Mike Portnoy interview

Mike Portnoy: Hey what’s up? This is Mike Portnoy here to share with you my personal real-life ‘Spinal Tap’ moment. It’s hard to pick just one, because everything that happened in that movie happens every single day on tour. I remember seeing Spinal Tap when it came out – I think it was ‘84 or ‘85. Saw in the theater and I thought it was a real documentary; I didn’t realize it was a “mockumentary”. It might have been one of the first mockumentaries there was, so it took a while to even realize it wasn’t real. But through the years of touring, every single thing like that has happened: not finding the dressing room, can’t find the stage from the dressing room, falling off stage. I’ve fallen off stage before, I stopped the show and got into the audience after hecklers. I mean everything. The one that comes to mind though was [in] 1997. I was in Munich, Germany; it was the last song of the set. I just bit off more than I could chew with a fill; I just thought I was Superman, and I was gonna do the fastest fill ever and I just went around the toms. The next thing I knew, it felt like a muscle cramp, and I looked down and my wrist was completely twisted the opposite direction. The palm of my hand was literally facing up while holding the drumstick. I completely dislocated my wrist, spun around, and I just turned blue. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. I literally had to bang my hand on the tom to try to snap it back into place. I played the rest of the song with one hand while my tech was putting it on ice. I got offstage and sure enough, I had dislocated my wrist. The crowd was so great, I couldn’t deprive them of the encore, so I went up and played the last song of the set one-handed. I figured if Rick Allen could do it, I could do it, except it was a like the most technical Dream Theater song we had ever had! But I got through the show, went straight to the hospital and had to do the rest of the tour with a brace on my hand. It was surely one of the scariest things I’ve ever experienced on stage and had never seen or been to anything like that since. And I’m having another ‘Spinal Tap’ moment right now as we do this interview; my microphone fell down my shirt. So as you can see, every moment on tour is a real true life ‘Spinal Tap’ moment including this very moment right here now.