Mike Portnoy stopped drinking in 2000, giving rise to the 12-Step Suite, a set of five songs inspired by his Alcoholics Anonymous experience, delivered across five Dream Theater albums – The Glass Prison from 2002’s Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence; This Dying Soul from 2003’s Train of Thought; The Root Of All Evil from 2005’s Octavarium; Repentance from 2007’s Systematic Chaos; and The Shattered Fortress from 2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings.
But by the time was ready to perform the songs together, he’d been out of the band he’d co-founded for approaching seven years. In 2016, long before his return to Dream Theater was a possibility, Portnoy told Prog why his 50th birthday was the right time to bring the Suite to life.
During this year’s Cruise To The Edge, you’ll perform Dream Theater’s 12-Step Suite live for the first time. Considering how much cruisers typically drink, do you worry about the message getting lost in translation?
[Laughs] People like myself who have chosen sobriety as of a way of life, it doesn’t mean we’re going to drop out of society. We live in a society where there’s drugs and alcohol everywhere. I have no problem with people that want to drink and do drugs – if they can do it in moderation, then God bless them. I wish I could, but I can’t.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been preachy with my sobriety. When I wrote the 12-Step Suite, it was a way for me to dive into 12-step work, not only for myself but for other struggling addicts or alcoholics. It was never meant to be preachy. But to be honest, my 50th birthday concert is not so much about the 12-Step Suite.
That’s just going to be a very small portion of that concert, [which] is going to be a celebration of my whole career – 30 years’ worth of music with all of my different bands. Even in that sense, I’m not going to be focusing so much on the lyrical content as I am on the music and the overall presentation. To me, it’s more about the bigger picture.
What made you decide to finally revisit the Dream Theater catalogue in such depth? Over the past few years, you’ve occasionally played Dream Theater material live with PSMS and Metal Allegiance – but not like this.
It was kind of like unfinished business that I never got to perform these songs in their entirety from start to finish. My 50th birthday concert seemed like the right time and place if I was going to ever revisit it. Obviously, the whole concert is a retrospective concert, so inevitably Dream Theater material was going to be a part of it. I felt like that would be the right Dream Theater material to do because I hadn’t done it yet.
Over the past few weeks you’ve announced some additional shows where you’ll perform the 12-Step Suite while being billed as Mike Portnoy’s Shattered Fortress.
These subsequent shows coming along is mainly a result of the announcement that I would be performing these songs on Cruise To The Edge. Now I’m getting all of these offers at different prog festivals to do it there as well, so I figured since it’s going to be up and running and rehearsed with the band I’m putting together to perform it with, I might as well. There’s more to come – there’s going to be probably a good dozen performances around the world throughout 2017.
I haven’t looked backwards in the last six years – I’ve done everything from The Winery Dogs to Metal Allegiance to Twisted Sister to Flying Colors to the Neal Morse Band. None of that is looking backwards and regurgitating my Dream Theater material. It’s a one-shot deal – this isn’t going to be an ongoing band or project. I’m not going to ever do this again.
Why not?
A lot of artists leave their bands and make a career out of playing their previous band’s material as a solo artist. That doesn’t interest me. I left Dream Theater because I wanted to move on and do different things. Doing this with Shattered Fortress is really just one-off events. Once we do this in 2017, that will be the end of that and I’ll move forward with whatever is next in my career.
You’ve previously said that it was a burden of sorts to write subsequent chapters of the 12-Step Suite, and that you were relieved when it was finally completed. Do you think you’ll feel a similar sense of catharsis to finally play it live?
I didn’t anticipate that it would take five albums and eight years to complete, so by the time I was getting to the final chapters, it really felt like a tremendous weight was lifted off my shoulders. Then I finally completed it, and shortly after, I left the band.
Now here we are, six years later, and I have yet to perform it from start to finish, which was always my intention. So yeah, this is going to be some nice closure to finally perform it this coming year.
To be honest, it saddens me a bit that I’m not doing it with the Dream Theater guys. That was always my intent. Honestly, I would have preferred to be playing it with them, but they’ve pretty much made it clear that they’re not interested in a reunion at any point soon and, you know, carpe diem. Life is short; I can’t sit around waiting for a reunion that may never happen. It’s my 50th birthday; it felt like the right time to finally do this.
I wish the Dream Theater guys would join me for this celebration but they’ve passed on the invitation, so I need to move on with my life. I really want to do this, so I will, with a great, great band of musicians that will do the music justice and [I’ll] finally get some closure on this whole project.
