Half A Million Prog Fans Can’t Be Wrong!?

Is it an earthquake? No, it’s just the sound of those old dinosaurs thundering back into town again! Mick Wall discovers on his latest anthropological dig, the dinosaurs are breeding thick and fast! He talks to Dream Theater and Magellan about the current shift in jurassic matters...

Of course, the question to ask about Progressive Rock has never been ‘what is it?’ – we all know what it is. Medieval names and concept albums, long meandering solos from every instrument in the band before you get to the first chorus, and lyrics that would send you cross-eyed trying to discern the ‘hidden’ meaning of... The question has always been ‘why is it?’ I mean, why take a perfectly good, immensely successful musical form like the three-minute Pop song, and diddle with it and fuss about until the poor bastard’s now three times as long, but not even half as catchy any more?

And we’re not just talking about Yes and Genesis and all those other sleeping giants like the Floyd and Tull and ELO. If you’re talking serious Prog, pal, you also have to include the likes of Metallica, whose first four albums, shrunk down to snugfit size, would have made almost as good a conventional Rock album as their most recent, wised-up, Bob Rock-produced, mega-plat ‘Metallica’ album; Led Zeppelin, who always viewed anything under six minutes as B-side fodder; and not forgetting Queen, whose Freddie Mercury singlehandedly transformed the word’ pretentious’ into something new and meaningful; Rock music with all the ermine trimmings.

Even Guns N’ Roses, whose Axl Rose was so smitten as a youth by the neo-classical Pop-epics of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra that he couldn’t resist flirting with a big, expensive bank of synthesisers on the last Guns N’ Roses album, tweaking at the tits of otherwise reasonable Pop crud like ‘November Rain’, until it swelled up into almost Gothic proportions.

But that’s just my gas filling the room. Metal Hammer thought it might be a better idea if I talked to two of the current most cred proponents of what is, after all, an even more maligned musical genre than Heavy Metal.

I began by speaking to Trent Gardner from Magellan. Trent grew up listening to the usual overachieving culprits: Tull, Marillion, Kansas, Yes ... but admits that there’s still, in his words, “a great deal of Progressive music I just can’t stand. I’m not into that mystical dungeon stuff, and I think that, in many ways, that’s what has contributed to the demise of that kind of music.

“I mean, if you mention a band like Queen in the same breath as Progressive Rock, it’s viewed as kind of a demotion in most people’s eyes now.”

Trent insists that, these days, Progressive Rock means “Pantera as much as it once meant Marillion. Prog is Sepultura...” Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater (sic), the most prominent of the latest wave of recognised Prog-rockers, says he would cast the Prog-net even wider than that.

“Sure, I grew up listening to a lot of ELP and Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull like everybody else,” he says. “But, to me, Progressive music never meant just those guys. Progressive music meant all kinds of different Rock music, whether Jazz derived or Classical. The musicianship was always the key thing.”

Indeed. Well, I remember the days when older, more venerable brothers of friends would try to tear me away from my T Rex singles, and make me sit still long enough to appreciate a vintage piece of guitar virtuosity from the winsome likes of a Steve Howe or a Mike Rutherford. it was all so smug and self-serving.

These were the kind of people who collected stamps or coins, or went train-spotting. Worse, it was always taken for granted that the musicians in so-called ‘Progressive outfits’ were inherently better musicians than their counterparts in the less elevated Pop and Rock bands.

As Trent Gardner says, “If you know how to play, you shouldn’t have to prove anything.” Nevertheless, he admits that Magellan enjoy their extended solos as much as the next fretboard fidget.

“Live, certainly, there are solos in our set. But mostly, these days, we’re concentrating on trying to write good songs, no matter how long they are.”

Isn’t it all just over-preening self-indulgence, though? And isn’t that why everyone from Genesis to Metallica eventually ended up aiming for, and eventually having hit singles?

“I was classically trained,” says Trent. “I got a degree in music theory from college. But I’m not aloof, or pretentious or any of those things. And neither is the best of Progressive music, ours or anybody else’s.”

Mike Portnoy doesn’t necessarily agree. He simply claims that what I call ‘pretentious’, he calls ‘diverse’.

“When I think of Progressive Rock,” he says, ‘I don’t think of self-indulgence. I think, for the most part, it’s the diversity that the public go for. Prog Rock, or whatever you want to call it, is just basically anti-Top Forty music. It’s really just Alternative music with a fancy name.

“What we want to do in Dream Theater is put all our influences together – the Pantera influences and the Metallica, the Journey and the U2 – and give them some sort of... expression, I guess. Why not?”

“And there is a compromise beginning to emerge,” says Trent. “You ask Mike and I the same questions, but Dream Theater are a very different category to us. We’ve got a thirty-minute piece called ‘The Ubiquitor’, but we’d never release it. We used to do it live a lot, but now we realise that it’s a lot harder to write a good short song than a good long one.”

“We’re no different in that respect,” says Mike. “For every ten-minute track, we also have a four-minute track. But the enduring appeal of Prog is that it is completely and utterly untrendy. It’s not faddish. Grunge, Funk Metal, Heavy Metal, Pop, they come and they go, it’s all a fad.

“Prog Rock endures because it’s not limiting.” Tell it to Phil Collins. Then ask him why Genesis never had any big hits until he started wearing a three-piece suit and sunglasses and singing covers of old Diana Ross tunes.

Or tell it to Steve Hogarth, and see if it stops him writing anymore of those drippy Pop ballads that have kept Marillion acquainted with the charts these last few years, while Fish seems to have swallowed his own tail.

So... will Magellan or Dream Theater go the Genesis route one day? Mike is sympathetic, but vows that the day is a long way off yet when he may be called upon to abandon his safe seat behind the drumkit, and learn to tell zippy jokes in between the long bits on stage.

“No, I think I’ll just probably reach the stage where I shave my head, start wearing combat clothes and listening to SOD albums,” he chuckles darkly.

But seriously, folks, as a famous Prog-drummer once titled his solo album, Mike says that, as far as he’s concerned, the only legitimate reasons he can think of why Rutherford, Gilmour, Anderson and the rest want to forget about the past and steal a march on the world’s singles charts now is down to that old chestnut, ‘maturity’.

“The reason they all took that route – Rush and Yes and Genesis and so on, is because they got older, I guess. Maturity sets in and...”

He sounds as though he just put something funny in his mouth and wants to spit it out again.

Maturity as in finally – but is it a case of reaching middle-age and realising what a game of tin-hatted soldiers this widdly-widdly Prog Rock business all is, or simply just getting too old to pomp the night away no more?

“Both,” he says, without missing a parp. “Maturity as far as songwriting goes, maturity as in just getting too old as well, yes. But that still doesn’t mean that writing a ten-minute song is immature, but that perhaps there comes a point where you simply don’t feel like experimenting anymore.”

He’s right, of course. I know because I’ve just reached it.

Parp parp!