and aggressive. And I think James would be the first to say that my vocals are naturally more aggressive and fit that tone of music better than his do. Anytime he tries to do it, it doesn’t sound convincing.

SH: Even if it was more like the Awake type vocals?

MP: I think James has said that he wasn’t crazy about some of those vocals. I don’t know. I could be wrong there. Anyway, James has never complained about how the vocals work within Dream Theater songs, and there’s a lot of times – believe it or not – where he will encourage me to sing a part. He’ll be like “why don’t you sing this?” Even though we’ll write them and hand them to him, he might say “this would be better for you to do.” For example, that middle section to Prophets of War, he suggested that I do it; it wasn’t like me pushing myself on to it. Ya know, if we’re happy with the way we write, and we’re happy with the way we present our songs and our vocals, then who are the fans to tell us how to do our job? BUT I understand that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Sorry, but that’s what being “progressive” is all about.

SH: That’s true – I can agree with that. But continuing that line of thought just a little bit further, by including these type of vocals and trying to cater to a younger audience –

MP: We’re not trying to cater to a younger audience. We’re not trying to purposefully be cool.

SH: Because I was going to say that it’s almost like selling out in a way.

MP: No no no. We’re not trying to cater to anybody, but the music. Me as the co-producer and writer of a lot of the lyrics and the melodies that I’m singing on, I’m trying to cater to the music. I’m not trying to cater to a younger audience, I’m trying to cater to what I think is best for the music. And that example I put online of A Nightmare to Remember is a perfect example. I thought that what I did was the best for that section. Originally with James’ clean voice, I thought it took away from the drive and the heaviness of that section. Once we tried different things, ultimately at the end of the day, me and John as the producers make the decision on what we think best suits the song and the music, and that may not be everybody’s cup of tea. I know you don’t like those type of vocals, but you know what? I love Machine Head, and I love Slipknot, and I love Opeth. And if I want to incorporate those kind of elements into Dream Theater, it’s my band! *lots of laughs* You go form your own band! *lots of laughs*

SH: Well, it’s too late for that! *laughs* But we won’t have to worry about it, where they would be on 50% of the album.

MP: No – it is what it is.

SH: It will always be an accent kind of thing.

MP: Yeah, it’s an accent. It’s a touch. It’s a sprinkle. But we would never do a full on death metal album – of course not. Just the same way we would never do a full on ballad album. It’s that balance that will always be incredibly important to us, and it’s always a priority.

SH: Fair enough. You’ve mentioned that Dream Theater stays in the studio as long as it takes to write and record an album. Has it ever taken longer than you planned on?

MP: *thinking* No. Usually when we’re writing the songs, we have a very open schedule. When we’re in the writing mode, we don’t know exactly when we’re going to finish it, and we just let the writing naturally take it’s course. Once we feel that we’ve written everything, then we go into tracking mode which is when we’ll pinpoint an end date. And you need to have an end date, or else you’ll just work forever. There’s that expression “an artist’s work is never truly finished, it’s just abandoned,” and it’s the truth. Unless we had a deadline, we’d still be in the studio tweaking. But we’ve never found ourselves in a situation where we couldn’t make the deadline. I myself am very organized, anal and meticulous in terms of keeping things on schedule everyday, discussing with the rest of the guys what the next day’s work will be. So luckily we’re very organize, responsible people and we’ve never had a problem staying on whatever schedule we’ve given ourselves.

SH: Has there ever been any songs that you’ve found difficult to write as a band, or at least when you’re in the middle of it, you wonder “how do we go from here?”

MP: Very rarely – knock on wood. We have a really great chemistry when we write. We’ve never ran into walls. I can’t think of any. Usually when we’re writing, the ideas are there, and we’ll have a list of all the ideas that have been thrown on the table, and it’s a matter of organizing. Usually the problem is wrapping it up. The problem has never been finding how to end it, the problem has always been “how do we get all these ideas in?”

SH: …so that it fits.

MP: Yeah. It’s always been very, very smooth – never been an issue.

