Originally published in Drum! magazine 198 · December 2012
Blake Richardson interview (excerpts)
Interview1 min read
Richardson never left home without his treasured compilation tape of solos by his drumming discoveries: “Dennis Chambers was on there, Simon Phillips, Neil Peart – I was always a big Rush fan. Then a friend of mine showed me a band called Dream Theater, who had a record called When Dream And Day Unite. I fell in love with that record and I got all their back catalog. I was a total fan of Dream Theater, just great players.”
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“I remember the first show of our tour with Dream Theater years ago, in Mexico City. The show was sold out – 10,000 people! It was the very first show on the tour, and the biggest show I’d ever played in my whole life. Well, the Dream Theater guys said, ‘You’ve got to play the whole Colors record,’ so it was like an hour-long opening set – we played the whole record!”
He laughs.
“Oh, I was nervous, I had the jitters. But that show was a turning point in our career: We were finally getting some deeper recognition for what we were trying to accomplish as a band. A lot of people who saw that tour didn’t know who we were, but they were very, very welcoming. And we got a lot of fans from that.”