Tag Archives: The Winery Dogs

A to Z of Making It, Music, Unsung Heroes

Lifers

If you want to have a career in the music business “Lifer” is a term that you need to get used to. You need to be in it for life.

Look at Mike Portnoy. He is a lifer. He lives and breathes music. In his youth, he worked in a record shop and substituted his pay for records. It shows his life commitment to music. Since December 2010, he has pushed out new music on a consistent basis and he has toured non-stop behind that new music. I can’t say I like everything from the bands that Portnoy is involved in, however he understands the current music business. And as much as the metal and rock bands don’t like it, the music recording business is not about releasing an album of 10 songs or more every two years and then touring behind it.

The recording business is about releasing music consistently. Capturing that spontaneity. When music is too thought out it loses its soul. It becomes processed. Even though I am not a big fan of “The Winery Dogs”, I do appreciate the soul of the songs, that loose feeling that anything could happen. This brings to mind a quote from Kevin Shirley who was the producer on the Dream Theater “Falling Into Infinity” album. He loved the original solo take that John Petrucci did for the song “Hollow Years” because it had this spontaneous feeling to it that fit the mood of the song. However Petrucci didn’t like it because it wasn’t precise enough and of course, Petrucci ended up re-doing the solo section to make it precise.

Going back to Portnoy, in 2011 he was involved in the Adrenaline Mob EP, the Neal Morse “Testimony 2” album as well as a tribute album to The Beatles (with Paul Gilbert, Neal Morse, and Kasim Sulton) called “Yellow Matter Custard – One More Night in New York City”.

2012 saw the release of the Adrenaline Mob album “Omertà”, the Flying Colors self-titled debut album as well as another Neal Morse album called “Momentum”.

2013 saw the release of a covers album from Adrenaline Mob called “Covertà”, as well as the self-titled debut from The Winery Dogs. In addition, live releases came out from the “Portnoy, Sheehan, MacAlpine and Sherinian” 2012 tour called “Live In Tokyo” as well as the Flying Colors 2012 European tour called “Live in Europe”.

2014 will see a new Transatlantic album called “Kaleidoscope” as well as the new BigElf album that Portnoy played drums on called “Into The Maelstrom”. Also in the pipework’s is a new Flying Colors album and a live release from “The Winery Dogs”.

In amongst all the studio time of the official releases, Portnoy was on the road, touring. That is a lifer to me. He implored Damon Fox from Bigelf to carry on when he thought about throwing in the towel and even stepped up to the plate to play drums. That is a lifer inspiring another musician to also become a lifer. It’s contagious.

What about bassist, Marco Mendoza? Who you say?

The first time I heard Marco was on the Blue Murder album “Nothin But Trouble” released in 1993. He then fell in with John Sykes, appearing on “Screaming Blue Murder” in 1994 and then on John Sykes’s solo album in 1995 called “Out Of My Tree.” He also appeared on the 1997 albums “Loveland” and “20th Century Heartache” and “Nuclear Cowboy” released in 2000. That year also saw a Thin Lizzy (this is the version that John Sykes put together in 1994,with guitarist Scott Gorham, keyboard player Darren Wharton and drummer Brian Downey. After a few one-off concerts, the band toured more consistently from 1996 until 2000, with Downey being replaced by Tommy Aldridge) live release called “One Night Only” as well as his involvement with David Coverdale’s solo album “Into The Light.”

Real musicians are lifers. He hasn’t had that hit single or appeared on that hit album, but that doesn’t make Marco any less successful.

He spent time with Ted Nugent, went back to John Sykes, then jumped ship to Whitesnake, while still continuing with the John Sykes Thin Lizzy project up until 2009. That project then became Black Star Riders. In between he appeared in Lynch Mob and their Smoke and Mirrors album in 2009. He is going to tour Australia with the band “The Dead Daises” led by former Noiseworks vocalist Jon Stevens.

Would you say that Marco Mendoza has been successful at his music career?

Marco has played with two of my biggest guitar influences in John Sykes and George Lynch. He is a great vocalist and from watching the live Whitesnake DVD from 2006, he hits those highs that Glenn Hughes did in “Burn”.

