Mike Portnoy interview (excerpts)

Charlie Benante: I’ve heard you talk about your dad being an influence on you, letting you hear things like Zeppelin and the Beatles and Zappa, but what was Mike like as a kid?

Mike Portnoy: I would venture to guess probably exactly like you. When I first started listening to Anthrax, I would see you and Scott and all the stuff you were interested in, and it was like all the same s*** that I’m interested in. So I got a feeling we were probably exactly the same kids. I was the only 10 year old kid in town with like 500 records and knew every B-side to every Beatles single, and knew who produced every album. I was just a music fanatic. So like you, when you grow up with that stuff... Like Beatles were big for both of us, Kiss was big for both of us, Rush was big for both of us... When you have bands like that, that have that kind of impact on your childhood, it stays with you forever. So I’m pretty much still exactly that kid, but in a 54 year old body, and I know you’re the same. I think that’s why I could chat about whatever for hours just because we had that same background. But it was my dad – he was a disc jockey on the radio in the early ‘70s, and he’d bring me into the radio station with him and let me pick records and let me talk on the air and stuff. So he’s the one that got me into the Beatles from day one and The Who and the Stones and Zeppelin and Bowie and all that stuff, literally as it was happening in real time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

CB: When you think about it, it’s hard to choose, but do you have a favorite decade of music?

MP: Yeah.

CB: ‘70?

MP: I’ve been doing a series on my social medias just because I’ve been so bored the last year. So I started this series where it’s like the year in music, and I started with the year I was born which was ‘67, which also happens to be in my opinion the year when great albums began. Great classic rock really started in ‘67 as far as I’m concerned. So I started doing this series where I would list my top 20 or 25 albums from each year, and it became glaringly obvious that the ‘70s for me was bar none, by far, by a landslide, my favorite decade of music. I mean the late ‘60s – ‘67 through ‘69 – was a huge impact on me as well, because that’s where you had the Beatles and The Who and the Stones and Hendrix and Cream. I love the late set late ‘60s, but the ‘70s was Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Kiss. Later on came the Sex Pistols and the Clash and the Ramones, and then later after that came Priest and Maiden and AC/DC and Motörhead. And I didn’t even mention prog I mean like Yes, Rush, Crimson, Genesis... I mean that was all the ‘70s. So by far, that was my favorite decade of music.

CB: If you think about it, we [Americans] always had the blues, but I don’t think we appreciated it as much as the English did. Once they got it and then kind of filtered it and we got it back from them, that’s when I think we were like, “Oh, I love the blues!” Think about Cream, think about Zeppelin – all those bands were so influenced by what we already had here, but we never picked up on it as well as they did.

MP: I think every band I just named from the ‘60s and ‘70s were English. It wasn’t until Kiss and Van Halen – at least for our generation – the first real American—

CB: And Aerosmith!

MP: And Aerosmith, too. Of course, there’s some exceptions – we also had The Doors in the ‘60s – but for the most part, that list: Sabbath, Purple, Zeppelin, The Who, Stones, the Beatles, Queen, Bowie – they’re all English! Genesis, Pink Floyd—

CB: All English!

MP: In America really, it wasn’t until Kiss and Van Halen, but I guess in the early ‘70s, when you had the Laurel Canyon scene, like Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Doors and Zappa. Later came the Eagles and stuff like that, so really that was when the American bands started to break, but it wasn’t in the hard rock world until later.

CB: You just mentioned Frank – when did you start to appreciate the music of Frank Zappa?

MP: I think I discovered Zappa because of his sense of humor. I think that was the first thing that appealed to me. I guess I was this 13-year-old kid, and I found a record that had a song called ‘Broken Hearts Are For A*******’ or ‘Crew Slut’. I was like, “Whoa! This guy’s singing about funny stuff!” As a 13-year-old kid, I got to hear about these crazy taboo subjects, but then, around that same age was when I started to really get serious about playing drums, and that’s when my ears started listening to the music of Zappa. And hearing Terry Bozzio’s drumming, hearing Vinnie Colaiuta’s drumming, and Chester Thompson, and hearing these odd time signatures, and these crazy polyrhythms. That’s when I realized this guy is a freaking musical genius! And that’s when I started diving in, headfirst. My early influences were The Beatles, The Who, Zeppelin, and Rush. Those were my big four heroes: Ringo, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Neil Peart. But once I started getting really serious about drumming, that’s when I discovered the more progressive stuff, and that’s when I went head on into Zappa-land and Rush-land as well. Neil’s drumming and Frank’s writing and the musicians in his band – those were the ones that really challenged me and got me going in the musical direction I ended up going in when we formed Dream Theater.

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MP: I was a Saturday Night Live fan as well. I actually went and saw the show back in 1980 for my 13th birthday. Belushi and Ackroyd were already gone, but Bill Murray was still there, Gilda Radner... It was kind of the ending of that era. It was awesome

CB: OK, let’s take it a little step further: you meet Petrucci and Myung. Did you know these guys were musicians, or one of them was wearing a shirt or something? How did it happen?

