A Quote by Mike Portnoy
When Dream Theater first started, we were touring in a van and playing clubs.
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I love playing live, but our tours generally last about a year. I could never do this without the understanding and support of my wife. She's also a guitar player, and we knew each other before Dream Theater started touring.
I really loved touring with my band, but it felt like we would spend a lot of time playing in empty rooms - empty clubs. We had some good successes, but it's so physically hard to load up a van and drive all day.
If we weren't in this band, some of us wouldn't be playing at all. You have tiffs with someone when he has smelly feet in the touring van, but we all respect each other as friends first.
I did three club tours before I started playing concert halls, and the clubs were half full the first time around.
When we first started touring, we were going to these towns we'd never otherwise go to, never otherwise see, and that's sort of why we like being in a band. But we started playing these bigger rooms and not even seeing the towns.
When I first was trying to play the clubs around Houston to start playing my own songs, songwriters like Eric Taylor and Vince Bell and Townes Van Zandt and Don Sanders were just really encouraging to me and would let me sit in with them during their sets and introduce me to the person that owned and booked the club.
When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.
When I was 14, I started playing in the bigger clubs in Holland and when I was 17, I started playing all of the festivals there.
I was always singing but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.
When we first started and started hitting new places for the first time, you kinda didn't know, because we were new. Sometimes we played tiny little clubs and sometimes we'd play a larger place.
Ivo van Hove is directing The Crucible, and rehearses in quite an unusual way. We started rehearsals last week and dived straight into the first act, like, five minutes after we all turned up. No warm-ups. We were very intensely immersed in that whole world on day one. It was quite surreal because I've never done any theater before.
I've been wearing Wrangler jeans for more than a decade now, all the way back to when I first started playing clubs in my teens in Georgia.
Patrick and Joe were so young when we started the band. As slow as it was, with all the touring and crappy clubs we played, we still never had time to stop and reflect. When we took a break, it finally gave us time to reflect and grow up.
When we started out in the U.K., there were songs that we made, we put them on the Internet, and we immediately started touring the U.K. We borrowed our friend's mum's car, and drove ourselves around for, like, a year playing gigs in pubs and tiny little venues. In that respect, we're pretty grass roots as a band. We've done all that together.
David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.
Back in the days of the Smiths, when we first started touring England - this is, like, 1984 - there were these two girls. They were literally vicar's daughters, and they used to follow us to every gig, no matter where we went.
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