Mike Portnoy interview

Nadine Swiger: You guys are out right now currently with Iron Maiden and tonight [is] actually an off night where you guys are headlining. Have you guys been doing many like off nights like that?

Mike Portnoy: The whole tour with Iron Maiden’s like six weeks. I think we have four club shows in between; it was Portland, Columbus, Buffalo and now tonight here in Worcester. Just four and that’s it.

NS: Playing with Iron Maiden – how cool – and there’s two more days and you guys play the Garden with them; how excited are you?

MP: Well twofold: on one level, we love playing with Maiden. They’re one of our biggest influences. We grew up with them. We’ve done so many shows with them throughout the years, but they were mostly over in Europe, so it’s nice to finally actually be doing a full-blown tour with them here in North America. So that’s one side of it, and then the other side is actually playing the Garden – that in itself is going to be a total dream come true. I mean we’re a New York band and we’ve gone up the ladder from the Limelight to Irving Plaza to the Beacon Theatre to Roseland to Radio City Music Hall, and now the final stop is Madison Square Garden, so it’s really like completing the New York checklist for us.

NS: Opening for Iron Maiden, it’s got to be a challenge to come up with a setlist because you guys usually play for a long time. How long of a set do you get with them and how did you come up with your setlist for it?

MP: With Maiden we’re playing a 50 minute setlist. Normally I write a different setlist for every show when we’re on a normal Dream Theater tour, but in the case of opening for Maiden, I wanted to write one setlist that was just the perfect setlist aimed at their audience. I wanted to write something that was kind of a crash course in the metal side of Dream Theater. I didn’t want to mix it up from night to night; I wanted to come up with that perfect formula and then just play it every night. Basically I stuck to the metal side of the band and the stuff that was a little bit easier to swallow, more accessible. It’s kind of like Dream Theater’s greatest hits that never were; all the ones that we’ve done videos for: ‘Constant Motion’, ‘A Rite of Passage’, ‘Pull Me Under’. So it’s that side of the of the band.

NS: How’s that been received?

MP: It’s been great – playing to Maiden’s crowd could be very intimidating because their fans are truly hardcore. I would say there’s only a handful of bands in the world that have such a devoted fan base, and Maiden is one of them, Metallica’s another. When you play to a Maiden audience, everybody wears Iron Maiden shirts! When you go to a Dream Theater show, you’ll see people wearing Dream Theater shirts, but then the audience want to mix it up – they’ll wear a Pain Of Salvation shirt or Symphony X shirt – they want to show their variety of tastes. When you go to a Maiden show, everybody wears a Maiden shirt, so it’s very intimidating when we’re on stage playing to a sea of Maiden shirts, especially because they let their fan club in first; so usually the first 10, 20 rows are the most hardcore Maiden fans there are right. So it’s intimidating, but I would say that I think we’re doing real well. In fact, their crew guys have said that we’re going over better than any band that’s ever toured with them. So I guess it helps when we have a lot of our fan base also coming to help strengthen the pot. But it’s been good. I think we’re making a lot of new fans out of out of their fans.

NS: And they’re one of your influences, too.

MP: Absolutely. When we formed Dream Theater 25 years ago, it was Maiden and Rush – those were the two big ones for us – and we wanted Dream Theater to be a combination of the two.

NS: Of course you’re with Iron Maiden; have you played with Rush?

MP: No. That’s one of the remaining goals on the checklist.

NS: [turning to the camera] Well, if anyone knows Rush who’s watching, there you go.

MP: Well I know Rush, but they’re not gonna let us do it. They’ve been doing the ‘Evening With’s’ and touring by themselves for many, many, many years. They’re not interested in having another band out with them.

NS: Almost every year you guys have put out something – especially I think it was the last nine years consecutively and then there’s like a few off nights. Do you guys have anything planned like a live thing or anything for this year?

MP: No, we’ve done live releases for I believe five out of the last six studio albums, ever since Falling Into Infinity and Once in a LIVEtime back in ‘97, ‘98. Basically we’ve done that every time, with the exception of one album. So it’s time to make another exception and break the chain just because I hate doing the same thing and following the same pattern and being predictable. So after so many cycles of that, I think this time I didn’t want to do something.

NS: You also do DVD instructional videos; do you have anything like that in the works too or thinking of doing anything like that?

MP: No, the last instructional DVD I did was about three years ago and it was a seven hour, three disc set, so I think I really blew my load with that one. I think that should cover my drumming for a while.

NS: You’re a big fan [of] bootlegs and you do your own bootlegs in Dream Theater; as a matter of fact you put some up for download on your site for people, so is it purchased?

MP: Well, we have our own official bootleg label, and through the years we’ve released 15, 20 titles from my archives, and I’ll put out three or four titles per year. I’ve been doing that for many years.

