Earplugs Required

Mike Portnoy - Dream Theater

by Courtney Campbell
Formed back in 1986 by John Petrucci (guitar), John Myung (bass) and Mike Portnoy (drums) while students at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Dream Theater has endured through name changes (originally known as Majesty) and member changes through the years. Without major radio play or coverage on MTV, the band has released six studio and two live CDs, as well as a best-selling live performance DVD since 1989.

Dream Theater is in the midst of the final weeks of their summer long co-headlining tour with Joe Satriani. The band released their latest studio album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence back in February and has been on the road ever since. After this tour the band will head to Europe.

After multiple emails back in forth, Earplugsrequired.com was lucky to catch up with drummer Mike Portnoy while the band was in Michigan.

ER: How would you describe Dream Theater to someone that had never heard of them?

Mike: It's kind of like taking Metallica, Rush and Pink Floyd and putting them into a microware and waiting 'til the thing exploded and what comes out is Dream Theater.

ER: That's good. I like that. Now this latest album was totally written in the studio, tell me about the writing process that you go through.

Mike: Well we have always written together as a band. That's the way it's been since day one with this band. But in the past, we would usually be in a rehearsal studio, write demos of this music and then six months later begin to record and have to go back and relearn what we had written months earlier. So now we have gotten to the point in our career where we're able to just lock a studio out for six months and move in and bypass that whole kind of demoing process. Now basically we move into a studio and we work the same way we have always worked - just bouncing ideas off each other and creating in a collaborative environment - but now we're able to roll tape as we're working and create on tape as well as in the live environment.

ER: Are there a lot of arguments or "discussions" as you are writing?

Mike: There are constant - discussions is a very tame word (laughs) - there's constant bickering and arguing and nitpicking and details. All that kind of stuff happens when you have four writers working together.

ER: The lyrics - you write a lot of the lyrics, John writes a lot of the lyrics - in a lot of other bands the singer writes the lyrics. How do you decide who writes what? I was reading that you actually recorded the tracks and then wrote the lyrics.

Mike: Yeah. Like I said since day one we have always written all the music first and since day one we have always written as a four piece band without a singer. It's just the formula that works for us. And our singer doesn't even play an instrument so there's really not much he would be able to contribute anyway during that process. It's just the way the formula has always worked. We write the music the four of us and then at that point one of us will determine that they want to write some lyrics to a particular song. We'll kind of split it up and and from there John and I will write a lot of the melodies and they write the lyrics from there. In some cases James will be writing a lot of the lyrics as well so we will hand the song off to him once it's ready. You know for the vocals.

ER: Does he ever find it difficult to sing somebody elses lyrics?

Mike: Well that's a question for him really.

ER: He's never voiced that?

Mike: I don't think he has a difficulty with it because it's the way it's always been in the band so I guess he's actually very comfortable with that.

ER: Now "Glass Prison" you wrote that. It's written in three parts and in reading the lyrics it seems to be about addiction, is this autobiographical?

Mike: Yeah. It's about battling addiction and recovery and those were some things that I have dealt with in my personal life over the past few years. So like most of the lyrics that I write, they come from personal experiences and things that I go through so this is another example of that.

ER: I really like that song and I noticed that people on the message board were asking whether or not you were doing that in this part of the tour and it wasn't showing up in the set lists for this second half?

Mike: Actually we opened with that every single night from January 'til July of this year so it was the opening song every single night at every show. But now that we're not doing our own tour and we're doing a co-headlining tour with Joe, we have a shorter time allotment and also I think it's a very very heavy heavy song that kind of freaks some of Joe's audience out. (laughing) So we kind of wanted to stray away from that for this particular leg but otherwise we've done it on every other leg at every show other than this leg.

ER: I don't know. In listening to it, yeah it's heavy but not all the parts are. As you go through the addiction process and going through recovery, it changes.

Mike: Well actually if you want to be specific, all three of the movements are written directly about the first three steps in twelve step recovery. So the first step in the first section of the song is admitting being powerless, the second step is needing the help of others, came to believe a power greater than ourselves to restore sanity. The third section is being willing to turn your life over to a higher power and handing over your will. So the three sections are directly out of the first three steps in AA.

ER: Are we going to see the rest of the steps?