SH: Has there every been any songs, complete or incomplete, or sections of songs that have been discarded in the studio, never to be heard.

MP: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Every album has dozens of sections that never made the final –

SH: Like a section where John [Petrucci] was using a sitar during the Octavarium sessions as seen photos from then?

MP: Well, every album has hours of jams and stuff that never got fully utilized or tapped into. Every minute that we play in the studio, I record. So there’s hours worth of jamming and ideas that come and go and we never utilized. But then there’s also a list of a good dozen or so of ideas that are developed progressions, riffs or whatever that we put on the riffentory list and ultimately never found a home. And are you gonna ask “would you ever consider going back to some of them”? We’ve never had a lack of ideas, so when we’re making a new record, we’ve almost never said “let’s go back to that riff from the previous album sessions” because we have so many current ones. One example though –

SH: The Glass Prison?

MP: No – I Walk Beside You was originally a riff and a progression that was written during Train of Thought. While writing Train of Thought, we stumbled upon that riff [starts reciting the beat and melody of IWBY found at the beginning of the song] So we started jamming on it, and we were like “this is great – this could be a great tune.” But it was not at all in line with the direction of Train of Thought. So I just put it in my CD folder and when we started making Octavarium, I said “hey remember that really cool U2-vibe song that we abandoned?” and we went back and pulled it out, and then turned it into I Walk Beside You. So that’s a rare exception to where we would actually go back to a previous session.

Rai Beardsley: What about Puppies on Acid?

MP: Well Puppies on Acid was written while we were in tour rehearsals or on tour during Images and Words. We wrote it in a rehearsal one day, and knew that we ultimately wanted to turn it into something. So it wasn’t like we started Awake and went back and said “oh let’s get that riff.” When we wrote it for the Images tour, and started playing it on the tour, we knew it would eventually become something on Awake.

SH: Didn’t you say that you had come up with that riff for The Glass Prison during the Falling Into Infinity sessions?

MP: No it was from the Scenes From a Memory sessions – I think. It was the [recites riff beginning at 1:45] Yeah, that’s another example. I can’t get anything past you guys! *laughs*

RB: With three of us in the room, you know you’re in trouble. *laughs*

MP: Yeah – this is the most anal interview I’ll do all year! *lots of laughs*

SH: And is it safe to assume that we’ll never hear these compiled on a CD, kinda like what Neal Morse has done or –

MP: You know I say “never say never” but no plans. It’s just the same as when we’re writing new music. There’s always just so much new stuff that we’ve never had the need to look back, but I never say never.

SH: How did you like writing Black Clouds without an inspiration corner?

MP: I thought it was good – I thought it really helped keep us in Dream Theater-land, where I think we were most inspired and influenced by Dream Theater on this record. If there were any albums that we looked back towards, it wasn’t Muse, Opeth, Radiohead, Metallica or whatever, it was Images and Words, Awake and A Change of Seasons. We influenced ourselves more than ever on this album. But it was a conscious decision to not bring in other bands while writing, because I’ve seen the criticism, how this song sounds to much like this band, how that song sounds too much like that band. So it was a conscious decision to get away from that.

SH: I know that this is a long way off in the future, but do you see that being something that you’ll do again in the future, with the next album or beyond?

MP: What, having –

SH: Not having an inspiration corner.

MP: Yeah, I think [not having an inspiration corner] worked really well on this album.

SH: How did Wither come about, since John Petrucci is the only one with a writing credit on it?

MP: That’s his song, no two ways about it. He came in one day and played on the piano, actually. He doesn’t really know how to play piano, but he knows how to construct block chords, so he sat down and showed Jordan these kind of block chords, and sang the melody. He said “this is something I have” and we were like “oh yeah, this is really nice. Let’s turn this into a song.” And it was such a simple song, we didn’t want to mess with it. There was no reason why we should “Dream Theater-ize” it. It was a strong melody, a strong chord progression. John had a real good vision of the kind of tonality it should cover. So there was no reason to mess with it. We were like “let’s just do it. And you [JP] will get the full credit – we don’t need to pretend that we wrote this with you, because we didn’t.” It was really something he had, and we brought it to life.

