Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

Banter Zine: Would you say then that you’ve kind of relinquished that kind of control with Adrenaline Mob?

Mike Portnoy: Yeah. I think with Dream Theater, it was very, very important for me to have that kind of control in the later years, because it almost broke us up in the early years. In the early years, we lived under this false democracy where we pretended everybody did everything equally, but the truth was there was one or two guys that made most of the decisions, and the rest of the time we just argued about everything. After ten years of that, it wears you down and could easily break up a band. So I think the later years of Dream Theater, it was important for somebody to run the ship, and it ran smoothly. Actually, it was very smooth sailing for a long time, but it also wore me down. It was a lot of work, a tremendous amount of work and pressure that admittedly was self-imposed, but it’s just the way that the ship ran. Anyway, I was only like that with Dream Theater because it was a 25-year investment, and after that much time you become very protective over your baby. We had times where record companies or management or lawyers or whatever were putting their two cents into everything and it’s what almost broke up the band. So taking control was important.