Mike Portnoy interview (excerpts)

Rich Chamberlain: With so many projects to juggle, is it difficult to not repeat yourself and overuse go-to beats and fills?

Mike Portnoy: I think that is something I am guilty of, to be honest. I have my style, I have my fills, I have my sound. I think that is a good thing in a lot of respects. I like that I can do a full-on thrash Metal Allegiance album and then I can do Flying Colors full-on pop and you can still tell it is Mike Portnoy playing drums. It’s a good thing to have a style and a personality.

RC: The concept of time off for you seems bizarre, but if you had a month’s break is there anything you’d like to sit behind the kit and work on?

MP: The last thing I want to do when I get home is play drums. I have maybe eight different kits set up in my house. I have one of my Siamese Monster kits in my office. My house is filled with kits, it’s like a drum museum. But when I get home I don’t want to sit behind the drums, I’d rather sit by the pool with my dogs. That’s probably not the greatest thing to admit to in a drum magazine but it is my reality. I’m not the sort of drummer at this point who practises and needs to learn more. I will be 50 years old tomorrow and I know who I am, I am very comfortable in my own skin. Not to be brash, but I have won every drummer award on earth that there is to possibly win. At this point, I don’t need to prove anything to anybody, including myself. I know my capabilities but I am also incredibly aware of my limitations. I see young drummers today, including my own son, who do things that I absolutely can’t do, things that I’m physically not capable of. There’s part of me that could think I will go home and shed for 12 hours a day and learn all of these things – but to be totally honest with you at this stage in my life I have other things that I would rather spend that time doing. I spend so much of my day as it is behind the drums on tour and in the studios with my 87 different bands. When I get home I want to kick back with my family and sit down and watch Fargo and Twin Peaks. Let the Virgil Donatis of this world do their thing; for better or worse I am Mike Portnoy, I am who I am and I am very comfortable with that.

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RC: You’re on the eve of your 50th birthday and busier than ever – what drives you?

MP: The drive is no problem. That is something I can’t turn off. If I am fortunate enough to still be alive at 80 years old, I will still have that drive and I will still be juggling 80 different bands. That is my nature. The hard part is my body keeping up with my mind. The physical aspect of drumming is very demanding. It’s hard enough if you’re just in one band. But to be in four, five or six bands at any one time and jumping from one tour to the next takes its toll. It’s not just the drumming but the travel is demanding. My limitation is just how far my body will let me go.

RC: How do you deal with that physical aspect of drumming and touring?

MP: There are two levels to it; one level is what you need to do to pull it off on stage. In that case I always warm up before playing so I never go on stage cold. But the other level is what you need to do to stay fit for the other 22 hours of the day that you’re not on stage. My biggest fear is getting sick on tour. That’s why when we do meet and greets I don’t shake hands. That’s not to be rude, it’s just so I don’t get sick. It is horrible to get sick on the road. A lot of people take offence if they go for a handshake and I offer a fist bump. I would hug and kiss them if I could, I love the fans, but I’m just trying to not spread germs and get sick.

RC: You’re touring this summer playing Dream Theater’s ‘12 Step Suite’ for the first time. Why is now the right time to, firstly, revisit Dream Theater material and, secondly, play those particular songs?

MP: It stemmed from my 50th birthday bash on Cruise To The Edge in February. I put on two concerts for that to span my entire career. I brought Flying Colors and Transatlantic on board, I did a set of Liquid Tension Experiment’s music and, of course, Dream Theater music needed to be represented because that was 25 years of my life. When deciding what I wanted to play I thought it would be a good time to finally do the 12 Step Suite that I had written the lyrics for and was about my recovery.

I never had the chance to perform it in its entirety before I left the band. This was the perfect opportunity to get it out of my system and do it for the fans and myself once and for all. Once word got out about it I got offers from different festivals, so I’m doing a short run of these shows. Now is the time. Let’s do it once, one time only just for this year. It’s going to be fun to revisit that music. I haven’t done that in the dozens of bands and albums and tours I have done since leaving the band, I haven’t played Dream Theater. I don’t need to do that, I am doing this mainly for the fans and giving them the chance to hear these songs and then I will move onto the next thing.

RC: Is it a cathartic experience to revisit the Dream Theater material?

MP: It is. It is very therapeutic. It was very therapeutic to write those songs. When I wrote them I was deep into my sobriety and step work. Me writing about each of those steps in each of those songs was me doing that work. Now, it’s another level of therapy to complete the process and perform it. I think the performing of it isn’t so much therapeutic for me in terms of the lyrics and my sobriety, it is a little bit more of a catharsis for me now on a musical level. I’m not thinking about the lyrical themes to be honest. It is more about playing the music and finally doing what I had always envisaged, which is playing it from start to finish as one piece of music.

RC: Is it a feeling of closing a chapter of your life?

MP: It absolutely is the closing of a chapter. It is unfinished business and it is giving me some closure. I didn’t want to go to my grave having never performed this from start to finish. It was a big, conceptual idea that I had and that I executed over the course of five albums in eight years and I never had the chance to see it through to its final presentation. Here we are 15 years later from beginning this to finally getting to do it. Honestly, it is sad that it’s not with the guys from Dream Theater. I would have preferred that but they have made it very clear that they have no intent of ever reuniting with me, at least as of this moment. I have to move on with my life. I’m not going to sit around waiting for a reunion that might never happen. Now’s the time, carpe diem; I want to play this music and I am going to play this piece of my life and then move on.

