Mountains Come Out of the Sky
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“We are fortunate to have the career we do, where we have a lot of exposure and tour the world and play our music,” said Petrucci. “Bands in this style do exist. But because we came up when we came we did, [because of] the timing, we were able to forge our own path.”
“Everything we do is swiped up by fans,” Portnoy said. “They stand by us through thick and thin.
Awake (1994)
A Change of Seasons (1995)
Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999)
Live at Budokan (2004)
Octavarium (2005)
Systematic Chaos (2007)
Dream Theater, changing the face of progressive rock: left to right: bassist John Myung, guitarist John Petrucci, vocalist James LaBrie, keyboardist Jordan Rudess, drummer Mike Portnoy. (Courtesy of Roadrunner Records)
PROGRESSIVITY CONTINUES INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
THE RESURGENCE OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK IN THE 1990S AND the 2000s was the result of the coalescing of forces such as the Internet, the burgeoning festival circuit, the growth of independent labels and mail-order companies, economics (i.e., an influx of money in the so-called prog field and a spike in listeners’ disposable income), and the musicians themselves, who had grown tired of not seeing and hearing the music they loved being reflected in the mainstream.
As they did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seems that popular bands are increasingly calling the shots and taking musical leaps that at once echo the past and catapult rock into a new dimensions.
Evidence of “progressivity’ is everywhere, from bands (many of whom are on major recording label that, ten years prior, would have shied away from such acts) such as electronic experimenters Radiohead and Floyd- and Queen-inspired Muse, to the Mars Volta (whose forty-five-minute jams have become legendary), sci-fi conceptualists Coheed and Cambria, Icelandic impressionists Sigur Rós, Americana proggers the Decemberists, psychedelic pomp rockers Bigelf, and Tool, a kind of Crimson-on-steroids art-metal band.
“What a band like Radiohead did, for instance,” says Jacob Holm-Lupo, guitarist and founder of Norway’s neo-Gothic White Willow, “was take something vaguely progressive and then create something that had not gone before. When [1997’s] OK Computer came, that was a huge turning point for a lot of people. It really combined elements of classic prog and something totally new.”
“Before Chris [Pennie] started recording with us as our drummer, Taylor Hawkins—from the Foo Fighters—cut tracks [for 2007’s Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow] and I can tell you he’s a big progressive rock fan,” says Coheed and Cambria guitarist Travis Stever. “His style reminded me of an early-Genesis Phil Collins. The roots of progressive rock run pretty deep in popular music, I’d say.”
Others bands such as Opeth, Pain of Salvation, Enchant, Threshold, Shadow Gallery, Mastodon, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and Symphony X continue to combine prog rock’s exploratory sense of adventure (and sometimes excesses) with heavy metal thunder.
“There has always been a lot of guitar-keyboard interplay in our music, but as time went on, the classical influence of Bach and Beethoven gave way to modern-sounding stuff, like twentieth-century art music and film scores,” says Symphony X founder and guitarist Michael Romeo. “But we never lost sight of metal. I think our common influence of classical music and progressive music, along with the heavier stuff, led us to where we are now and what we do.”
“For me, I’ve collected all the styles of music I like and molded them into one,” says Opeth guitarist /vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt. “It was never a big problem going from [one] extreme to the other, like a death metal part to a calm acoustic part. It just always made sense for me, given the kinds of bands I’ve listened to, whether it was a metal act or a classic progressive rock band.”
“In order to create something that’s true for you that sometimes requires sacrifice,” says Coheed and Cambria drummer Pennie. “You have to say, ‘I don’t care if anyone likes it.’ With progressive rock, they are either going to love it or hate it.”
THE FLOWER KINGS
Prog’s third wave, as it’s often referred to, broke in the 1990s. The Swedes, in particular, were instrumental in leading the way, helping to shape progressive rock as we know it today. (Not surprising: Sweden has a history of producing trailblazing experimental rock artists, from Algren’s Trädgård to Bo Hansson and avant-garde Samla Mammas Manna.)
