DREAM THEATER Drummer: 'We've Always Dabbled In The Metal Community'

Bram Teitelman of Metal Insider recently conducted an interview with DREAM THEATER drummer Mike Portnoy. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Insider: "Black Clouds and Silver Linings" is your 10th album. Did you have any idea that DREAM THEATER would last as long as it has?

Portnoy: We dreamed that it would and hoped that it would, but even after a few years together, our future was uncertain. The early days were filled with a million obstacles; false starts, bad contracts, and lineup changes. In the early years of the band, the future was always uncertain, but somehow we endured it, and persevered, and here we are, almost 25 years later. Like METALLICA said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Metal Insider: It seems like you might have gotten a little more acceptance within the metal community upon signing with Roadrunner. Have you noticed that at all?

Portnoy: Roadrunner has surely helped, but we've always dabbled in the metal community. We've done tours with MAIDEN and done festivals with SLAYER and PANTERA, so that's always been a side of us. Even before Roadrunner, Dave Mustaine handpicked us to co-headline Gigantour. So maybe they've helped us get more acceptance with that side of the band, which is good, because we've always been a metal band. But our problem is that we've always been too progressive for the real metalheads, and we're always too metal for the real prog purists. So as much as we've been able to float between the two worlds, I don't know if we've ever been fully embraced by either world.

Metal Insider: The album is coming in three different versions. Do you feel like that's a necessity to do to sell more records and combat downloading?

Portnoy: I think the label feels that's a necessity. We don't necessarily feel that as artists. Personally, I would have loved to have done special editions for all of our albums, but in the past, it was hard to try to convince the labels to do it. Now it's the opposite and the labels are trying to convince the artists to do it to combat downloading. The labels are kind of scrambling to get these extra products out there to keep people buying. It's kind of a win-win situation for everybody, because it works out right for the fans, and they get that much more bonus stuff to get their hands on. As a fan, and a collector, I love it, and I think it's awesome. The fact that the label is enabling us to do it, I'll have no shortage of suggestions about what we can do for bigger and better releases, and I'm glad that they're supporting it now.

Read the entire interview from Metal Insider.