SH: So it wasn’t like he had a demo that he brought from home?

MP: No – he brought in the chords and the melody, and then we brought it to life as a band, but we didn’t really add or change anything to it that would justify us getting any writing credit. And then me and him as producers inevitably orchestrated it together and had ideas on how to orchestrate it – put this here and put that there. And just so you know – this will probably become common knowledge soon enough anyway. We recorded another song during the sessions that nobody knows about. We did a piano/vocal version of Wither, and it’s a completely different recording – just piano and vocals. Because when John originally presented it on the piano and the melodies had a really cool Peter Gabriel/Sarah McLachlan kind of vibe. So all along the idea was to do a metal band version for the album, but a piano/vocal version for a B-side. And there’s gonna be a Wither download single coming out, which is the album version, the piano version, the JP demo vocal version and then my demo vocal version of The Best of Times. But John’s vocal version of Wither is basically our tracks, and then he sang down the melody for James to learn. The same is the case with The Best of Times where it’s the band version with me just doing the vocals for James to learn.

RB: Isn’t that on the drum DVD?

MP: Yes.

SH: You had mentioned how it is primarily you, John Petrucci and Jordan that do the writing – what are your feelings on James and John Myung not having much input in the band, especially in the writing scenario, and does that bother you at all?

MP: Two things – first of all, I wish people would not blame me, or John or anybody for other member’s lack of contributions. The door and the floor is always open for anybody to contribute. So if John Myung is not writing lyrics, or James is not present while we write, don’t blame me! Everybody’s free to do what they want. But then that brings me to my second point – the chemistry works this way. I think we really have a chemistry and a procedure that works for us, so I really wish the fans wouldn’t question it or second guess it or doubt it. If John Myung wants to write, go ahead, just present them in a lyrical fashion. James – if he wants to be present, then he can be, but the reality is, the chemistry works this way. The reality is, James isn’t needed there. He’s not really going to change the music – he’s just basically gonna be another body in the room – and frankly, with the less bodies in the room, the smoother it’s gonna be. If you have a room full of people that aren’t contributing or aren’t saying anything, it just makes it more difficult to move on. But with that being said, he’s always welcome. However, if this is the way it works, then the chemistry is great.

SH: So even the point on Octavarium and Systematic Chaos where you started pushing for James to be in the studio –

MP: Well we found with Octavarium and Chaos, when James was around it was good for the comradery, no question about it. It was good for him to see and understand what we were doing and take it in to internalize it. But the reality is, he didn’t really have any impact on the music. We would write 99.9% of it without any influence, and then he might .1% comment here or there, but it didn’t have any impact on what we were doing creatively. So we found this time, if he’s not around, it’s okay – we’re not gonna hold it against him, we’re not gonna be mad at him about it. We’ve said to each other “this is the way it works” so if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.

SH: You mentioned that when doing the LTE shows, you were elevated to a whole new musical level with Tony. So that kind of suggests that you wish it was more of a permanent situation. Comments?

MP: No – we would never want to do LTE full time in the same way that I would never want to do TransAtlantic full time. I think Dream Theater is the ultimate chemistry and the ultimate vehicle for all our creative outlets. LTE and TransAtlantic are…I think the old saying “it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” applies here. And even with LTE, it’s a very different way of writing – you’re writing instrumentally. That’s fun and exciting, but at the end of the day, I think we all want to be a band with a vocalist and songs. Even when we were looking for James 20 years ago, for a little while we were contemplating being an instrumental band. And we realized that we didn’t want to be a Dixie Dregs or Return to Forever. We wanted to be an Iron Maiden or a Rush. We wanted to be a band with a singer, a frontman with songs and lyrics. So the LTE thing is really fun musically, but it would never be as fully musically satisfying as Dream Theater is.

SH: How did you go about picking what cover songs to record in the studio? Do you envision recording more covers in the studio in the future?

