Mike Portnoy comments

I remember the first time I heard Metallica. I found them really early on. It was sometime in 1983, shortly after their debut Kill Em All was released. A friend of mine was a college radio DJ, and he was sent a promo version of the album. He thought it sounded like noise, but I listened to it and was immediately blown away by its raw intensity. I traded him my copy of AC/DC‘s Back In Black for it and never looked back. It was the heaviest thing I had ever heard, and I had been looking for a sound like that for years.

I immediately started covering “Seek & Destroy” in the band I was in at the time, and I even remember that Ride The Lightning was released the very same day I passed my road test and got my driver’s license. I made my very first drive a trip to the local record shop to pick up the album that very afternoon. I also remember seeing them live for the first time at L’Amour in Brooklyn when they were opening for W.A.S.P. and knowing that they were inevitably going to blow up the whole scene and change music forever.

Master Of Puppets was released when myself, John Petrucci and John Myung were at the Berklee College Of Music. I totally remember picking up the album the day it came out. The three of us sat around my stereo like some sort of religious ritual. I dropped the needle onto the record (what the hell is that?), and we were floored by what we heard. About 50 minutes later, we peeled our faces off the walls and realized that we had just listened to metal’s quintessential masterpiece.

I also remember the three of us being together in Sept ‘86 when we heard that Cliff Burton had died. We sat in my bedroom with a case of beer listening to ‘Orion’ and practically were brought to tears.

16 years later in 2002, Dream Theater paid tribute to the mighty Metallica by performing the Master Of Puppets album live in its entirety at three different shows in Barcelona, Chicago and New York City—an idea that Lars Ulrich has since told me directly inspired Metallica’s doing the same thing themselves a few years later!

People have always known DT’s obvious influences to be bands like Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, etc....but it was always just as important for us to incorporate the “Balls & Chunk” of the metal bands we grew up with. Those first few Metallica albums were a big part of our early days.

I continue to admire and respect Metallica for not only what they’ve done in the past, but for what I know they are still capable of doing in the future...and I am as eager and excited as anybody else to hear Death Magnetic.