Having been the drummer for a band called Dillinger Escape Plan, Chris Pennie should have learned a thing or two about great escapes. But when the time came to break free of that band, he found himself a rocker in a hard place.

Pennie was offered the drummer spot in the troubled Coheed and Cambria around the same time he saw conditions deteriorate in his longtime New Jersey hardcore band Dillinger Escape Plan.

Coheed, more of a prog-rock enterprise, had opened for Dillinger, and later when they needed a replacement for drummer Josh Eppard, he got the invite. "I got to go up there and play with them," Pennie says. "I think things really clicked personality-wise and musically."

It looked like Dillinger Escape Plan was going to be on hiatus due to personal problems, so for a while, Pennie thought he could work both bands. The guys in Dillinger seemed to be OK with it, at least until they found out he was going to start recording on Coheed's new record, actually titled "Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow."

That's when he was denied permission to either play for or record from Coheed's label, Relapse Records.

"It was a very abusive relationship with that band," he says. "It was an ugly and dark time. I ended up leaving the band and it's the best thing I ever could have done."

Although Pennie worked on the demos with Coheed by sending digital files back and forth, the New York prog-rock band had to bring in Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters at the last minute to play the parts in the studio.

Now, though, Pennie is free to tour with Coheed and enjoying not only the band's energy but the stylistic change.

"With Dillinger, there's a lot of notes being played drum-wise," he says. "The music is really heavy and very busy. With Coheed, there's a lot more space. I'm working with a guy who's crafting melodies and there's a wider spectrum of things to work with. Instead of cramming a lot of notes into one song, it's more a matter of knowing how to use the notes."

Pennie finds himself in a band with a frontman, Claudio Sanchez, who emulates classic-rock bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and, of course, Rush, with whom Coheed and Cambria is often rightfully compared.

"I honestly share an interest in all decades, all genres of music," Pennie says. "I'm very content in the generation I grew up in, with many phenomenal bands. But obviously, you have your Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Pink Floyd, The Who -- those are all great rock bands. But you have great rock bands from this era, too, like Coheed, Mars Volta, even Dillinger. There's so much in the sea of music to pull from. You have to really look, though, because music is so diluted with bands that sound so much like each other. Everywhere you look someone's starting a band and you're hearing about them from myspace and all these small labels. In the '60s and '70s, there was only a handful of bands you would hear about."

With Coheed, Pennie has also entered a band with its own built-in mythology. The group's records loosely follow a story line of two characters, Coheed and Cambria, from Sanchez's sci-fi graphic novel "The Armory Wars." "No World for Tomorrow," which ranges from harsh nu metal to epic-sounding late-'70s rock, closes with a five-part suite called "The End Complete." How important is to know the story to appreciate the music?

"The main thing that he always talks about is that it's a band first and if you want to take more from the experience, you can. When I got into the band, I got into it for the music first. That was the first and foremost thing. Now being a part of it, I'm learning bits and pieces."

What's more important to Pennie is the positive creative atmosphere that Sanchez sets for the band.

"The most important thing is that he's someone who is dedicated, and he perseveres. He's an amazing creative force and all of them are, that's why I'm in this band and why I love being in this band. For me what was missing is, this is very true and pure, and that's hard to come by these days. I've worked with a bunch of musicians and some of them just seem like they're trying to sell you something, like 'I'm going to sell you this riff.' There's none of that going on. Even though he had the majority of the songs written, he was very open to input. This band really functions as a unit."