Mike: Yeah! It's something that would be a nice little project for me to try to tackle in the coming years. It would also probably be a very good thing for my recovery. So yeah it's something I'm thinking about.

ER: There you go, a theme for an entire concept album. Although I don't know how many CDs that would equal.

Mike: Yeah. (laughing)

ER: This one is two cds. The second one has a quite long one song but then you broke it down. How did you end up breaking it down into the tracks that it is?

Mike: Well we wrote the whole piece as one 40 minute song so really when we were writing it, we didn't perceive it in different lyrical passages; we just perceived it in different musical passages. We wrote the overture first and from there we took the themes in the overture that we liked and knew we wanted to expand into full sections we would then develop them into full sections and then once we looked at the entire 40 minute thing after it was finished we divided up the sections and John and I split up the sections into six different characters and each of us write about three. Basically I wrote about three and he wrote about three and they're six different people all from very different backgrounds and walks of life, all dealing with the common thread of trying to cope with mental imbalances and things like that.

ER: Now in the shows on this tour with Joe, I've been looking at the set lists and you pick out a few songs from there, the past few nights it's like three or four from the new album. How do you decide what you are going to play?

Mike: I write the setlist and I spend a lot of time paying a lot of attention to the detail. For me, writing the perfect setlist is like solving a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw puzzle. I spend many many hours going through the various setlists, trying to balance each of the albums, trying to give different audiences things that maybe they haven't heard like for instance, this tour, it's our second time through the States this year so every time we get into a town, for instance tonight we are in Detroit I had to look back at the setlist for what we did in Detroit in March and determine all the songs we didn't play last time through and then create a setlist from those songs. So the people that are repeat visitors, which is usually a lot of people because our fans like to go to multiple shows. I try to make sure that we're offering a completely different setlist to the repeat visitors. At the same time, still balancing it enough that it will be something that will be satisfying for somebody that is seeing us for the first time. But every night is a completely different setlist and usually there is a method behind the madness of why certain songs are played on certain nights.

ER: So there's not this big push, because there is a new album out, to play the entire new album.

Mike: We do whatever the hell we want. If we don't want to play any songs off the new album, that's what we are going to do. Or if we wanted to do the entire 95 minutes each night, we would do that. But for me the excitement of playing, and I know as a fan, the excitement of going to see a band is getting something unpredictable when you show up to a show and getting something different. It makes the most sense to just kind of split up the album and play certain songs on certain nights, especially when we were headlining and doing a three to three and a half hour show, which we had been doing all year up until this leg. We would play the entire 6 degrees for the second set of the show and then in the first set we would have one or two of the songs from the first one. It gets mixed up every night. On the Scenes from a Memory tour in 2000, we were doing the entire album, every single night 'cause it was a concept album and to me that was torture, doing the same exact 90-minute setlist every single night.

ER: Seems like that get kinda boring.

Mike: Not only does it get boring to the audience that comes every night, there's a lot of people that come to multiple shows, but it's also, now switching the setlist every night keeps it very interesting for us. Every night is something different and it keeps us on our toes.

ER: Keeps your lighting person on their toes too.

Mike: (laugh) Yep.

ER: Now I had read how you had planted MP3s before this album came out so that people thought they were getting new tracks

Mike: Right

ER: but they weren't. What's your official opinion on MP3s?

Mike: I'm a big trading and bootleg fan and supporter so I love trading stuff and bootlegs and MP3's. I'm a big fan of that so I'd be a hypocrite to not support it when it applies to my own music. I think with a band like ours, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I think our fans are going to buy everything we put out anyway. I think it's bad for bands that are one hit wonders that have just one song that is popular on the radio because then somebody can just download it onto a cd themselves but I don't think that's endangering a band like ours. We're all about the full album. Our fans love the packaging; they want to buy everything they can get their hands on whether it be real releases or bootlegs. The only problem I have - or I should say had - with MP3s is when they hit the 'net, when a new album hits the 'net before its released. And I had for instance when we finished 6 degrees you know during the two month waiting period before it was released a lot of the stuff had surfaced on the 'net and my only problem with that was that it ruins the surprise for everybody. You know when you make an album you kind of want, everybody looks forward to the release date. You want everybody to hear it at the same time and not ruin the surprise for everybody else or start spreading opinions it before anybody else had has a chance to form their own. So that was the only thing that bothered me. It bothered me from an artistic point of view that people were getting their surprises ruined before the release date but I don't think it bothers me on a commercial level. I don't think it effects sales at all for a band like ours and now that the album is out, to be frank, I could care less if people are swapping it and trading it. It was just I didn't want the surprise ruined before the album came out.

