Why ‘virtuosic weirdos' Dream Theater are every rock connoisseur's favourite band

Telegraph

20-02-2025

Dream Theater have never been what you might call a straight-up rock and roll band. Even at the start of the Long Island quintet's recording career, 36 years ago, their debut album, When Dream and Day Unite, attracted praise and opprobrium, in more or less equal measure, for its metal-adjacent technical flamboyance. As a former student at the esteemed Berklee College of Music, in Boston, Mike Portnoy, the group's drummer, was singled out for particular attention.
'In the band's very first appearance in Kerrang! magazine… there was a photo of me with the review and [music journalist] Derek Oliver wrote, 'Mike Portnoy: heir to the Neil Peart throne,' Portnoy tells me. (For anyone unfamiliar with the name, the now late Neil Peart was the drummer from the Canadian group Rush, known to all as the gold standard of modern progressive rock bands.) 'To me, that was the ultimate compliment,' he says, 'especially on our first album because Neil was one of my biggest heroes when I was a teenager. Seeing that comparison at such an early age was the ultimate compliment back then.'
Over the course of 16 studio albums, like Rush, Dream Theater have done their business away from the mainstream. As was the case with their Torontonian forebears, though, an almost perfect absence from the airwaves has had no discernible impact on the box office. Never mind, either, that the critics can be a bit sniffy – The Guardian once described their sound as a combination of 'old-school heavy metal wailing and unrepentant prog' – because the people keep coming. With almost no fanfare at all, in October of last year, the group headlined their largest-ever London concert, at the O2 Arena.
Now, Dream Theater are on the road in North America for a tour to mark the 40 years that have elapsed since forming in Massachusetts (where two other founding members also attended the Berklee College of Music). Unlike many metal groups of a certain age and standing, however, nostalgia is not usually their stock-in-trade. Later this year, the group will return to the road in order to play their latest album, Parasomnia, released this month, front to back for ticket-holders who are evidently keen on hearing new songs as well as old.
'Our audiences are very supportive of us making new music,' Mike Portnoy says. 'We have a fanbase that's very, very passionate. They're not casual. We don't have the kind of fans that just pop in to check out a show because they maybe heard a song on the radio. We're just not that kind of band. We've always been an album-oriented band.'
He continues. 'Luckily, these days, we're established enough, or have been around long enough, where we can kind of do whatever we want and call the shots. But it wasn't always that way. It took many, many many years to get a fanbase built up to that level of dedication and support. If we were just starting out, I don't know how we would do it. But luckily we've built this fanbase that has been with us all these years and which allows us this freedom.'
Late at night in the thick of February, Mike Portnoy appears on my computer screen from a dressing room of the Hard Rock Live theatre in Biloxi, Mississippi. In response to the observation that his quarters look rather posh, not without humour he answers, 'We play nice places, you know?' Reassuringly, though, with a fulsome beard, long hair and a t-shirt bearing the words 'Directed By David Lynch', he retains the air of a man whose very presence in a department store would attract the attention of the head of security. In a voice that sounds like a Harley on the horizon, he answers my questions with considered concision.
His backstory is pleasingly irregular. After toiling away on the lavatory circuit under the name Majesty – chosen following a conversation about Rush – it was the drummer's father who suggested the group rechristen themselves Dream Theater. Far from an ordinary working dad, as well being an author, a film director and the owner of an art gallery, the late Howard Portnoy was for a spell a DJ at KRML, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, in California. As if this weren't quite unusual enough, the job was secured after watching the Clint Eastwood thriller Play Misty For Me, a cult standard from 1971 about a lover-turned-stalker.
'He saw that movie and wanted to move to Carmel and get a job working at that radio station, which is exactly what he did,' his son reports.
After an apprenticeship banging on pots and pans, Mike Portnoy took possession of his first real drums at the age of six. Lacking any real branding, it had a blue-sparkle design, he remembers, and was a gift from a grandfather who suffered a heart attack on its day of purchase (and who died before the week was out). A decade later, in possession of serious musical chops, he became the owner of a kit made by Tama, the brand he endorses to this day. Asked to guess how much his current set-up would cost were he required to buy it with his own money, he answers, 'I don't know… tens of thousands of dollars'