Bands such as the Flower Kings, Landberk, Anglagard, and Anekdoten took an emotional (yet retro) stance against the tide of corporate control, offering nonconformists everywhere an alternative to popular music.
“When we started out in 1991, it felt like the underground progressive community was establishing itself,” says Jan Erik Liljeström, vocalist/bassist of Anekdoten. “We didn’t know much about how to reach out to distributors, but through personal connections and [later] the Internet, we were able to get ourselves a name in the prog rock community fairly easily.”
As the 1990s rolled on, the interest in prog rock began to grow, thanks in no small part to the World Wide Web, which connects prog fans from all over the world. Record labels, catering to fans of progressive music, were open for business: Magna Carta, Laser’s Edge, Cuneiform, InsideOut Music, Cyclops, Syn-Phonic, Galileo, Kinesis; France’s Musea, established in the mid-1980s, was coming into its own.
Others, such as Leonardo Pavkovic’s Moonjune, Snapper Music’s Kscope, and Shawn Gordon’s ProgRock Records, were soon to follow and underwrite adventurous prog rock and jazz-rock recordings by legends and relative unknowns alike.
Annual festivals, such as ProgDay, NEARfest, Baha Prog in Mexico, RoSfest, and 3RP (the Three Rivers Progressive Rock festival in Pittsburgh), dedicated to prog music cropped up (and continue to crop up), causing family men and wayward sons and daughters across the globe to interact over a weekend of live music.
“I remember I played ProgFest with Kevin Gilbert [Sheryl Crow, Toy Matinee] in 1994, when we did The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” says Spock’s Beard’s Nick D’Virgilio. “I had no idea that there were labels and festivals that promoted progressive rock.”
It is from this burgeoning milieu that the Flower Kings sprang and thrived. “I wasn’t aware that there was something happening with progressive music outside of Sweden,” says guitarist Roine Stolt. “I began thinking: ‘I have all of this recording equipment. Why not try to make an album today with what I see as ... prog rock?’ That’s what led to my recording the solo record The Flower King.”
Prior to the release of The Flower King, Stolt did whatever he needed to in order to survive. (He had previously been a member of the Swedish symphonic prog rock band Kaipa, which he joined in the mid-1970s, when he was seventeen.)
“I played in every possible style you can imagine after that,” Stolt says. “Blues, folk, rock, Latin, heavy rock. Whatever. That was the best education I could have gotten.”
This stew of influence sweetened the music of the Flower Kings for albums such as Retropolis, Flower Power, Stardust We Are, Space Revolver, and Back in the World of Adventures.
“I started the band because I wanted to play and write music,” says Stolt. “When I write songs, I want to write songs about something that matters to me, and something that connects with the other part of Roine Stolt, the family man, the private person.”
Sense of Adventure: The Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt. (Courtesy of Ulei Frey)
Unfold the Future (2002)
Since the turn of the century, the Flower Kings have continued to fuse disparate genres for releases such as 2001’s Rainmaker, 2002’s Unfold the Future, 2004’s Adam & Eve, 2006’s Paradox Hotel, and 2007’s The Sum of No Evil, even making a conscious move to downplay Tomas Bodin’s vintage keyboard sounds on latter records.
“You receive a certain feeling when you put on ‘The Truth Will Set You Free’ from Unfold the Future,” says the Tangent’s Andy Tillison, who has recorded with Stolt and other members of the Flower Kings, such as bassist
Jonas Reingold and Hungarian drummer Zoltan Csörsz. “They develop riffs on marimba, and that had a similar effect on me as, say, when I heard and still hear ‘Dawn of Light .. .‘[from Yes’s “The Revealing Science of God’]. These things let you know that you are on the verge of twenty minutes of escape. But it’s not just escape: You’re going places with these bands.” “I hope that when people hear the Flower Kings they know that this is a band not interested in seeing its music played on the radio,” says Stolt. ”There’s a sense of adventure in the Flower Kings music that much of today’s music simply lacks. People look back fondly at records like Topographic Oceans or Relayer. What they loved about those albums they can find in the Flower Kings.”