ER: I have noticed quite a few bands now are not allowing pre-release copies even to journalists.

Mike: Well we did that for Scenes From a Memory 'cause we wanted that to be a complete surprise to our fans. We didn't want the fans to know a) that it was a concept album and b) that it was a sequel to Metropolis Part 1. So we didn't give advance copies to any journalist or any radio or anybody. Even the name of the album was kept completely undercover. And I think it worked in the sense where it gave the fans the ultimate surprise on the release date but it also backfired in a sense where our record company had their hands completely tied in terms of marketing and promoting and setting up the release. So it's got that kind of time in between when you deliver a record and when it's released that's like a crucial time for the record company to kind of set up the record and if you don't send out advance cd you are kind of killing that set up time.

ER: It's not like in the 70s where an album could just come out from an artist and it would sell just as well no matter what.

Mike: Well I think they should frankly turn around, I think you don't need a two month set up time anymore. So much marketing and promotion is done on the Internet, which is immediate; it's in real time. All it takes is, we could deliver the record to the record company and the next day they could send the cd to somebody that has an Internet site and BOOM the very next day it will spread like wildfire. So that's why you have to be careful because that two month period all it takes is one day on the Internet and all hell is going to break loose.

ER: That's true, I can bet that is how most of these get up there, advance copies.

Mike: In fact when we were setting up this record we made it a point to refuse any Internet interviews until the release date because we were trying our best to keep it off the 'net because it's is real time. All it takes is one interview and one bit of information to come up and the whole world knows about it that same day. So we were only granting interviews and promotional cds to magazines and things like that and then once the album came out we hit the Internet.

ER: Now I had read where you were considering official bootlegs, is that what you forsee in the near future? The Who are putting out official bootlegs from this current North American tour.

Mike: Right. Yeah I mean I think it's a natural for a band like ours because the fans are such collectors and all of my favorite bands have done that from Phish to King Crimson to Marillion all of these bands kind of offer that through their website or fanzines and things like that. I think it's a natural thing for us and I have the archives to surely supply a project like this with because I tape every single show we have ever done. So it is something I'm really trying to get us to get off the ground but the only problem is that we are at the mercy of what Elektra will let us do. So we are kind of buffing out the technicalities of that now.

ER: If you did do that you could release recordings that were at a much higher quality than what people are trading.

Mike: Oh absolutely! That's what all the bands that I just mentioned are working at. Even Frank Zappa I think was the first to do that with the Beat the Boot series.

ER: Now how many copies of the Live Scenes from New York actually were sold on September 11th?(editors note: The front cover was Dream Theater's 'sacred heart' insignia from the Image and Words days transformed into a burning apple, with the NY skyline amongst the flames. )

Mike: I think, some stores refused to stock it right from that afternoon, you know it came out the morning of September 11th. A lot of stores didn't even stock their shelves after what happened happend so I think only about 20 - 30 thousand probably made it into the fans hands before they were yanked off the shelves. And I know a lot of retailers probably sold them anyway because they knew that they were a collectors item and they didn't pull them like they were supposed to but I think there are probably 20-30 thousand out there floating around.

ER: It's probably all over Ebay too.

Mike: Yeah they were.

ER: I was reading that the CBS Morning Show appearance was cancelled. What happened with that?

Mike: Oh God. I don't want to make a mountain out of a mole hill but basically they wanted us to do an "unplugged" performance and that's not what Dream Theater is about. So we decided it would have been a misrepresentation of the Dream Theater style and sound and what makes us unique so we decided to pass on it.

ER: Unplugged, I can't even believe that they would even ask you to do that.

Mike: Well you know whatever.(laughs)

ER: Whoever did that must not have had any clue.

