What bothers me the most about Mike's "I am the band" attitude is the fact that he wasn't even that much of a band leader for most of their early (and by and large, better) works. Prior to Falling Into Infinity, Portnoy wrote only two songs; A Change of Seasons and The Mirror; that was it. Oh, and I believe he wrote the "rap" part of Take The Time. But from '86 - '94, Petrucci and Moore were the clear creative leaders, with occasional input form Portnoy, Myung, Dominici and LaBrie. Then Moore left after Awake, and Portnoy, and to a lesser extent, LaBrie, stepped up to fill in the void, but even then, it wasn't the Mike Portnoy show. He didn't really take over the band until Scenes From A Memory; though it seems like on SFAM, the other members were still permitted a lot of freedom with creative contributions (i.e.; Myung was still allowed to write lyrics). After that, though, Mike completely took over the band's creative direction, with a growing focus on sounding "cool" and "modern". As the band began to climb back in the mainstream starting with Train of Thought, Mike probably viewed their growing success as validation of his "rule", and began to exert ever more control over the band, using Petrucci mainly as a lyric-writing machine and virtually freezing the others out of having any meaningful say in their own band. I remember Mike commenting on multiple occasions (interviews and the bonus materiel on the Chaos In Motion DVD) that everyone in the band was cool with how the ship was being run and there were no major internal problems. But it is clear now that there was a lot of tension under the surface, especially with Myung, and when Mike presented them with the choice of either an indefinite hiatus or a Dream Theater without Portnoy, they chose the latter, and now he wonders why they would do such a thing when everything had been so "perfect" for a decade. I respect Mike a lot for all he did, not to mention his talent, but after the last two albums the band clearly needed some fresh ideas and he should have had the common sense to just step aside and let the others write the music. But no, he wanted them to wait around while he was having the time of his life with A7X, and when they refused and said they would press on with or without him, somehow, he felt like he was the victim. And his self victimization is one thing I cannot stand.
I know a lot of people here don't like David Prater, but after all that has gone down recently, I suspect there is some truth to his statement in Classic Rock: Prog that DT kicked Mike out because they were sick of having to accommodate his every whim. While it may not have technically been a firing, they certainly had little qualms about moving on without him, and honestly, I can see why they would want to. They had an opportunity to allow all the band members to write for the next album and to rid themselves of a leader that had grown stale in his own creative output. Why wouldn't they want to take that risk?
Topic: Mike Portnoy on wanting to rejoin Dream Theater (Read 140120 times)
