Interesting if there's ever going to be a thaw with LaBrie. They WERE friends at one point.
They were best pals around the IAW era (or so I've read), and if I'm not mistaken, things started to go south in around the SDOIT era.
I believe they were good friends through FII and SFAM is where it started to sour. From Lifting Shadows they mentioned a time when Mike told James that he was going to have Theresa sing the "move on be brave" part during TSCO at a show and they almost came to blows.
SDOIT was when it probably got REALLY bad.
Interesting if there's ever going to be a thaw with LaBrie. They WERE friends at one point.
They were best pals around the IAW era (or so I've read), and if I'm not mistaken, things started to go south in around the SDOIT era.
I think that James was really upset with that conference call with MP and JP when both complained about James' performance, and from there on, it was never the same. Pure speculation on my part, but I think there's some truth to that.
Is that in "Lifting Shadows"? Why the animosity then for Mike and not John?
I've mentioned this a lot in the past but I think that call was 95-99% Mike. I've noticed Mike is quick to take credit for a lot of things unless it is controversial, then it is a "we" decision. If you look at the quotes in Lifting Shadows (as well as all of Mike's comments publicly, online, etc), he had a big problem with James and it doesn't seem like the others did. The only comments in Lifting Shadows were Jordan saying that he was too new to have an opinion, Myung didn't comment at all, Mike was really bothered by James, and John was very passive in his criticism of James. From memory, all John had to say was, "We wanted to ask James, 'are you even into this anymore'?" He mentioned that James seemed to be in a bad mood a lot and they were concerned about him. I don't think John even mentioned looking for a different singer, wanting a different direction, etc. Makes me wonder if Mike made one of his patented exhaustive arguments, that by his own admission, he wouldn't drop until other people went along with. John may have finally been like, "all right, I can agree we need to talk to him" but never had any intention of ever asking him to leave unless things got much, much worse.