MP: I would love to do more – I mean I have in my head a list of hundreds of covers and I’ve gotten to do so many of them between Dream Theater full albums, one-offs, tribute bands, the ones I’ve done with Neal [Morse] and now TransAtlantic. So I have this list that eventually get worked through, and when it came time to come up with bonus material for this album, I didn’t want to repeat the 5.1 mix and I didn’t want to repeat the DVD that we did for Chaos, so I had this idea to do some covers in the studio. And out of that list of dozens of songs, these are the six that came out – well five since one of them already existed. These songs were on that list and I thought would be good.

SH: So you envision this being something that you’ll do again in the future?

MP: Yeah I surely would love to do it again. It was fun – I think we had a fun time doing it. One thing I won’t try to do is keep it secret though. *laughs* I’ve learned that’s impossible. Like with the TransAtlantic bonus disc that we just announced a couple days ago, I didn’t even consider keeping it secret. I thought it would be out of control, so let’s just announce it. *more laughs*

SH: Are there any plans for your old label to release remastered versions of all your older albums from Images and Words thru Octavarium?

MP: That’s a Rhino question once again. It has to do with their budget and the CD industry that’s going down the tubes. I don’t know how fruitful they’ll be in the future, but we’ll see. But that wouldn’t be at the top of my list.

RB: Did you hear about the Japanese ones? [Mike shakes his head no] There’s Japanese remasters.

MP: Really?

RB: Yeah.

SH: They were done on some sort of high quality materials or something.

MP: Done without any of our input obviously. I didn’t even know about it. That wouldn’t be at the top of my list, because those records – other than When Dream and Day Unite, which we have no control over – were made in the CD age. I think they stand up fairly well, unlike the Beatles remasters which were desperately needing to happen. I think anything that we’ve produced from Images and Words forward, I think we did a fairly good job with them.

SH: What are your feelings on the Mirror – is it a prelude to the 12 Step Suite or –

MP: No – not officially. It surely covers a similar topic and lyrical thread. It’s all about resistance to temptation and addiction, so yeah – but it’s not an official prequel. Surely it was foreshadowing that lyrical subject matter. Absolutely. Which is why I even named one of the sections “Reflections of Reality Revisited” because it was tying into the Mirror.

SH: So would you be willing to divulge whether it will be included when you do the 12 Step Suite live?

MP: No – definitely not.

SH: When you do the 12 Step Suite live, do you envision doing it at all the shows, or do you envision doing it at shows here and there?

MP: Well, I can never be sure, so I don’t want to tie myself to anything, but at this moment, I envision doing it consistently, so that everybody can see it. I don’t think it would be a one-night thing filmed for a DVD. I picture doing it so most of the audiences around the world can experience it at least once in their lifetime.

SH: So it wouldn’t be just in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Paris…

MP: I don’t think so.

SH: When writing the Shattered Fortress, was there any debate over how much of the music from the previous tracks should be repeated?

MP: No debate – it came out really smoothly. But me, John, John and Jordan sat down and listened to the 4 previous songs back to back, which I think might have been the first time ever that we actually sat down and listened to the 4 of them, and we all made notes on musical themes, progressions, melodies and lyrics that should definitely make a final appearance in the final chapter. But putting it together was like anything else – it came together really smooth. We had our list of this, this and this from This Dying Soul, this, this and this from Glass Prison, and it just came together like magic.

SH: Very cool. With the self imposed limitations the band put on being on the road for no more than 4 or 5 weeks at a time, and with many cities in North America being regularly passed over, has there ever been any consideration to extending the North American leg of the tour and then splitting it apart with a week or two break in the middle.

MP: Like we did in Europe? Yeah, we have talked about and considered it, but there’s so many factors. And in this case, financially it’s very expensive to put a 10-day hole in the middle of a tour, where you have crew guys that you need to put on retainer, you have trucks and busses and lights and audio and video that are just gonna sit in a truck for 10 days. And those are 10 days that you’re not playing shows and making money, so realistically, yeah it looks great on paper, but if you were to talk to our manager, he could tell you why financially it would be impossible. So at this point, we gotta do the best we can to hit all the markets, and if we can’t get to them on one leg, then we try to get to them on the next leg.