SPOCK’S BEARD: THE HEALING COLORS OF SOUND
One of the major bands to emerge from prog’s third wave were Americans Spock’s Beard, who are often compared to Gentle Giant due to their use of syncopated patterns and counterpoint melodies.
Opeth: Blackwater Park (2001)
Coheed and Cambria: In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 (2003)
Muse: The Resistance (2009)
Radiohead: OK Computer (1997)
Riverside: Rapid Eye Movement (2007)
Sigur Ros: () (2002)
Spock’s Beard: Day For Night (1999)
The Mars Volta: Frances the Mute (2005)
Tool: Aenima (1996)
A performance by Yes in 1972 in California changed forever Neal Morse and his brother, guitarist Alan, the founders of Spock’s Beard.
“It was the Fragile tour,” Neal says, “and I am not exaggerating when I say that it changed my life. Yes had this magic.”
“I saw Steve Howe with a pedal steel and knew it wasn’t exactly country music, but that rock music could have this whole other sonic palette,” says Alan Morse. “That was an event that opened up a whole lot of things.”
When Neal graduated from high school, he followed his aspirations of being a professional musician. “I had been trying to, all through the ’80s, get a record deal as a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles,” says Morse. “I used to write a lot of songs in the vein of early Elton John and Billy Joel and later on Marc Cohn. That was my vision for myself as an artist for years. But it never happened.”
After Morse spent some time in Europe, he returned to America, but his career in music was still in traction. A self-help forum, sponsored by an educational service called Landmark, changed Morse’s view of music and life path.
“In the ’90s I was very depressed,” says Morse. “I asked, ‘What’s the point? I’ve failed.’ What Landmark made me realize is that I had commingled the realms of music and the music business. They helped me to remember what inspired me in the first place. I remembered Yes opening for Black Sabbath when I was twelve years old. A lightbulb went off: I never got into music for the business in the first place. It was like, ‘That’s what it’s all about.”’
“Neal and I came up with a slogan: ‘Fuck it! Let’s do what we love,”’ says Alan Morse.
A week after taking the Landmark course, Neal began writing music for what would become Spock’s critically acclaimed debut, 1995’s The Light, recruiting bassist David Meros and drummer Nick D’Virgilio (whom the Morse brothers met at a blues jam in L.A.).
“No one did prog in the mid- ’90s,” says D’Virgilio. “Spock’s Beard played ProgFest in 1995, and that was when everything just took off. We met Thomas Waber, who owns the label InsideOut, and that eventually led to a deal with this record label, a mail-order company, GEP, Giant Electric Pea . . . and they released The Light in Europe.”
“Spock’s were something different,” says keyboardist Martin Orford, formerly of Britain’s IQ, who runs the GEP label. “These were long tracks but with catchy ‘pop song’ melodies. There was clearly a proper songwriting team at work here, and I was much impressed.”
Beard’s sophomore effort, Beware of Darkness, followed, featuring veteran Japanese organist/Mellotron player Ryo Okumoto, as did a live record in 1996, The Official Bootleg.
“It just snowballed,” says D’Virgilio. “There were people who supported this music, particularly in Europe. We’d play in small clubs and it was a surprise to everybody that bands were playing this kind of material.”
The Beard continued to release crowd-pleasers, such as 1998’s Kindness of Strangers, 1999’s Day for Night, and the live Don’t Try This at Horne (recorded in Holland). The following year’s V featured the longest composition of the band’s recording career (up to that point), “The Great Nothing.”
“The Great Nothing” tells the tale of a veteran musician who’s on the verge of conceding a worthless pursuit, when out of the blue he hears a single note of music, which inspires him to write songs again (thus reflecting Morse’s own experience with the music business).
