Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

At present – and for over a year now – Portnoy’s top priority has been The Winery Dogs. When he left Dream Theater in 2010, Portnoy said goodbye to the big stage productions and playing to several thousand people a night, but he’s back on track with a full-time band with The Winery Dogs. Portnoy makes it clear that even though he’s had to re-start from scratch, it hasn’t been the ordeal some people might expect.

“It’s a lot less work for me personally because with Dream Theater, I did it all. I wore 30 different hats so it was a huge weight to carry. In The Winery Dogs I’m not the ‘leader’, the three of us carry the responsibilities equally, so it’s a lot less work. In fact everything I’m doing now is a lot less work. I guess it balances out because I could wear 30 hats in one band, or I could wear six hats in five different bands.”

Being a part of The Winery Dogs has put Portnoy in the position of writing and playing clean, compact songs far and away from his prog rock / metal foundations. Call it a personal gripe, but there are albums in the Dream Theater catalogue over the past 15 years where the band meanders through prog metal paradise seemingly with no destination in site. It was as if they’d forgotten how to write songs, and Portnoy was part of that equation. He’s now feeding a much different animal.

“I’m as much of a fan of Van Halen as I am of Rush, so I felt that after 25 years of Dream Theater that I’d said everything I wanted to say with that type of band,” says Portnoy. “I needed other outlets because as a music fan I go way beyond what Dream Theater is. I needed to do different things, and Avenged Sevenfold and Adrenaline Mob scratched that certain itch for the heavier side of me. Transatlantic provides for the prog side of me, and Flying Colors is for the part of me that like Coldplay, U2, The Beatles and Muse. The Winery Dogs gives me my classic rock outlet. I needed to explore certain things, and one of those things was simpler songwriting. I think if you look at everything I’ve done post-Dream Theater other than Transatlantic, the focus has been on writing compact, memorable songs. They were different genres but the focus was always the same.”

“As time goes on your taste changes and sometimes you grow out of a certain type of music, so I get what you’re saying. You don’t want to eat the same meal at the same restaurant for the rest of your life.”

Portnoy is gracious in addressing the subject of his ongoing sobriety, a question brought up because of the amount of touring he’s been doing over the last several years. More than a few musicians who managed to beat the bottle have fallen off the wagon due to the mind-numbing hurry-up-and-wait nature of being on the road. Boredom = beer or something stronger if one isn’t careful.

“When I first got sober 14 years ago it was a struggle,” Portnoy admits. “I had to work diligently at it for the first couple years from day to day. I had to go to meetings every day, I had to talk to my sponsor every day, and it was difficult because it was a huge adjustment in my life. We had to get rid of all the alcohol backstage and on the bus and in the hotel rooms, but it’s 14 years later and if I can survive touring with Avenged Sevenfold, I can survive anything (laughs). I still have to think about it because if I don’t keep in in check I could slip like anybody else, but I think 14 years of sobriety has given me the tools to be able to survive out here on tour.”