Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez loves ’70s rock, warms up for concerts to Thin Lizzy’s Chinatown

Seventies prog-rock has taken a lot of flak over the years, but fans who were there at the time know that the genre wasn’t all bombast and excess. It generated some of the most skilled and adventurous groups in the history of popular music.

Most kids these days don’t get it, but there are exceptions, Coheed and Cambria main man Claudio Sanchez among them. The 27-year-old singer-guitarist would much rather spin Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon than the latest Creed disc, thanks to his father’s influence.

“I kinda got into prog-rock because of him,” says Sanchez, on the line from a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio. “That was my initial approach to rock music, my dad sitting me in the car and listening to Jethro Tull, early Led Zeppelin, things like that. And I found as an adolescent, when I created my own understanding of rock ‘n’ roll and started listening to grunge or death metal, that those things kinda came and went, and classic rock was always a mainstay.

“Just yesterday I was listening to Is Anybody Out There: Pink Floyd Live at Earl’s Court,” he continues, “the night before I was listening to Yes’s Fragile. All the time I warm up [for concerts] to Thin Lizzy‘s Chinatown. That’s what I listen to. The only new stuff that I really get into is the folk songwriter stuff, like Devendra Banhart and Iron & Wine.”

Sanchez claims that his bandmates-guitarist Travis Stever, bassist Michael Todd, and drummer Joshua Eppard-had similar upbringings, and it certainly shows on the quartet’s new CD, Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. The title itself may seem as overblown as a six-sided Emerson, Lake & Palmer LP, but the music within is fat-free, an intricately arranged, melodic hard-rock concept album that revolves around characters living in a futuristic world threatened by a genetically embedded virus. Sanchez is chronicling the complex tale in a series of comic books; it’s also detailed in the 116-page graphic novel that was released the same day as Good Apollo.

The new CD is actually part of an ambitious five-album saga, which begs the question, Does your average 21st-century rock fan have an attention span long enough for such things?

“You’d be surprised,” Sanchez replies. “We have fans that are just into the band for the rock side of it, then we have ones that are very much into the conceptual side. You go on the message boards and there’s threads about the stories and about characters’ roles in the story, the environment. So it’s pretty interesting.”

Whether the main attraction to C&C is the sci-fi story line or its intense instrumentation, there’s no doubt that the combo is catching on with the music-buying public. Despite its unfashionable prog-rock stance, the band’s previous CD, 2003’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3, went gold. Its follow-up entered the local Top 50 chart at No. 5 last week, and according to Jamie Teske of House of Blues Concerts, tickets are “selling well” for the quartet’s headlining show at the Croatian Cultural Centre on Tuesday (October 11). Sanchez is as surprised as anyone by his group’s fast-growing popularity.

“When we were a young band, before the record deals, we were a hard act to swallow,” he relates. “We weren’t really accepted in our scene. So every day I’m surprised.”

Coheed and Cambria will be joined on-stage by an auxiliary keyboardist whose job is to re-create Good Apollo‘s symphonic and choral bits. If the lineup succeeds at duplicating the sound of the CD, local prog-rock fans are in for a huge treat. The fact that it’s an all-ages show shouldn’t deter aging ’70s die-hards from reliving the days when then-innovative acts like Floyd, Yes, and Genesis were defining the concept album. And if you’re a Rush fan, Sanchez’s high-end vocals and his band’s challenging guitar-bass-drums noise will prove especially endearing.

Sanchez is quick to point out he wasn’t directly influenced by Geddy Lee and Co. In fact, he’d hardly heard the progressive power trio before the comparisons to Coheed and Cambria started pouring in. Since then he’s bought a few Rush albums and liked them, but he had to overcome a negative mind set established early in his career.

“When I started my first band we auditioned a guitar player,” he recalls, “’cause I was gonna play drums at the time. This kid came in and played a bunch of stuff and he was great, but later that night he had a friend call who told us that we were a bunch of dreamers, that it was never gonna happen, we sucked. And the one thing that this guitarist just loved was Rush, so I was like: ‘I will never listen to Rush!’ And now that’s the one band that Coheed and Cambria gets compared to all the time. It’s hilarious.”