Mike Portnoy interview (excerpt)

Brando: Reading up about you in your history, not just in Long Island, your dad was a radio DJ?

Mike Portnoy: He was, but he relocated to Carmel, California when my mom and dad got divorced, when I was really, really young. It's a funny story – I won't get too in detail – but he saw the movie Play Misty For Me by Clint Eastwood, and Clint Eastwood was a disc jockey in Carmel, California on KRML radio. And my dad saw the movie and loved the location, and loved the idea of being a disc jockey. So he picked up, moved to Carmel, and got a job at KRML radio, and literally had the exact job, in the same exact studio, in the same exact city as Clint Eastwood in that film.

B: Brilliant. No stalkers for him though?

MP: No. But it's funny – I used to do the radio show with him when I’d go visit him and spend the summers with him. So I was like this little six-year-old celebrity back then in the early 70s. And one time I remember calling up the operator to place a collect call, and I was like, “I need to place a collect call from Mike,” and the operator's like, “is this Mike Portnoy?” He recognized my voice at like six years old! That was my first claim to fame. But yeah, I grew up listening to New York rock radio; when I was a teenager in the ‘70s, it was WPLJ.

B: OK. Yeah, that was rock for a while, and I think it's Christian now. I know there's so much to talk to you about, but it's just the beginnings that fascinate me, when you see somebody that you become a fan of – I guess like with Dee Snyder – seeing somebody where I'm from. I went to Hofstra University for college.

MP: I went there for a semester as well. After we formed Dream Theater at Berklee, we came back to Long Island and I did two semesters at Five Towns and then one semester at Hofstra.

B: See, those are things I like finding out. So I got my radio start at Hofstra. 88.7 FM radio – Hofstra University, the Aggressive Edge – and it was my induction to Dream Theater, and no radio station was playing them. So I'm just curious when’s the first time you heard yourself on the radio and your reaction to it.

MP: Yeah, I remember distinctively the very first time hearing myself on the radio. It was around 1986 or ’87, and Dream Theater weren't Dream Theater yet; we were still called Majesty. We had put out this demo – a 1986 demo, the Majesty demo – and it was with our first singer Chris Collins. Around ‘86 or ‘87, WBAB had a Fingers’ Metal Shop, and Fingers was the first person to play us on Metal Shop, but we weren't signed yet; it was a demo. I think he used to do this thing once a week where he'd play a local demo – “Fresh Metal” or whatever it was called – and he played a track off the Majesty demo, and I remember we were at rehearsal. We had a rehearsal place in Huntington, Long Island, and we would gather around the radio, because we found out Fingers was going to play one of the songs. We all sat in my van listening to BAB 102.3. So he played us just as this local demo, but then sure enough, when we signed our first record deal in ‘88 and put out our first album in ’89, he of course got totally behind us and then started playing the album regularly before anybody else in the world was playing us.