If your friend is into progressive rock and hard rock maybe you should try another Tool song besides Aenima, like Stinkfist or Vicarious.
And he doesn’t like grunge? I’m dumbfounded as to exactly what constitutes Hard Rock to him if he doesn’t like grunge, all of which came about in the early 90’s.
I"m going to second this. I love me some Savatage. One of my personal favorites is Rage. I must have something for German metal as I like so much of it. He might like to check out Gamma Ray and Iron Saviour.
Exactly what I wanted to say. In Absentia and The Sky Moves Sideways are where I’d start if you want to convince someone that good music isn’t dead. (FWIW, I’m a big Genesis/Floyd fan myself.)
For a strong, relatively recent release by a rock dinosaur, I highly recommend 2003’s The Power to Believe by King Crimson.
I recommend this website: www.melodicrock.com. American or not, you can find tons of great AOR, hard rock and metal.
I shall recommend one of my personal favorite artists, Jeff Scott Soto. His new one (Beautiful Mess) is Lenny Kravitz meets the Red Hot Chili Peppers and is awesome.
Oh yeah - also have him check out the RHCP and Foo Fighters!
I came in to mention some of those very bands. I second Porcupine Tree and Spock’s Beard.
A month or so back there was a thread about incestuous band relationships. PT, DT, and SB are all part of an incestuous little family that includes OSI, Transatlantic, Fates Warning, Chroma Key, Gordian Knot and other bands.
In a more metal vein, check out Opeth. Steve Wilson, the man behind PT, produces some of their albums.
Maybe he should try some Avenged Sevenfold. Good hard rock with some prog elements. And as was mentioned before Rush did not stop making good music after 1990, they just continue to evolve. Quite a bit of their newer stuff has been quite heavy.
I see he likes the classic 80s thrash metal bands, so I’ll recommend a few newer bands playing thrash: Municipal Waste, Evil Army, Merciless Death, and Toxic Holocaust. The first three are among my favorites; the last I’m not personally into (mostly because I don’t care for the vocals), but a lot of thrash fans really dig them so I threw the recommendation in.
If he’s into metal generally, I’ll second the recommendations for some great stoner/doom metal bands upthread, Witch and Electric Wizard. Other good ones along similar lines include Kyuss (who are no longer around), Crowbar (rumored to be reuniting), Acid King, and The Gates of Slumber (whose new record, The Conqueror, is my favorite album of 2008).
Does your friend like any punk rock? Career Suicide, and Los Crudos are amazing hardcore bands who can stand up to any of the 80s hardcore classics. The latter are no longer around. On the more Ramones-ish end of the punk spectrum, The Marked Men and The High Tension wires play some good, basic, three chord punk rock, with great pop hooks. The Exploding Hearts put out one great punky power pop record, Guitar Romantic, in 2003, before a bus accident killed three band members; it’s one of the best pop rock albums ever.
One last recommendation for The Reigning Sound, fronted by Greg Cartwright (who’d previously played in bluesy garage punk bands The Compulsive Gamblers and The Oblivians, both of whom are worth checking out). Cartwright’s an outstanding songwriter; their first two albums, Time Bomb High School and Too Much Guitar sound like The Rolling Stones playing punk rock; their most recent, Break Up Break Down, has a strong country influence. One of my favorite bands; they also backed Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las on the record she released last year.