He has never been without a decent sized gig and if he is, he has his little solo band and his jazz three-piece project that play the bars and the clubs. The bottom line is that he is working non-stop. He is a lifer when it comes to music. That is why he is still around. While record labels whine about the lack of recorded sales in a society where streaming has won the war, Marco is the definition of the long hard slog to have a musical career. A lifer. Excellence is the key. That is why he is in demand. He fits in well, is professional and he doesn’t have a social media presence.

You want a career in music, prepare to be a lifer.

Standard
Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Piracy

Deja-Vu. 2011 vs. 2013 with Dream Theater and Trivium – Random Thoughts on their new songs

It’s like déjà vu again. In 2011, I was listening to new songs from Trivium and Dream Theater. Trivium had just unleashed In Waves as its promotional single for the In Waves album and Dream Theater had unleashed On The Backs of Angels as its promotional single for the A Dramatic Turn of Events album.

I remember listening to both songs back then and taking into account both of the band’s position in the musical landscape. Dream Theater to me, had the most to prove, as this music would be their first without founder Mike Portnoy.

In my opinion In Waves is a stronger song than On The Backs of Angels. The song wins all the time. I was listening to Images and Words yesterday and the reason why that album is awesome 21 years after its release is the songs. Learning To Live, Metropolis and Take The Time are progressive as hell, but man, I can physically hum the whole songs to anyone including the progressive interludes.

Images and Words is Dream Theater. That album represented what Dream Theater are all about and it set in motion everything that was to come. This new album is self-titled, therefore it should represent what Dream Theater is all about.

Anyway I digress, going back to my 2011 experiences. In relation to the albums, both of them had a six week U.S sale run (physical sales) and then disappeared. Will history repeat itself? I think so.

Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn Of Events
Week 1 – ending 21 Sept 2011 – 35,750 units sold
Week 2 – ending 28 Sept 2011 – 8,030 units sold
Week 3 – ending 05 Oct 2011 – 4,430 units sold
Week 4 – ending 12 Oct 2011 – 3,120 units sold
Week 5 – ending 19 Oct 2011 – 2,600 units sold

Trivium – In Waves
Week 1 – ending 17 Aug 2011 – 20,640 units sold
Week 2 – ending 24 Aug 2011 – 6,700 units sold
Week 4 – ending 07 Sept 2011 – 2,890 units sold
Week 5 – ending 14 Sept 2011 – 2,890 units sold

Artists are so scared if an album under performs these days. WHY? The album sales figures quoted above is not the metric to judge success on. Dream Theater have hardly sold any music in South America, however they play to their biggest crowds there. I wonder how that came to be?

As Nicko McBrain said in Flight 666 The Movie, Iron Maiden hasn’t sold an album in Costa Rica, however they are playing a stadium show that is sold out with 30,000 people attending. Put it down to piracy, file sharing, Bit Torrent or copyright infringement. The bottom line is this, if what you create is great, expect it to be shared.

Before the Internet, before YouTube, before streaming services like Spotify, fans had to own the music to hear it. That is no longer the case. The history of recorded music is at our fingertips. Fans are participating in this new arena, while artists and labels are still banging their heads against the wall judging success by album sales.

Even Mike Portnoy asked fans to buy The Winery Dogs as a show of support to the label and to show to them that this project is viable. Why does he care about sales? Look at all his posts, show after show. He is blown away at the reaction they are getting. Isn’t that the validation he should be seeking?

So here we are in 2013. We have Trivium’s new song Brave This Storm and Dream Theater’s The Enemy Within.

So what is the verdict.

I can’t say that The Enemy Within is anything special. Some bits remind me of Scenes from a Memory, but really, I could see this song fitting on A Dramatic Turn of Events. It is not a great leap forward in musical terms. Let’s hope that the other songs make the “definite statement.”

Hopefully what we heard was their “Commercial” piece for the album, in the same way that Forsaken was seen as the “Commercial” piece in Systematic Chaos. If this new album turns out to just be ADToE part 2, then yeah I’ll be pretty disappointed, and everyone will know what a pivotal role Portnoy played in the band and how directionless they are without him.