MP: It was me wearing a shirt, actually! I was wearing a Talas shirt because I was a big Talas fan. Back then, it was only the second week of college, it was September ‘85, and I went up to Berklee, and those two went to high school together and they went up to Berklee together. But it was only within the first week or two, I was in one of the practice rooms just playing drums, and I was wearing a Talas shirt, and they know who Billy Sheehan was. At that time, that was a pretty obscure reference – not everybody knew who Talas was. But we were Long Islanders, Talas always played the New York club scene. Talas and Twisted Sister, and that whole scene. So they approached me the next day in the cafeteria; they came up to me and they were like, “Hey man, we saw you jamming yesterday. We saw you wearing a Talas shirt. Wow! I can’t believe you know them.” Then we started talking about our mutual love for... The big common denominator for us was Rush and Iron Maiden. The three of us were Rush fanatics and Maiden fanatics. I was already listening to you guys, I was already listening to Anthrax and SOD came out around that year and I was a huge, huge fan of that album. And then, of course, I knew the other thrash bands that were coming out around that time. So I was a big, big thrash metal fan, but those guys didn’t really know that. The only metal they kind of knew was Maiden, Priest, and Sabbath, so I turned them on to Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica. I remember we were at Berklee when Master of Puppets came out, I guess sometime in ‘86, and I remember taking the ‘T’, which was the train – that’s what they call the train in Boston – but taking the ‘T’ of Newbury Comics to pick up Master of Puppets and playing it for those guys. They had never heard Metallica before and they were floored. And then from there, I introduced them to everything else, including SOD and stuff like that. That first year at Berklee just jamming and getting to know each other, and playing Maiden covers and Rush covers – that’s how the band started.

CB: I often think back to the days when if I didn’t have a mutual friend who knew Scott, none of this would have happened. And I’m sure you as well think of those things too – if I wasn’t in that school, if I wasn’t in that place... But all of it was fate. I would always say, “We’re not in control.” We’re put in these places, so that these things could happen. But what were you gonna say?

MP: People from all over the world are at Berklee. Literally, this guy’s from Japan, he’s from Germany, he’s from Brazil, he’s from Omaha, Nebraska. The fact that the three of us were all from Long Island, and we all had the same taste – it was totally incredible. Also, kind of with what you’re saying about fate, not to bring the conversation down, but here’s a weird thing that I often think about. My mom died a year earlier in a plane crash. She was in a plane crash in ‘84 when I was a senior in high school, and she didn’t want me to go to Berklee; she wanted me to go to a traditional college and maybe just major in music. She was really not a fan of me going to Berklee, but when she tragically passed away, I was free to make my own decision and I really wanted to go to Berklee, so I ended up going. And sure enough, that’s how I met those guys and that’s how we formed Dream Theater. I often think if my mom had lived, which would have been incredible, my life would be so completely different. But not only my life, John Petrucci’s and John Myung’s lives would probably be different. We would have never met. We would have never met our wives, because the three of us married three girls from the band Meanstreak. So wouldn’t have met our wives because we met Meanstreak because I was going to a different school with Yael at the time. And we wouldn’t have had our kids. I mean none of this would have ever happened had my mom lived. So, often I think about that, it was almost like she traded her life for me to have this life and this path.

CB: I just want to go a little further with Dream Theater. First, it was Majesty. So when did you guys finally realize that this is it?

MP: We realized this while we were at Berklee. It’s funny, we had to spend all this time convincing our parents to let us go to Berklee, and then once we went there, we had to come back and convince our parents that we wanted to leave Berklee. [laughs] We only stayed for one year. We met each other and the chemistry was so good and so strong that we really felt that we could go somewhere with what we were doing. So that’s how soon it was – within the first year of playing together we made that decision to leave Berklee, go back to Long Island, and just focus on the band. Even while we were at Berklee, we were rehearsing five days a week, six hours a night. You’d have to go rent out these practice rooms at Berklee two hours at a time, so every morning we’d have to wait in line to rent out these practice rooms for six hours. But anyway, we went back to Long Island, we recruited Kevin Moore in the band, we went through a couple singers, but we spent years and years and years just practicing five days a week on Long Island, working day jobs, coming into the basement of a hair salon, or a meat cutting factory, whatever, to rehearse every night. We finally got our first record deal in ‘88. I became friends with the Crumbsuckers who you know, and they kinda got us our first dea,l because I was good friends with Chuck and Gary. They were on Combat Records, which was owned by Steve Sinclair at the time. They introduced me to Steve Sinclair who was opening up a new label called Mechanic, and that was how we got our first record deal. But even that was a bit of a lesson – we spent years and years even after that album just trying to get noticed. It wasn’t until our second album Images and Words, which we made it in ‘91, and it came out in ‘92. It was until that album that things started to happen. But we had the faith, we stuck it out, we left college, we were determined, focused, passionate and driven, and a lot of times that’s really all you need.

