My first exposure to Mike Portnoy was, I think, seeing him in Mapex ads in Modern Drummer in the early 1990s. Pretty soon, he was everywhere in MD: ads, articles, features, interviews, blurbs… Then, I saw a transcription of the opening to “6:00” in a Sabian brochure. I had to hear it.
I went to Blockbuster Music (remember those?), where they would open any CD and let you listen to it. That’s when I heard “6:00” for the first time. Holy crap… My fifteen-year-old head nearly exploded. Yeah, I’d heard and seen a lot of great drumming to that point, but Mike Portnoy and Dream Theater differed so greatly from what I was into at the time. And that was the start of long (mild) obsession with the band and their drummer.
This went on until a few years ago. For no reason in particular, I stopped listening to Dream Theater. Not altogether, but I went long stretches DT-less. It started around the release of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence in 2002. I was disappointed that it wasn’t (in my opinion) a strong follow-up to Scenes from a Memory, and I was irritated with the injection of politics into the lyrics (“The Great Debate”). I was also a little turned off after I, as an employee at The Drum Pad, spent a day with Mike Portnoy in March 2002. He was very bitter and didn’t have any of the enthusiasm he did the first time I met him in 1998. Granted, a lot had gone on for him both professionally and personally in that four years [and I don’t fault him for not being thrilled to hang out with rabid DT geeks (myself very much included)], but it was nonetheless disappointing to see one of my drum heroes so jaded. This, combined with my musical studies at Berklee taking me in a very different direction, and I found myself giving the next few Dream Theater albums only a cursory listen.
Well, I’m rediscovering those intervening albums now, as well as the older stuff I worshiped in high school. It’s been at least a year since I’ve listened to many of the songs on the earlier albums, and I’m amazed that I remember so many of the drum parts in such detail. It’s been air drumming heaven at my house…
For all the praise Mike Portnoy has garnered, he’s received a lot of harsh flack too. On one end are the academics and jazz nazis who disparage anyone who plays a backbeat or a kit larger than 4 pieces manufactured post 1965. At the other end are two factions: the hardcore metal guys who clock and compare blast beats; and the general YouTube baboons who may or may not even play drums but post incoherent, nearly illiterate diatribes castigating all who aren’t their favorite drummer.
Here’s a gem from the comments on the videos below:
bassmont: well its my point of view for me he really sucks he’s dirty take a look to jose pasillas and comparte the cleaness wich he plays the drumms.
Wow.
But I digress. The point I want to make is that if you like Mike Portnoy as a musician, you have every reason to. He’s creative, he has good technique, he has great dynamics, he can play simple, he can play complex, etc. Let’s also not forget that his memory—recalling on stage dozens of really long, really intricate songs—is a commendable talent in itself.
I think you have to recognize his talent, but you don’t have to like Mike Portnoy. You can choose not to like his playing style or his bands, but belittling his abilities is completely baseless and… well, just mean.
There are loads and buckets of great videos on the web. Here are a couple of extended clips from Mike’s Hudson Music DVD In Constant Motion.
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