“In the song, when I talk about ‘one note timeless came out of nowhere . . .’ I’m talking about music saving me,” says Morse. “I’m going through my life, feeling like I’ve missed my calling and . . . becoming a miserable partier, a drunk. I was a major drinker. I remember the times I asked my girlfriend to bring me a beer in the shower. My motto was [that] a beer an hour would keep the hangover away.”
By the time Morse was writing material for the next Spock’s Beard record, the 2002 concept double album titled Snow, about an albino teen with the power to heal through touch, he was in the process of being spiritually transformed.
“I was becoming a Christian through the course of Spock’s Beard,” says Morse. “Even as early as a song like ‘The Water,’ from the first album, you can hear me reaching for God.”
Snow was a success, selling tens of thousands of copies, but soon after its release, Morse announced he was leaving Spock’s Beard, claiming he felt the pull of a religious calling.
“I felt ... at that time that God was calling me out of [the band],” Morse says. “I prayed about it for nine months and all I ever felt was . . . ‘You know what you need to do. It’s time.’ I feel like He let me be with the band and let us have our dream together for a while, and then it was time for me to move on.”
For a time it appeared as though Spock’s Beard might have been in trouble. They’d just parted company with their most prolific writer and cofounder, a unifying force for the most part.
“Neal never gave any indication that he would quit,” says D’Virgilio. “He just came in one day out of the blue and dropped the bomb. We were a bit miffed. We were just finally getting to a point where we could have gone to the next level and were about the break a little bit. Then we got the rug pulled out from underneath us.”
Nevertheless, Morse’s solo material has helped to shape a new rock subgenre—CPR (Christian progressive rock)—with the release of albums such as 2003’s concept record about Morse’s spiritual journey, called Testimony (“Snow took two years to write, and Testimony took about a month,” Morse says), 2004’s One, 2005’s?, 2006’s Cover to Cover, 2007’s Sola Scriptura, and 2008’s Lifeline.
Morse even reactivated Transatlantic—the supergroup he had formed with Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy, Marillion’s Pete Trewavas, and the Flower Kings’ Roine Stolt, recording and releasing 2009’s The Whirlwind, the band’s first record since 2001’s busting-at-the-seams Bridge Across Forever.
Meanwhile, Spock’s Beard continues to motor along. The same instinct to say, “Fuck it all” that birthed Spock’s Beard has kept it alive. D’Virgilio stepped up to the microphone as lead vocalist, pulling a Phil Collins. (D’Virgilio continues to sing and play drums in the studio, but skinsbeater Jimmy Keegan handles the drumming duties when the band performs live.)
Post—Neal Morse, Spock’s Beard have released 2003’s Feel Euphoria, 2005’s Octane, Live in ’05: Gluttons for Punishment, 2006’s eponymous album, and 2008’s Live. At press time, Spock’s had released their tenth studio record, appropriately titled X. It’s been a long journey, full of ups and down, but the band has fought against the tide to become one of America’s premiere progressive rock ac
ts for the new millennium.
“After Neal left, we didn’t waste any time,” says D’Virgilio. “We knew what we needed to do and just went for it. Now, I’d say, we have a better idea of what we’re doing and how to work together, and I think it shows in the music.”
PORCUPINE TREE
For all intents and purposes, England’s Porcupine Tree might be the best example of a modern band balancing elements of the experimental and melodic while watching their sales volume steadily rise with each studio release.
Alternately described as progressive rock, post-progressive, neo-psychedelic, progressive metal, experimental /ambient, and even trance/club, Porcupine Tree are in the enviable position of being a work in progress while maintaining a loyal fan base.
“I think what’s really interesting is that I very often get spoken about in the terms of someone who is making progressive rock, and for many years I resisted that and felt that was only a part of the story,” says Porcupine Tree mastermind and multitalent Steven Wilson. “What I do understand and have come to appreciate now about my style and approach over the years is that everything I do does have a certain progressive sensibility about it. I have definitely learned from listening almost exclusively as a teenager to progressive music—from Can to Mahavishnu to Henry Cow—which is not the type of music I listen to very often now. But it’s certainly almost in my DNA.”