PipemanRadio Interviews Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater at Louder Than Life 2025

0:04 Hi, you lunto here? That's sure. Se wow, crazy young. This is pipe Man here on the adventureds pipe Man W four c Y Radio. And I'm here with Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater. Nice here at Louder than Life. Yeah, oh my god, how you love this festival? It's my first time here? Actually really well, it's Dream Theater's first time doing a Danny Wimmer festival. Believe it or not. Yeah, I bet we do all the. European festivals Grasspop and hell f S and Sweden Rock and all those, but in America this is our first time being invited to the party.

0:47 Yeah, so I go and I do download Bloodstock yep, don hell Fest, grasp Pop, Resurrection Fest. Yeah yeah, I've been to these with my son. My son has played all the Danny Room festivals. He's playing with Code Orange and with his ban Tala. Oh so yeah. So but now finally Dad gets to come out and play. I know, right, how is he here supporting you now? Since you support him? Yes, exactly, I know. He's Actually he's got a record release show of his own tonight. Actually nice. Yeah, so I want to focus on that a little bit. How does it feel that your kid is in the industry too. He's been killing it. I could not be proud of him. He'd been playing drums for Code Orange for the last few years and his ban Tala now he's playing bass in that band. So he's an incredible musician, not only just drummer, but musician now playing bass and he writes all the music for Tala.

1:39 So I couldn't be a prouder dad. You know what I love about that is people in your and my generation that didn't really happen, like I know when I was growing up. You might have experienced the same thing. I don't know, but it's like my parents were like, yeah, no, you can't be a musician. They don't follow your dreams. Get a real job. We were born in the general we were probably not the first rock generation, but maybe the second. It was born in sixty seven, sixty six. Here, yeah, there you go. But now all the kids that were born in the sixties, that Tweasel Zappa and you know Wolfgang van Halen, and you have all of the second generation. Jason Bonham, that's even better. I interviewed Bonham's kid.

2:21 Oh yeah, he's in the medal. Right, yeah, now, yeah, actually John Bonham's grandkid, right, was it Yager Henry? Yeah, and now it's on the third generation. But yeah, you see that now ooh. As he like I have brought both my son and grandsons into their first mash pits ever. Wow, that's amazing. It's funny. You know what I noticed too, Tell me if you noticed this is like, so we go out here and later in life, and we see multi generations at the festival looking at bands that are older, like Slayer crowd last night, your crowd, whatever it is, And I'm thinking, I remember I went to Slayer Matauka's first show ever, and there's no way I would have gone to see a band of sixty year old at that.

3:04 Yeah. And light Yeah, well back then even I saw Metallica on the ride of the Lightning Tours. I was eighty four. And at that point the oldest bands around were the Stones and the Who, right, and they were what they were probably in their thirties or forties at that point. And now here we are the Dream Theaters and the Metallicas and the Slayers. We're in our sixties, right, and the Stones and Who were in like in their eighties. So yeah, it just keeps going. It's just amazing rock till you drop. At one point, rock was supposedly dead, metal was supposedly dead. You walk out there at Danny Wimmer Festival and you realize that, no, it's probably bigger than it's ever been. Yeah. Absolutely, and a lot of these festivals too.

3:46 You still have a generation above us, like the Maidens and the Priests and the Scorpions and the bands like that that are even a generation beyond the Metallicas and the Slayers and the dream Theaters. And look at Auntie. Yeah, like, look at the love he's gotten from every single person throughout the world. I mean to me, that says it all. Yeh, because we're one big family. Like people think we're scary, but they realize that this is the best place to be. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm glad to be here. So what was that one moment in time, way way way back that you knew this is what you want to do. What prompted you to be a musician? Well, it was probably seeing Kiss at Madison Square Garden in nineteen seventy seven Nice on the Live two tour and being in that ordien I was only ten years old, but being in that audience even before the show started, and seeing the big Kiss light, the big light up whatever you would call that, the backdrop, seeing it not lit in the arena, smelling the pot smoke in the air, and just the excitement of what the light's going down and.

