Mike Portnoy was born and raised in Long Beach, New York, on Long Island. His father worked as a DJ at a local radio station, helping Portnoy gain an appreciation for music at an early age through bands like Deep Purple and the Beatles. Although Portnoy taught himself how to play the drums he did take music theory classes in high school, and during that period he began playing in local bands Intruder, Rising Power and Inner Sanctum, the latter of which released an album. He left Inner Sanctum after being awarded a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he met John Petrucci and John Myung and formed what would become Dream Theater.
Portnoy has won 19 awards from Modern Drummer magazine, including "Best recorded performance" (5 times) and "Best Progressive Rock Drummer" (for 12 consecutive years), and is also the youngest person (at 37 years of age) to be inducted into their Rock Drummer Hall of Fame.
An avid collector of many things, Portnoy has a vast array of Dream Theater memorabilia including bootlegs, posters, clippings and everything else under the sun with the band's name on it. He is also responsible for capturing everything the band does on video tape and DAT (see YtseJam Records). His huge video collection includes favorite films such as 2001 - A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Jacob's Ladder and The Wall along with episodes of The Simpsons and memorable boxing matches. His love of A Clockwork Orange is so great that a section of the soundtrack was used as Dream Theater's intro tape on both the first several legs of 1997/98's "Touring Into Infinity" World Tour as well as the Octavarium/20th Anniversary World Tour of 2005/06.
Mike is also a recovering alcoholic. This prompted him to write a musical suite which will eventually comprise the 12 Steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery program. So far, Dream Theater has written three songs, which describe seven of the twelve steps. These are: "The Glass Prison" (Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence), "This Dying Soul" (Train of Thought), and "The Root of All Evil" (Octavarium). The song "The Mirror" (Awake), which was also written by Mike and discuss the same topic, is not officially a part of Mike's "AA Saga". Though some fans wonder about how deep his alcoholism ran within him, fans highly respect his right to privacy and as a respected musican and stray from bringing the subject up around him (whether it be in person or via the internet). To this day Mike has not made a public statement (aside from the general storyline of the A.A. recovery program) about this subject.
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