Mike Mangini interview (excerpt)

Barbara Caserta: Which is the most embarrassing or goofiest thing that happened to you on stage, and are those a kind of learning lesson for anybody?

Mike Mangini: There might be a list of those, but the most recent one that comes to mind has a level of humor to it; for me, it's humor; for other people, it's not funny. [laughs] A lot of times, stuff that's not supposed to be funny is funny to me. Anyway, I was on stage and it was the first couple of weeks of – I don't know if it was the last Dream Theater leg – and we were playing ‘The Count of Tuscany’, which is an old favorite. I'm still acclimating in the first week or so; I'm acclimating to what everything looks like for real, because the rehearsals don't do that. It's just like a quick run through kind of a thing. Really, most of the rehearsal is spent wiring stuff together. [laughs] There's so many plugs and lights and buttons and things. So a week in or 10 days, at some level I was tied into the production through a click sync – the timing – so I have to be perfect. I can't hit a note out of place That's a whole different level of pressure; it makes it a hundred times as hard to do the show, I'll tell you that right now, but it's something that I learned how to do. So here I am with this kind of pressure, really paying attention, and one of my microphones was clamped to a cymbal stand... So yeah, it was the beginning of the A View From the Top whole thing... I hit really hard – it doesn't look it – but I get a lot of power from a low height or whatever. I'm literally crushing this hunk of metal, and the stand is like vibrating, so the microphone was clamped to it. Eventually it broke the microphone, but before it totally busted it, it made a pop sound, and it sounded like a click. So when I was playing ‘Count of Tuscany’, I was going into a very, very odd section, and it clicked one 16th note off from where my beat was, the beginning of this phrase that had 16th notes in the phrase. I'm so used to doing this kind of a thing, my entire mind and body adjusted everything that was playing. I slipped it one 16th note over to match the click that I heard, cuz I thought I was wrong. But when I slipped it over one 16th note, the song started to sound wrong like everybody was playing something, and I had like a nervous breakdown kind of a heat. I'm like, “Oh wow!” So I just stopped at the break and I heard what was happening in the space that wasn't drums and then I adjusted to it. It was horrible! But there's a lot of humor in that, and it's an interesting thing. It shows you how susceptible or at least what I'm experiencing back there that people don't know. And I'm not going to complain, I'm not going to make an excuse, like, “But I thought it was a click...” It doesn't matter; the whole place saw me train wreck! [laughs]