CB: Now on the second album, was that when MTV started to take notice? Headbangers Ball?

MP: Yeah, we never thought in a trillion years we’d get played because we were writing these 10 minute songs, and this one single, ‘Pull Me Under’ was eight and a half minutes. We just did a ridiculously cheap, horrible video, thinking, “Oh, they’ll never show it.” The next thing we knew, they picked up on it and it blew up. The next thing we knew, the record went gold, and we were on our way and touring the world. So that’s where it began, but that was at that point already seven years into our career. We were on our third singer, our second record deal. So it took a long time; it wasn’t quick.

CB: It wasn’t overnight. The one thing I have to talk about is in the ‘90s, that’s when things got kinda strange, and it was a very weird time for our band and a couple of the other metal bands. But you guys continued in the ‘90s.

MP: Because we were never cool! So, if you’re never cool... [laughs] You’re never in fashion! The thrash scene kind of went away in the ‘90s. I look at that around ‘97, ‘98, I think every band in the metal genre put out their worst albums during that period, it was horrible!

CB: Yeah, it was tough. [laughs] But again, you guys were growing and growing and growing. And you had your own audience, which I always thought was so cool. It didn’t matter if you had radio or video – you had a following. You had this core, very much like Rush.

MP: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the only reason we got through all that time. I joke that we were never in fashion – but we weren’t. The fact was, we couldn’t rely on MTV, we couldn’t rely on Rolling Stone magazine or mainstream radio. We had a little bit of a hit with ‘Pull Me Under’ but that kinda came and went. So we really needed a devoted audience to help sustain us, and luckily, we found them. And I think it was a very similar type of story and audience to Rush’s music. I think when you’re playing music that doesn’t fit into any scene or trend, it’s harder, but it also helps you find your audience. Suddenly, the fans that are at these shows are not there because of a hit song or a fad or a trend – they’re there because they really, really love the band, and they’re completely fanatical about it. So luckily, we found that audience after a while.

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CB: When you’re doing the setlist, did you ever get confused, like, “Oh s***! That fill goes with that song!”

MP: No, believe it or not. I have this elephant memory – I don’t even think about this stuff. I think if I did think about the fill, the parts, I would panic and I would f*** up, but I just don’t think about it. Plus back in those Dream Theater days, I was the one that wrote the setlist, and I wrote a different setlist for every single show. So at the same time, I would give the other band members, and the lighting guys, and the video guys, a list of like 50 songs. Then every night, I would write a different setlist and submit it to the band and crew the night before the show. So it was a lot of work that we would have to always be on our toes for. But like I said, luckily it was just all embedded in there [motioning to his head], and then it came in handy post-Dream Theater, where I’m jumping from band to band to band, and tour to tour to tour. There have been times in the last 10 years where I would play with three different bands over the weekend – a three-hour show with Neal Morse Band, and then a gig with The Winery Dogs, and then a gig with Twisted Sister, and it all just has to be up there. Luckily, one of the things I’ve been blessed with is this kind of elephant’s memory. And another part of it is I play very spontaneously as well, so it’s never like Neil Peart where the fills had to be the exact same every single night. For me, the structure’s there, the beats are there, the grooves are there, but the fills were kind of always spontaneous. So luckily, I didn’t have to remember every single nuance.

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CB: Mike, when you look down on the setlist that you of course wrote, was there any song that you’re like, “Ah, this one takes a lot out of me.”

MP: It takes a lot out of me, yeah, maybe more so than difficult because I never found anything difficult. As you know, once you spend so much time writing it, composing it, recording it, practicing it as a band, by the time you get to play it live, for me, it’s always second nature. So even our most challenging songs like ‘The Dance of Eternity’, by the time we got on stage, I could play it while eating a tuna fish sandwich with the other hand; I don’t have to think about it. So I would say if anything, it’s more of a stamina thing like you said. For instance, you brought up ‘The Glass Prison,’ and ‘This Dying Soul’ – those two songs, even though they were on different albums, they were written to be eventually connected. I wrote this thing – five songs that were supposed to be interconnected over the course of five albums. But for instance, when I did the Shattered Fortress tour a few years ago with the guys from Haken, and we did all of these Dream Theater tunes that I hadn’t played together yet – ‘The Glass Prison,’ and ‘This Dying Soul,’ one’s 12 minutes, one’s 13 minutes, so you put them together and it’s a 25-minute onslaught with no break – it’s relentless; [they] were the heaviest songs we had written. So if anything, it wasn’t challenging in terms of technical playing, it was just challenging because of stamina. And I look at what you do Charlie, it blows my mind. I watched your live stream the other day and I’m watching you play ‘Skeletons in the Closet’, and I’m like, “How the f*** is he doing that? I would never be able to!” And same with Max, some of the stuff Max plays with his band – the blast beats and stuff – I can’t do that.