The Minister For Industry

A year after his traumatic departure from two bands, Mike Portnoy is back with a brace of supergroups. Rich Wilson talks to the drumming deity about life after Dream Theater.

You wouldn’t believe what I’m doing right now and I really wish you could see what’s going on,” laughs Mike Portnoy down the phone, sounding out of breath and unusually flustered. “Dream Theater have sent back all of my drums from the last 25 years which have been in their storage. So we’re out behind my house and my life is flashing before me. It’s all very nice and nostalgic but I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with all this stuff. You have to figure that for each tour, I had multiple kits. As if one of those massive kits wasn’t enough, you have to times that by two or three, and then that multiplied by six or seven tours. So it’s pretty insane.”

In spite of such wistful and probably painful visible reminders of past musical triumphs, it’s a relief to find that Portnoy has – superficially at least – returned to his buoyant, optimistic self. Effectively left musically homeless at the end of 2010 following his resignation from Dream Theater and subsequent departure from Avenged Sevenfold, the drummer recalls that he found solace through his family and by working with Neal Morse during those shady times when uncertainty prevailed and he became the target for open abuse by some disillusioned fans.

“I surrounded myself with Neal’s tremendously positive spirit, which was a good thing for me,” Portnoy says. “So we did his Testimony 2 album and a couple of other projects right off the bat. Neal has such a calming and positive spirit that was just very, very good for me on a personal and musical level at that time. This particular summer, I was also able to spend a good amount of time with my family, enjoying sitting by the pool and having barbeques. That’s not to say that I wasn’t itching to go on the road as well. You might think that my wife would be one to say ‘Hey, now that you don’t have Dream Theater you should relax and stay home awhile.’ But actually, she’s been the one who has been so supportive of me and any time that the phone rings she wants me to go for it, which has been really great to have that support in my life.”

Not that Portnoy needed much pushing. With an incessant love for music and a personality which he readily admits to being “obsessive compulsive”, it came as no surprise when news of his multiple new projects broke over the internet.

“Oh yeah, I need to work and I have to stay busy,” he agrees. “You can only imagine that once I didn’t have Dream Theater in my life how I was champing at the bit to fill up my time with a million other things. I saw a lot of people posting online like ‘I thought you left Dream Theater because you wanted a break’, but my intention was not to take a break from music, or from working or being creative. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. I just needed a break from the Dream Theater machine.”

It transpires that the first of these projects, Flying Colors, had already been planned and musicians enlisted well before his departure from Dream Theater, and with Portnoy combining with Neal Morse, Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs/Deep Purple) and Dave LaRue (Dixie Dregs), it’s obvious why the project has garnered so much interest.

“The whole Flying Colors concept basically stemmed from Neal and Steve starting work together,” he recalls. “Then, once we had the four of us, we wanted to get a separate singer as all along we knew Neal was going to be more of a supporting player. I brought up the idea of Casey McPherson because I had been a friend and fan of Casey’s for years now and loved his work in Endochine and Alpha Rev. It’s really hard to put my finger on it musically though, as every song has a very different style to it and it’s something that’s unlike Neal, Steve, Dave or myself have ever done. It’s more song-oriented, alternative pop with a progressive edge. On top of that, it was great to have Peter Collins producing, as he has produced so many great Rush albums as well as the classic Queensrÿche albums like Operation: Mindcrime and Empire.”

It’s intriguing to watch Portnoy embark on an assortment of projects which are all far-removed from his past. Even the much-heralded Adrenaline Mob – which features Portnoy teaming up with Symphony X frontman Russell Allen – owed more to such metal luminaries as Black Sabbath or Judas Priest than the progressive, neo-classical metal that many were expecting. With Adrenaline Mob now set to release an album, Portnoy stresses that deliberately exploring music that’s far away from Dream Theater has been key to his current happiness.

“Everything I am doing is purposely very different, as if I wanted to keep doing what Dream Theater do then I’d still be in Dream Theater,” he asserts. “I wanted to explore other things musically with different types of singers, instrumentation and musical influences. Although I love progressive metal and it’s a huge part of my background it’s not the only thing I do. Now it’s about exploring different territory and different sides of my musical tastes, which are incredibly broad. Adrenaline Mob isn’t a prog metal thing and as long as people go in understanding that, then it’s a tremendously powerful album. We did a little touring in America and everybody in the band is a full-on performer. It was the first time that I’ve ever been on stage and I felt like I was the least animated person in the band.”

Another of those musical influences Portnoy refers to is 70s-era classic rock, with bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Whitesnake all a prevalent portion of his musical psyche. Keen to tap into that, Portnoy recently joined with former Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy and Blue Murder guitarist John Sykes, for a proposed side-project that now seems to have petered out. Undeterred, he’s also teamed up with bassist Billy Sheehan (Mr Big), guitarist Tony MacAlpine and former Dream Theater and current Black Country Communion keyboard player Derek Sherinian for live appearances at a handful of drum shows.

“I thought it would be cool to put together an instrumental band and this was the line up that came to mind. So we’re going to do a couple of these shows and while we are together, we’re going to film a DVD as well. It’s probably going to be a lot of covers and jamming as it’s not going to be a real band in terms of writing original material, although who knows if something like that could develop in the future? It will be the type of fusion prog stuff Bill Bruford played with Allan Holdsworth, and I’m sure the four of us will be able to tap into some serious playing.”

There are also strong hopes that Transatlantic will record a new album in 2012, although Portnoy explains that this will be reliant on finding a suitable time-slot in which the band can reconvene to write and record.

“There are still a lot of things that could come up and Transatlantic is one of them,” Mike explains. “Transatlantic is merely between albums at this point and all four of us have openly stated that we would love to continue working together. There are rumblings of trying to fit it into each of our schedules and get another album going in 2012. If and when that album comes out, we can hit the road possibly at the end of 2012 or early 2013. So that’s really a fourth band in the mix.”

For all his foibles, it remains hard not to have a huge amount of sympathy for the position Portnoy found himself in a year ago. With his idealistic vision that Dream Theater would share his yearning for a break backfiring when the rest of the band called his bluff and carried on without him, the public baring of war scars that followed was messy. Yet it’s apparent that this is a year which will see him busy – and, as a natural consequence, undeniably happy.

“It’s absolutely about having fun,” he laughs. “It’s not about money for me because I could have been financially secure for the rest of my life if I’d just continued riding the Dream Theater machine. When I decided to leave, with that choice went a lot of security and stability which I could have rode for the rest of my life. But for me it’s not about that. It’s about being artistically and creatively inspired to do new things and sometimes that means you have to take a chance and walk away from security to follow your dreams. Sometimes you have to roll the dice and go for it. So everything I’m doing right now has everything to do with fun and wanting to spread my wings. I do realise that I’m doing this for the love of music and I’m hoping as many fans stay on board with me as possible. I love the Dream Theater fans and my fans who have supported me through everything that I’ve done. I’m just hoping they stay along for the rest of the ride because there are surely some great things to come...”