RC: How about on a musical level, has it been challenging to revisit those Dream Theater drum parts?

MP: It’s funny, I am known for having an elephant’s memory and people make fun of me for showing up for rehearsals and gigs without listening to the music, it is just in my memory bank. I can jump from gig to gig to gig and play shows without re-learning the songs. Right before the rehearsals for the birthday bash cruise, I listened to the Dream Theater songs a few nights before to refresh my memory. I have to be honest, there was a moment of panic when listening to those tunes. They are very complex. There are a million time signatures and changes. I thought, “Oh my God, I should have probably been preparing for this a little bit better.” But the next day I sat down and it was like riding a bicycle, every single nuance was there, I didn’t even have to think about it. You just don’t forget these things so my elephant memory came through. There’s a lot of complex music but I was a big part of writing that music so it wasn’t like I had to learn this incredibly complex music just thinking of the drums. When I sat down, suddenly it all came back to me; the writing, the drumming, the melodies, the vocals. It was second nature to me because it was a huge part of my life and my history and that will never go away.

RC: Those songs discuss your sobriety and on your 50th birthday you celebrate 17 years sober; how big an impact has that decision to clean up had on your life?

MP: It was something I had to do in order to survive. There came a point in my early thirties where I knew I could no longer control my alcoholism and my drug addiction and it was controlling me. If you’re an OCD control freak like me then that is a scary thing to have a substance that is controlling you. There came a point on my 33rd birthday, and I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and I needed to do something about it. I had tried quitting on my own 100 times throughout my twenties and early thirties and I could never last 24 hours before consuming again. I knew deep down that if I was really serious about it and if I wanted to get sober then I needed to get help. That’s when I started going to meetings and I incorporated the 12 steps into my life and I wrote those songs around them. I think if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t be here today. I would have been one of those rock’n’roll drug and alcohol casualties. It was heading in that direction. I don’t think I would have made it to 40. I thank God that when I got to that fork in the road I made a decision that saved my life. Here I am today with both of my kids growing up and I am here to see that. To me, when I was 33 that was my biggest fear, my kids were newborns and the thought of not being there for them scared me into sobriety. It was a big change in my life and it hasn’t been easy. I have had many struggles through the years. It is still something that I struggle with today even 17 years later. I still need to think about it and work on it in order to stay on the right path.

RC: Dream Theater was your primary band for 25 years. Did leaving give you a degree of freedom that has led to you launching so many bands in the last six years?

MP: It has been absolutely liberating for me; ‘liberating’ is just the perfect word for it. I feel such a freedom now in my career that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want with whomever I want. Make no mistake about it, I was very busy even when I was in Dream Theater. I did a lot of things while I was running the ship with Dream Theater. I have always been a workaholic. I have always been very driven to do different things. But, with all of those years in Dream Theater that was my main band and that was my home. After a while, after 25 years of it, I just needed to move on and do different things. The feeling of liberation since I left Dream Theater has just been huge. Now, it’s like the list of bands that I have played with is staggering. I would not have been able to do most of that had I not made that decision and made that change in my life.

RC: With bands like Dream Theater and Transatlantic you are playing incredibly complex parts and odd time, but with feel. Would you agree with that assessment?

MP: A lot of people jump to the conclusion that I am obsessed with technique. Maybe that is because of the technically progressive music that I have made a career playing, or perhaps because I am very well versed in odd time signatures. People think I spend a lot of time thinking about technique. That could not be further from the truth. I really have always been the sort of drummer that puts a much higher priority on feel and performance. There are a lot of progressive drummers that when you go and see them live they look bored to tears. They are so consumed with being perfect that they are boring. I, personally, would much rather watch Lars Ulrich or Keith Moon live on stage, as sloppy as they may be. Tome, they are entertaining and they put a smile on my face and make me want to play drums. I would rather watch a drummer that makes me want to play drums rather than a drummer that makes me want to quit playing drums. To me, all of those technical drummers do the latter and where is the fun in that? Even though I can easily play 19/16 time or 13/8 or 11/8. I know that stuff. I went to Berklee and learned about how to do it and all of the other things around music that aren’t just about the drums, like arranging. I learned all of that not because I wanted to but to because I needed to. It is good to have that ammunition in the back of your mind for when you need it when you want to create and communicate with other musicians. At the end of the day, though, it is way more important to play something that feels right. There are a lot of drummers that play odd time signatures. If you listen to Soundgarden, I doubt Matt Cameron knows half of the time signatures that he is playing but he makes it feel good. To me, that is the most important thing.

RC: What do you have coming up beyond the Shattered Fortress tour?

MP: I have a new band I’ll be announcing in the summer. It is premature to give away too much information about that now but I can say that it also involves Derek Sherinian who I worked with in Dream Theater. It is the two of us with an all-star line-up. It is myself and Derek getting back together and picking up where we left off. It’s music that is probably closest to Dream Theater out of everything that I have done over the last six years. I have purposefully stayed away from the prog-metal genre because I wanted to spread my wings. But I would say that doing these Shattered Fortress shows has kind of reignited a little interest in revisiting that world from me. Derek and I have formed this new band that will satisfy myself and quench the fans’ thirst for something in that vein.