NS: Is it like a drum cam?

MP: Oh no no! That’s a whole separate thing. I’m talking about for Dream Theater, but then my own personal store, the last I think five or six Dream Theater albums, I’ve put out drum cam DVDs – the making of the drum parts for each of them. I’ve had four different cover bands, and that’s all available on my site as well. So between those that I do for my own site and the ones I do for Dream Theater, there’s just dozens and dozens of titles that aren’t even available in stores.

NS: When you brought up some of your cover bands, there’s Hail—

MP: Well I guess Hail makes five actually. [laughs]

NS: Do you want to talk about the other ones? There’s a Beatles one, right?

MP: I did a Beatles tribute band, a Zeppelin tribute, Who and Rush – those are the four tribute bands that I did together with Paul Gilbert on guitar. Those were kind of one-off projects that I did, but since then I’ve made them available on CD and DVD.

NS: And then Hail is kind of like a super group where you guys just kind of getting together – is that what that is?

MP: Well Hail was something I was invited to do. It wasn’t something that I put together, so I was just basically hired to join them for some shows, and it was a tremendous amount of fun, but basically it was David Ellefson, Ripper Owens and Andreas Kisser from Sepultura. Hail is something that’s kind of a classic metal or thrash tribute band, and they kind of have this revolving door of musicians. I was honored to have been one of the drummers to walk through that revolving door.

NS: You were Rolling Stone’s eight – was it seven?

Elle Tourjman: Eighth greatest drummer of all time. That’s what you were voted as.

MP: [joking] That’s f***ing bulls***! You mean to tell me there’s seven people that were voting ahead of me?! [laughs] The drum polls that I’ve been completely blessed to have won through the years are tremendously flattering. These poll lists surely are just subjective and they’re just people’s opinions, but it’s nice to be held in such high regard. What can I say? If anything it scares me. It feels like I have these expectations that are put on me now. I just wanna play drums – I don’t want to like have to prove anything. I want to just play and have fun, so it’s kind of scary, but it’s nice. Thank you.

NS: Well it doesn’t seem like you have to prove too much; you’ve already proved yourself.

MP: No, but then there’s people that are like, “Oh, this guy was on this!” and “He’s in the Modern Drummer hall of fame! He better be good!” So every time I play, I feel like, “Oh God! How do I possibly meet up to these expectations?” I just want to play!

NS: When it comes to tribute stuff, I’ve heard that Dream Theater’s done some special shows in the past where after your set, you do some kind of tribute.

MP: We had a tradition when we were doing ‘An Evening With Dream Theater’ a couple years ago; the tradition when we played two nights in the same city [was] the second night we would cover a classic album in its entirety, and we’ve done that four times now. We did Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast, Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Deep Purple’s Made in Japan. All four of those have been put out on our official bootleg site, so you can check them all out.

NS: Do you have any others planned?

MP: Well, we’re not doing the ‘Evening With Dream Theater’ tour right now. If and when we go back out as ‘An Evening With Dream Theater’ and we do a two-night stand, then yeah, we’ll continue that tradition. But as of now there’s no tours like that in the works at the moment.

NS: You did a thing with Avenged Sevenfold when their drummer passed away unfortunately, and you jumped in to help them out. How did that all come about?

MP: They asked me. After the Rev died I had been in touch with M. Shadows, their singer, and just told him how shocked and saddened I was, and said if there’s anything I could do for you guys, let me know. I wasn’t talking musically, I was just talking personally. And then sure enough, a few weeks later, they called and asked if I would do the album. I was honored to have been asked, I was glad that they wanted to make the record and move on, and I was more than happy to do whatever it took to help them out.

NS: So you’re friends with them then, too?

MP: Now I’m especially good friends with them. I mean now I’m part of the family, but before the Rev died, I had been in touch with M. Shadows and with the Rev – just via e-mails and texts and stuff like that. They were big Dream Theater fans – Matt and Jimmy – so they always talked about Dream Theater in the press. Me and those guys kind of just kind of became friends from that.

NS: There’s not a lot of information that I found about [Nightmare] – I know they were in the middle of doing stuff for the album. Was that already starting to be recorded and then you took up from there or the writing process?

MP: No, the whole album was written when Jimmy was alive and they had just done demos for the songs with Jimmy playing electronic drums. They were about to begin properly recording the album and recording the drum tracks when the Rev died. So I ended up playing on the whole album, but it was written and Jimmy had done the demos before he had died.

NS: I saw where they’re actually releasing those demos too for the fans.

MP: Really! I would be shocked over that.

NS: I could be wrong. I believe it was on their Myspace page and saying there was a limited amount.

MP: Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. That’s news to me. I had thought that those demos were definitely gonna be kept under lock and key, but maybe you’re right.