Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy Nearly Drummed for Nickelback
In the 13 years he spent away from Dream Theater, drummer Mike Portnoy saw himself joining, touring with, or returning to a number of other acts, including the Winery Dogs, Liquid Tension Experiment, Transatlantic, Adrenaline Mob, Stone Sour, Overkill… the list kinda goes on a bit. But now that he’s back with the band he helped create, he’s revealed the one band he nearly joined that certainly would have made headlines — Canadian butt rock outfit Nickelback.
Yep, there was a time where Portnoy would have been in a buncha photographs on stage with Nickelback. That tidbit of info came out during his Drumeo sessions, the latest video of which dropped earlier this morning. In that video, he was tasked with playing the band’s song “Burn It To The Ground” without ever hearing it before. And as you’d expect, he embellishes a bit more on the song than the original track calls for.
According to Portnoy, he was approached by the band back in 2022 when they had a sudden vacancy behind the kit.
“I got a call from Nickelback in spring of ’22. Their drummer [Daniel Adair] I guess was having surgery and they asked me to play a show with them. And I said ‘Yeah, that’d be a fun gig!’
“I was all set to play this gig with Nickelback – it was for a festival [in Vancouver, Canada] – and the festival ended up getting canceled. But I was this close to playing a gig with Nickelback.”
Portnoy said things progressed far enough that he received the setlist for that night’s show. And while you and I might know every word to at least a few Nickelback tunes, Portnoy said he’d never heard a single one.
“Chad [Kroeger] sent me the set list. My daughter and my wife were like ‘You’re gonna know every one of these songs’ and I was like “I’ve never heard any of these songs!”
“I don’t listen to the radio so I don’t know any Nickelback songs.”
Talk about a wild set of circumstances. Sure, it would have likely only been for one show, but that would have been a doozy of a Jeopardy! question one day. As you’ll see in the clip below, Portnoy opted to add double bass to the song, which he joked would have gotten him “fired immediately.”