4:54 You wanted the best, you got the best, the hottest man in the world. Kiss. Just that excitement and the bomb's going off and the and that was it. From that point on, I knew that's what I had to do. See, I love that because my story first album I ever had, I'm a Jersey Boy. So I was at the Jersey Shore on the boardwalk I won something. They were given away albums. I looked up and there were these four guys on this album cover. It was Kisses first album, yes, when it first came out, and I was looking at like, that's the one I want. And that is what brought me to where I am. And it's so funny because that album cover for the first album cover so iconic, but when you think about it, it's really just an updated version of the Beatles to meet the Beatles album cover. So it was like taking that taken the same album cover and just taking it for a decade later to a new generation.

5:49 I love that you said that, because I've always said that the Beatles and Kiss were very similar to a lot of people don't get. Oh, I totally get it. Like Paul Stanley is the Paul mc cartney character, Gene Simmons was the John Lennon character. Ace Freheli was the George Harrison character. They online even you had four guys that all sing and all create contributes, and Kiss was like four. And when the Beatles came around, it was the first time there was a band. Of four characters, right, you know, up until then you just had Elvis Presley's or Chuck Berry's. But the Beatles came around, you finally had four distinctive characters. And it was the same with Kiss. When Kiss came around, you had four characters and they were all like bringing something to the image of the band.

6:33 I always noticed too, that in both bands, whoever wrote the song sang the song. And then like John and Paul, every song either one of them wrote was both of them. Gene and Paul, every song they ever wrote, both of them had exactly And then last week I was here for Bourban Beyond another Danny Wimmer festival. Ringo Starr was here alas bucket list for me, Like I've seen almost everybody. I'm like, holy shit, I'm watching Rigo stories. It's mid eighties. Yeah, running around the stage doing jumping. Yeah, amazing. And he was the reason I started playing Me Too, Me Too, you know. So that's way cool. Yeah, So what else you got to talk tell us about that you have going on after Louder than Light.

7:18 Well, we're in the middle of a dream Theater tour that began last October, so we're almost a year in at this point. But we spent the first year celebrating the band's fortieth anniversary and also celebrating the reunion of this lineup now that I'm back in the band. We've spent a year doing that. We went all around the world, all through America, all through South America, all through Europe, and now we're on our second run through the globe celebrating our new album. We put out a new album in February, but we hadn't had a chance to play it yet because we're so busy doing the anniversary tour. So we spent the first of the first year kind of looking back with the first forty years, and now we're on tour playing the new album in its entirety, finally looking at where we are now.

7:58 You know, I love that and how are people loving the new music. It's been amazing And it was an inspired album to make because it was the first album with me back in the band after about fifteen years or so, so we were really very inspired making it. It was just a real renewed energy. See I love hearing that, because it's tough when you do this for a long time. Oh yeah, to keep that spirit alive. Yeah, it's easy to lose that spark. I'll be honest. That's one of the reasons I left the band after the first twenty five years. After twenty five years of doing it, I was fried. I needed some new inspiration to inspire me. So I went off and played with even Semnvold and Twisted Sister and formed about a dozen other bands, and ultimately, after spreading my musical wings and getting my rocks off, I realized there was no place like home and I wanted to come back to my family.

8:50 It's so great to be back with Dream Theater after all this time. And with all that gap and doing all that stuff. Probably now it's probably better than l absolutely right. This makes the heart grow fonder. And I think we all really missed each other and we have a new new found energy and just respect for each other. We're older and wiser, and we just we appreciate each other a lot more. I think that is a key with getting older, right, Like you kind of see things a little differently, and yeah, I'm not that cocky young person exactly. We used to bicker over you know, when we're in our twenties, we'd bicker over everything, every single bitch. Yeah, right, and now we're in our fifties and sixties, and it's like, you know what, we're just happy to be here and be able to do this. Well, we're happy you were here at Louder and you're here at Louder. Thank you, and thanks for being on the Adventures of pipe Man.

9:36 Thank you, mann Hey, what's up? This is Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater, hanging right here with the Pipemin on W four c Y Radio. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipemin on w fur c u I Radio. H