Mike: I guess not. I guess whoever booked us on to begin with obviously was clueless but we thought we will continue to do things on our own terms and when they feel like coming around and re-inviting us then we will do it.

	by Courtney Campbell
	Formed back in 1986 by John Petrucci (guitar), John Myung (bass) and Mike Portnoy (drums) while students at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Dream Theater has endured through name changes (originally known as Majesty) and member changes through the years. Without major radio play or coverage on MTV, the band has released six studio and two live CDs, as well as a best-selling live performance DVD since 1989. Dream Theater is in the midst of the final weeks of their summer long co-headlining tour with Joe Satriani. The band released their latest studio album Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence back in February and has been on the road ever since. After this tour the band will head to Europe. After multiple emails back in forth, Earplugsrequired.com was lucky to catch up with drummer Mike Portnoy while the band was in Michigan. ER: How would you describe Dream Theater to someone that had never heard of them? Mike: It's kind of like taking Metallica, Rush and Pink Floyd and putting them into a microware and waiting 'til the thing exploded and what comes out is Dream Theater. ER: That's good. I like that. Now this latest album was totally written in the studio, tell me about the writing process that you go through. Mike: Well we have always written together as a band. That's the way it's been since day one with this band. But in the past, we would usually be in a rehearsal studio, write demos of this music and then six months later begin to record and have to go back and relearn what we had written months earlier. So now we have gotten to the point in our career where we're able to just lock a studio out for six months and move in and bypass that whole kind of demoing process. Now basically we move into a studio and we work the same way we have always worked - just bouncing ideas off each other and creating in a collaborative environment - but now we're able to roll tape as we're working and create on tape as well as in the live environment. ER: Are there a lot of arguments or "discussions" as you are writing? Mike: There are constant - discussions is a very tame word (laughs) - there's constant bickering and arguing and nitpicking and details. All that kind of stuff happens when you have four writers working together. ER: The lyrics - you write a lot of the lyrics, John writes a lot of the lyrics - in a lot of other bands the singer writes the lyrics. How do you decide who writes what? I was reading that you actually recorded the tracks and then wrote the lyrics. Mike: Yeah. Like I said since day one we have always written all the music first and since day one we have always written as a four piece band without a singer. It's just the formula that works for us. And our singer doesn't even play an instrument so there's really not much he would be able to contribute anyway during that process. It's just the way the formula has always worked. We write the music the four of us and then at that point one of us will determine that they want to write some lyrics to a particular song. We'll kind of split it up and and from there John and I will write a lot of the melodies and they write the lyrics from there. In some cases James will be writing a lot of the lyrics as well so we will hand the song off to him once it's ready. You know for the vocals. ER: Does he ever find it difficult to sing somebody elses lyrics? Mike: Well that's a question for him really. ER: He's never voiced that? Mike: I don't think he has a difficulty with it because it's the way it's always been in the band so I guess he's actually very comfortable with that. ER: Now "Glass Prison" you wrote that. It's written in three parts and in reading the lyrics it seems to be about addiction, is this autobiographical? Mike: Yeah. It's about battling addiction and recovery and those were some things that I have dealt with in my personal life over the past few years. So like most of the lyrics that I write, they come from personal experiences and things that I go through so this is another example of that. ER: I really like that song and I noticed that people on the message board were asking whether or not you were doing that in this part of the tour and it wasn't showing up in the set lists for this second half? Mike: Actually we opened with that every single night from January 'til July of this year so it was the opening song every single night at every show. But now that we're not doing our own tour and we're doing a co-headlining tour with Joe, we have a shorter time allotment and also I think it's a very very heavy heavy song that kind of freaks some of Joe's audience out. (laughing) So we kind of wanted to stray away from that for this particular leg but otherwise we've done it on every other leg at every show other than this leg. ER: I don't know. In listening to it, yeah it's heavy but not all the parts are. As you go through the addiction process and going through recovery, it changes. Mike: Well actually if you want to be specific, all three of the movements are written directly about the first three steps in twelve step recovery. So the first step in the first section of the song is admitting being powerless, the second step is needing the help of others, came to believe a power greater than ourselves to restore sanity. The third section is being willing to turn your life over to a higher power and handing over your will. So the three sections are