The understandable desire not to pay for his own clobber led to a deal with Sabian Cymbals, which in turn led to a friendship with fellow endorsee Neil Peart. The sight of the two men discussing the intricacies of their trade, in the company of former Frank Zappa drummer Terry Bozzio and session great Tony Braunagel, in promotional clips on YouTube, affords a glimpse of the exalted level at which Portnoy is operating. In the distinction made by Buddy Rich, these are people who play drums rather than hit them. To hear them joined in conversation is like eavesdropping on the winning team in the World Cup for geeks.
With his busy paradiddles and mad time signatures, naturally, the relationship with Peart progressed beyond professional obligations. 'I knew Neil very well,' Portnoy explains. 'He became a good friend of mine for about the last 15 years of his life [the drummer died in 2020]. It was a friendship I had so much gratitude for. He would invite me to sound-check, so I would go and see Rush's sound-check. He would let me sit behind the kit and let me play whatever [set-up] he was using on each particular tour.'
But there were differences between the two men. As habitués of the 1970s rock circuit, Peart and his bandmates' preference for reading books over hedonistic chicanery led Gene Simmons, from Kiss, to note that 'in rock and roll even an ugly bastard like me can get laid, but none of the Rush guys ever did it'. I can't speak for Portnoy's predilection for pleasures of the flesh, but, certainly, he enjoyed other trappings familiar to the rock-biz circus. Enjoyed them, that is, until they threatened his livelihood, and even his life. With bombastic élan, over a series of Dream Theater albums, the drummer's journey to sobriety is itemised in a song-series nicknamed the Twelve-Step Suite.
'Back in 2000, I knew I was drinking and partying too much,' he explains. 'My kids were just born and they were young and I didn't want to become a rock and roll casualty like my heroes, like John Bonham and Keith Moon, so… I got sober at that time and [have] spent many, many, many years sober. It was probably what saved my life. It's very easy to fall into the trap of boredom on the road, and things like that. Luckily, Dream Theater isn't a crazy Mötley Crüe [or] Guns N' Roses type band, so our environment is a little more' – he searches for the right word – ' normal than some of the crazier bands out there.'
Maybe. But the weird truth of it is that rock and roll is one the very few occupations at which, at one's place of work, one will find crates of beer and bottles of liquor left by promoters apparently unconcerned that touring musicians will end up too trollied to play a show. As if to prove the point, Mike Portnoy raises an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel's 'Gentleman Jack' whiskey into view, against which his phone has been resting.
'I think musicians are creative people and you see those kinds of issues not only with musicians but with actors and even athletes sometimes, [where] you live a life where you're put in the spotlight and you're surrounded by whatever you could want and all you have to do is request it and it's brought on a silver platter,' he says. 'When you live that kind of lifestyle, it's very easy to succumb to it. And there's a lot of boredom, too. There's a lot of time sitting around, you know. I'm on tour with Dream Theater now. We play a three-hour show every night, but the other 21 hours of the day we're kind of sitting around waiting to play.'
Today, it seems that Portnoy avoids the temptations of grape and grain by staying as busy as is humanly possible. He is, and has been, involved in what seems like dozens of side-groups with esteemed players such as bassist Billy Sheehan and guitarist Ron Thal. He's sat in with everyone from thrash metal prototypes Overkill to the jam band Umphrey's McGee. During a 13-year period of absence from Dream Theater, concluded in 2023, he kept the beat for both Twisted Sister and the brilliant Orange County metal group Avenged Sevenfold, whose own drummer had died from the misuse of opioids.
But it's as a member of Dream Theater that Mike Portnoy has built what is, and what will surely continue to be, his most enduring legacy. Peculiar and esoteric, the group's continued popularity supports the notion that while some avenues of guitar-based rock and roll struggle to prosper, or even survive, metal remains bulletproof.
But here's the thing of it: even in this context, the band are irregular. By emerging into the light in the early nineties, perhaps the only period in its history when the movement was in declining health, Dream Theater became a legitimate alternative for listeners who were seriously unpersuaded by the overnight popularity of alternative music. In the years since, they've remained somehow separate from the scene they represent. Lacking the 'cool' of Tool or the crossover wallop of Metallica, instead, with the persistence of Wile E Coyote, they've fashioned an enviable career out of virtuosic weirdness.
'We went through a lot of periods where this band could easily have broken up,' Portnoy reports. 'We went for three years looking for a new singer, trying to change our record deal, getting new management – we could easily have thrown in the towel. The late nineties was a very tough period for us. But I think all the stuff that's happened to us… well, it's like the expression goes: what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. I think we're an example of that.'