SH: Gotcha. In the last interview I read in the New Voice fanzine, you had mentioned wanting to make ProgNation a 5-band festival bill, and yet both the North American and European tours feature 4 bands.

MP: Once again, it’s another – mainly financial – logistical nightmare. At the start of this tour, in all the meetings I had with our booking agent, I was pushing for a 5-band thing that would start at 3 in the afternoon. And once again, there’s just so many behind the scenes reasons why those things are so much harder to implement than they appear on paper. Adding a fifth band on this tour is another bus, another 10 people you have to feed each day at catering – we pay for all the catering. Then there’s all the union fees – that means that load-in is gonna have to be that much earlier, the local hands at every show… It just gets harder and harder and harder, the more bands you have on the bill. There’s a million reasons why it is difficult. And believe me, my agent and my manager were trying to make Progressive Nation 3 bands. I put my foot down and said it’s gotta be at least four. I mean the Queensrÿche show in Maryland was a one-off example, but it’s a very big expense to do a tour like that. To be honest with you, this is the first tour in a very long time where we’re not making money – we’re breaking even. In addition to ticket sales being really light this summer – for every tour – which surely hurt us, we’re paying Zappa a lot of money and all of the other bands and the catering, the union fees and blah blah blah. At the end of the day, it would be way more financially feasible to do an evening with tour and just pocket the money ourselves. But to me, I want to offer something more to the fans. And I know that’s a debate – I know a lot of people would prefer an evening with – it would make more sense for it to be an evening with, but those 3 hour shows are tough on us.

SH: Speaking of the evening with shows, would you ever consider doing a tour where you do part of a set semi-acoustically, similar to how you did the Home for the Holidays shows in 1998 to maybe lighten things up a bit so that you could catch your breath?

MP: You know, that’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that for the “catching your breath” factor, but it does make sense. Yeah. I saw the thread wondering if we would ever do a tour like that again. Even for those shows, for those of you around back then when we did them, they were met with skepticism. Now a lot of people can see the DVD and say that was cool and awesome. But I remember at those shows having to take the mic and say “look – if you came for Pull Me Under and Metropolis, leave now – we’re not doing them.” And I remember a lot of people bitching and moaning “I went and saw Dream Theater and all they did was sit there and play all these songs I never heard before.” So yeah, the hardcore fans wanna hear the B-sides like Where Are You Now and covers like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but the majority of fans coming to see Dream Theater weren’t digging it. They went away kind of disappointed. So we can never win. *laughs*

SH: Well, the mini-set might be kind of a cool compromise.

MP: Yes, within an evening with that wouldn’t be a bad idea.

SH: So maybe we will see an evening with tour eventually?

MP: I will definitely go on record and say that at one point in our career in the future, we will do an evening tour again. It’s not out of the question. It’s just that we needed a break from it.

SH: Fair enough. What have the highlights been for this tour?

MP: Oh that’s an easy answer – just watching Zappa every night. Frank is my biggest hero of all time. Really for me it’s Zappa and the Beatles, and to be able to watch Zappa every night has been truly awesome.

SH: One last thing, how does this Progressive Nation tour stack up against last year’s?

MP: They’re different. Last year was very metal, this year’s is way more prog. And I remember last year’s thing with Opeth and Between the Buried and Me, people were saying “this is so metal!” And I knew that it wasn’t always going to be just that or only this, and this year’s line up ended up being less metal and more prog. It just goes to show the diversity of the term progressive. If and when there’s another Progressive Nation down the road, it could go either way – who knows? In the same way that Dream Theater can play with Yes and with Megadeth, I think the same could be said for our opening acts. We could tour with Zappa or we could tour with Opeth.

SH: Well, thanks very much Mike!

Very special thanks to Mike for allowing me to do the interview on quite a busy show day and to Ro (not to be confused with Mike’s drum tech Ho) from the road crew who put up with the extending of the interview!