directly out of the first three steps in AA. ER: Are we going to see the rest of the steps? Mike: Yeah! It's something that would be a nice little project for me to try to tackle in the coming years. It would also probably be a very good thing for my recovery. So yeah it's something I'm thinking about. ER: There you go, a theme for an entire concept album. Although I don't know how many CDs that would equal. Mike: Yeah. (laughing) ER: This one is two cds. The second one has a quite long one song but then you broke it down. How did you end up breaking it down into the tracks that it is? Mike: Well we wrote the whole piece as one 40 minute song so really when we were writing it, we didn't perceive it in different lyrical passages; we just perceived it in different musical passages. We wrote the overture first and from there we took the themes in the overture that we liked and knew we wanted to expand into full sections we would then develop them into full sections and then once we looked at the entire 40 minute thing after it was finished we divided up the sections and John and I split up the sections into six different characters and each of us write about three. Basically I wrote about three and he wrote about three and they're six different people all from very different backgrounds and walks of life, all dealing with the common thread of trying to cope with mental imbalances and things like that. ER: Now in the shows on this tour with Joe, I've been looking at the set lists and you pick out a few songs from there, the past few nights it's like three or four from the new album. How do you decide what you are going to play? Mike: I write the setlist and I spend a lot of time paying a lot of attention to the detail. For me, writing the perfect setlist is like solving a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw puzzle. I spend many many hours going through the various setlists, trying to balance each of the albums, trying to give different audiences things that maybe they haven't heard like for instance, this tour, it's our second time through the States this year so every time we get into a town, for instance tonight we are in Detroit I had to look back at the setlist for what we did in Detroit in March and determine all the songs we didn't play last time through and then create a setlist from those songs. So the people that are repeat visitors, which is usually a lot of people because our fans like to go to multiple shows. I try to make sure that we're offering a completely different setlist to the repeat visitors. At the same time, still balancing it enough that it will be something that will be satisfying for somebody that is seeing us for the first time. But every night is a completely different setlist and usually there is a method behind the madness of why certain songs are played on certain nights. ER: So there's not this big push, because there is a new album out, to play the entire new album. Mike: We do whatever the hell we want. If we don't want to play any songs off the new album, that's what we are going to do. Or if we wanted to do the entire 95 minutes each night, we would do that. But for me the excitement of playing, and I know as a fan, the excitement of going to see a band is getting something unpredictable when you show up to a show and getting something different. It makes the most sense to just kind of split up the album and play certain songs on certain nights, especially when we were headlining and doing a three to three and a half hour show, which we had been doing all year up until this leg. We would play the entire 6 degrees for the second set of the show and then in the first set we would have one or two of the songs from the first one. It gets mixed up every night. On the Scenes from a Memory tour in 2000, we were doing the entire album, every single night 'cause it was a concept album and to me that was torture, doing the same exact 90-minute setlist every single night. ER: Seems like that get kinda boring. Mike: Not only does it get boring to the audience that comes every night, there's a lot of people that come to multiple shows, but it's also, now switching the setlist every night keeps it very interesting for us. Every night is something different and it keeps us on our toes. ER: Keeps your lighting person on their toes too. Mike: (laugh) Yep. ER: Now I had read how you had planted MP3s before this album came out so that people thought they were getting new tracks Mike: Right ER: but they weren't. What's your official opinion on MP3s? Mike: I'm a big trading and bootleg fan and supporter so I love trading stuff and bootlegs and MP3's. I'm a big fan of that so I'd be a hypocrite to not support it when it applies to my own music. I think with a band like ours, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I think our fans are going to buy everything we put out anyway. I think it's bad for bands that are one hit wonders that have just one song that is popular on the radio because then somebody can just download it onto a cd themselves but I don't think that's endangering a band like ours. We're all about the full album. Our fans love the packaging; they want to buy everything they can get their hands on whether it be real releases or bootlegs. The only problem I have - or I should say had - with MP3s is when they hit the 'net, when a new album hits the 'net before its released. And I had for instance when we finished 6 degrees you know during the two month waiting period before it was released a lot of the stuff had surfaced on the 'net and my only problem with that was that it ruins the surprise for everybody. You know when you make an album