by Michael Popke

Ex-Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy recently tweeted about a new project, proving he is keen to move past awkward breakups with both Dream Theater and Avenged Sevenfold:

VERY excited about a new project I’m working on w one my fav singers in the world: my bro Sir Russell Allen…wait til you hear this sh*t!!!

You may recall that Allen’s main band, Symphony X, was working on a new album last summer that was supposed to be out already. Allen, like Portnoy, doesn’t like to sit still for long – taking on projects with Jorn Lande, Ayreon and his own solo work in the past. Both men are powerhouse performers with their chosen instruments, and it should be fun to see (and hear) how this goes.

(And if you’re not following Portnoy on Twitter, I urge you to do so. He posts about everything from iPhones to  TV shows to middle school sporting events.)

by Michael Popke

If you frequent online progressive-rock communities, you’ve no doubt seen the question “What is prog?” posted countless times. The responses typically range from the overly intellectual to the downright offensive. So it is with extreme humbleness that I suggest there really is no “right” or “wrong” answer. We like progressive music because it affects us in ways far deeper than practically any other genre (save, perhaps, classical). It can incite an abundance of emotions, including passion, fear, joy, sadness and violence – sometimes all in the same song.  It forces us to move beyond the mainstream and actually think about what we’re hearing. At its core, “prog” means whatever we want it to mean.

When I was young, my dad would sit with me in my bedroom and listen to selections from my latest album purchases (usually by such artists as Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner and Loverboy). But among the last titles I remember us sharing together was Asia’s self-titled 1982 debut. I was 14 years old.

While Asia’s epic synthesizers, grandiose orchestration and Roger Dean artwork may seem hopelessly dated now, it remains a classic album that – despite that dragon on the cover – brought the pretentiousness of Seventies progressive rock to a mainstream audience with a combination of accessible melodies and often-lofty lyrics. Today, Asia isn’t even considered prog in some circles. But for me, it was my introduction to an expansive world of music, one in which long songs about the apocalypse were not only permitted but encouraged. So long, Loverboy.

Prog enthusiasts can argue the merits of Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Marillion, Gentle Giant, Kansas and Camel for years – and they have. Throw some metal into the mix (Queensryche, Dream Theater, Rush and Iron Maiden), and you’ll incite some real heated debate. Queensryche’s lead vocalist Geoff Tate, during an interview with me several years ago, refused to acknowledge that his band played “progressive” music — even though renowned music  journalist Paul Gargano wrote that Queensryche defined “the parameters of progressive rock for mainstream America” in the liner notes to the then-new Live Evolution album.

But if these bands and all of their descendants – Spock’s Beard, RPWL, Pain of Salvation, Opeth, Magic Pie, DeeExpus, Ayreon, Porcupine Tree, Riverside, Symphony X and even Phish and Umphrey’s McGee among them – introduce new ways for us to hear music and provide enjoyment long after we think we’ve heard it all, then we certainly can call them “progressive.” They are advancing our understanding and appreciation of their art.

One of my most recent prog discoveries is Zevious, an aggressive New York City-based instrumental trio that tears a huge hole in the logic of labeling genres. On the band’s 2009 CD, After the Air Raid, Zevious takes influences from contemporary jazz artists like Vijay Iyer, the polymetric metal of Meshuggah, the vintage fusion of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the avant-garde attitude of Magma. Challenging and not always easy to listen to, After the Air Raid defines adventurous music.

I’ve been in relentless pursuit of the adventure since I dropped the needle on side one of that first Asia record almost 30 years ago.

They all laughed at Arjen Lucassen. It was the mid-’90s, and nobody was doing rock opera anymore — not with grunge and its Doc Martens kicking anything that smacked of self-indulgence off the charts and out of record company boardrooms.

But after slogging through tour after tour for 15 years with a number of rock and metal bands since he was a teenager and making “ … concessions to band members and concessions to record companies,” as Lucassen recalls, he was ready to do what he damn well pleased. 

“I was like, ‘I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I’m going to do my own rock opera,’” says Lucassen, the multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer and vocalist behind the monolithic progressive-metal project Ayreon. “And of course, it was like crazy to do a rock opera in the ’90s. That was the days of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and whatever, so doing it in those days was like mad, it was crazy.”

With no money, Lucassen, inspired as a teen by Andrew Lloyd Webber and such productions as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and The Who’s “Tommy” and concept albums like Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, got a little help from friends like Barry Hay of Golden Earring and Kingdom Come’s Lenny Wolf and another musician who gave him access to a studio in conjuring the heavy, complex music and a gripping yarn for The Final Experiment in 1995.

“All record companies turned me down,” says Lucassen. “About 30 or 40 record companies turned me down, and it was funny. They all said, ‘Oh, that’s great. Oh, it’s cool. I would buy it… but we don’t want it [laughs].”
Not everybody gave Lucassen the bum’s rush.

“There was this guy in Holland who had never released an album before,” says Lucassen. “He had only released old vinyl on CDs, and he said, ‘Hey, this is cool. I want to release this.’ And I was like, ‘well, go ahead man [laughs].’ And a company in Japan was interested as well, and it slowly started selling. At first it was a thousand, then a couple thousand, and I was like, ‘Ah, a couple of thousand bought my LP, or my CD… sorry. My age is showing. And then it was like 10,000, then it was 20,000, then 30,000, 40,000 and 50,000 … what? What’s happening? Then the record company said, ‘Hey man, it’s a success. You’ve got to do another one.’”

And he did — seven to be exact, including 2008’s magnum opus 01011001, an album that tied together, musically and lyrically, all of the previous Ayreon releases in one epic recording. Having sewed up all the loose story threads of Lucassen’s imaginative sci-fi/fantasy narratives, Lucassen was ready to embark on something he’d always resisted: a box set that sampled some of his best work from past efforts — to wit, Timeline, a new three-CD/DVD set that nicely encapsulates the Ayreon story.

“Basically, my first three or four albums had no connection with each other, and then, suddenly, the fifth album — I think it was Universal Migrator — I started connecting my previous albums, and with the last album, 01011001, I brought all my albums together,” says Lucassen. “It’s weird because when I started with the first album, The Final Experiment, I had no idea that all my future albums were going to be connected, and I didn’t even see the
connection. I only saw the connection when I did my last album.”

That moment of clarity was a revelation. Before, Lucassen felt that taking songs out of context from each album would result in a box collection that was a di