you kind of want, everybody looks forward to the release date. You want everybody to hear it at the same time and not ruin the surprise for everybody else or start spreading opinions it before anybody else had has a chance to form their own. So that was the only thing that bothered me. It bothered me from an artistic point of view that people were getting their surprises ruined before the release date but I don't think it bothers me on a commercial level. I don't think it effects sales at all for a band like ours and now that the album is out, to be frank, I could care less if people are swapping it and trading it. It was just I didn't want the surprise ruined before the album came out. ER: I have noticed quite a few bands now are not allowing pre-release copies even to journalists. Mike: Well we did that for Scenes From a Memory 'cause we wanted that to be a complete surprise to our fans. We didn't want the fans to know a) that it was a concept album and b) that it was a sequel to Metropolis Part 1. So we didn't give advance copies to any journalist or any radio or anybody. Even the name of the album was kept completely undercover. And I think it worked in the sense where it gave the fans the ultimate surprise on the release date but it also backfired in a sense where our record company had their hands completely tied in terms of marketing and promoting and setting up the release. So it's got that kind of time in between when you deliver a record and when it's released that's like a crucial time for the record company to kind of set up the record and if you don't send out advance cd you are kind of killing that set up time. ER: It's not like in the 70s where an album could just come out from an artist and it would sell just as well no matter what. Mike: Well I think they should frankly turn around, I think you don't need a two month set up time anymore. So much marketing and promotion is done on the Internet, which is immediate; it's in real time. All it takes is, we could deliver the record to the record company and the next day they could send the cd to somebody that has an Internet site and BOOM the very next day it will spread like wildfire. So that's why you have to be careful because that two month period all it takes is one day on the Internet and all hell is going to break loose. ER: That's true, I can bet that is how most of these get up there, advance copies. Mike: In fact when we were setting up this record we made it a point to refuse any Internet interviews until the release date because we were trying our best to keep it off the 'net because it's is real time. All it takes is one interview and one bit of information to come up and the whole world knows about it that same day. So we were only granting interviews and promotional cds to magazines and things like that and then once the album came out we hit the Internet. ER: Now I had read where you were considering official bootlegs, is that what you forsee in the near future? The Who are putting out official bootlegs from this current North American tour. Mike: Right. Yeah I mean I think it's a natural for a band like ours because the fans are such collectors and all of my favorite bands have done that from Phish to King Crimson to Marillion all of these bands kind of offer that through their website or fanzines and things like that. I think it's a natural thing for us and I have the archives to surely supply a project like this with because I tape every single show we have ever done. So it is something I'm really trying to get us to get off the ground but the only problem is that we are at the mercy of what Elektra will let us do. So we are kind of buffing out the technicalities of that now. ER: If you did do that you could release recordings that were at a much higher quality than what people are trading. Mike: Oh absolutely! That's what all the bands that I just mentioned are working at. Even Frank Zappa I think was the first to do that with the Beat the Boot series. *ER: Now how many copies of the Live Scenes from New York* actually were sold on September 11th?*(editors note: The front cover was Dream Theater's 'sacred heart' insignia from the Image and Words* days transformed into a burning apple, with the NY skyline amongst the flames. ) Mike: I think, some stores refused to stock it right from that afternoon, you know it came out the morning of September 11th. A lot of stores didn't even stock their shelves after what happened happend so I think only about 20 - 30 thousand probably made it into the fans hands before they were yanked off the shelves. And I know a lot of retailers probably sold them anyway because they knew that they were a collectors item and they didn't pull them like they were supposed to but I think there are probably 20-30 thousand out there floating around. ER: It's probably all over Ebay too. Mike: Yeah they were. ER: I was reading that the CBS Morning Show appearance was cancelled. What happened with that? Mike: Oh God. I don't want to make a mountain out of a mole hill but basically they wanted us to do an "unplugged" performance and that's not what Dream Theater is about. So we decided it would have been a misrepresentation of the Dream Theater style and sound and what makes us unique so we decided to pass on it. ER: Unplugged, I can't even believe that they would even ask you to do that. Mike: Well you know whatever.(laughs) ER: Whoever did that must not have had any clue. Mike: I guess not. I guess whoever booked us on to begin with obviously was clueless but we thought we will continue to do things on our own terms and when they feel like coming around and re-inviting us then we will do it.