On the other hand, I was very cautious as to how the Trivium and David Draiman collaboration would work. From hearing Brave This Storm, I would say they are on a definite winner. The song is heavy, it is a progression from what they started with In Waves, it is all math in the verses and it is very melodic. Let’s hope that the other Trivium songs are not Brave This Storm 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on.

For some reason this got me thinking about a song from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers called Rebels which is the lead off track on his 1985, Southern Accents album.

With one foot in the grave
One foot on the pedal
I was born a rebel

Are musicians/artists rebels in 2013? It seems that they all want to be winners. Seen any posts from a musician recently about what they think, what they feel, what they are going to do and it doesn’t relate to selling music. Our heroes are even beholden to the Corporations.

Randy Blythe is one artist that shows his humanity. He uses his photographs and puts stories around them, which always relate to a personal part of his life. We are all human. We win and we lose. Blythe focuses on his work, not the sales pitch.

There is new news every day, so if Dream Theater and Trivium want their story to survive, they need to keep it alive by making news every day

Standard
Music, My Stories, Stupidity

Is Having Mike Portnoy in your band a good thing or a bad thing these days?

There’s never been any doubt about Mike Portnoy’s work ethic. The man is a machine. He doesn’t just play in bands, he spawns them, shepherds them, fuels them, and somehow finds time to tour, record, rehearse, and still show up like it’s day one and he’s got something to prove.

But here’s the inconvenient question no one wants to ask out loud:

At what point does doing everything start to feel like doing nothing?

Not because the passion isn’t real.

Not because the talent isn’t there.

But because even the hungriest creators face the same truth: quality doesn’t scale.

And that’s where things get uncomfortable. Because quality, real, signature, unmistakable quality, comes from the furnace, not the assembly line. It comes from the chemistry of the right creative partners. Not fame, not legacy, not sheer hours logged.

Look at the pattern.

Dream Theater

Portnoy wasn’t just a drummer in Dream Theater. He was plugged into a once-in-a-generation creative engine, John Petrucci, the guitarist every metal kid secretly wished they could be. That partnership was lightning in a bottle, and lightning doesn’t strike twice on command. Leaving that team wasn’t sabotage, it was a gamble. A hard reset. A leap into the unknown with no guarantee the muse would follow.

Adrenaline Mob

Here, the spark came from sheer brute force.

Mike Orlando, raw, volatile, borderline unhinged in the best way, felt like the spiritual cousin of the great riff architects. You could hear the Iommi DNA in the walls. You could picture a classic record forming if the universe cooperated. There was potential. Serious potential.

Transatlantic

A different beast entirely. Roine Stolt and Neal Morse aren’t minor-league players, they’re specialists. They live in a very specific musical ecosystem: grandiose, sprawling, prog epics for people who want forty-minute tracks. That’s a lane, not a flaw. But it’s also a place where “quality control” can blur into “more is more,” where ambition outraces cohesion. It’s a world with its own rules, and its own ceilings.

Flying Colors

Steve Morse is a legend. Full stop. But legends age, and even titans spread thin eventually feel the pull. Deep Purple, Dixie Dregs, solo work… it’s not burnout, it’s bandwidth. Greatness doesn’t vanish, it just becomes … diffuse.

The Winery Dogs

And here we hit the pressure point.

If a project wants to stand out in a landscape already saturated with Portnoy’s fingerprints, it has to bring something unmistakably new.

Something with teeth.

Richie Kotzen is skilled, no debate. But that’s not the question. The question is: does he bring a signature?

A sonic identity that doesn’t feel like déjà vu from the Shrapnel era?

Because being good isn’t enough for a trio built on presence and personality. When the guitarist is the vocalist and the main songwriter, the entire organism lives or dies on distinctiveness.

And Kotzen, for all his technical fluency and vocal punch, often feels like a man shaped by the ghosts of his influences. The shred era’s fingerprints are all over him. The blues-rock revival too. Even his vocals echo Cornell’s silhouette. None of this makes him bad. but it makes him familiar. And when you’re leading a three-piece with two virtuosos behind you, familiar might not be enough.

This is where the truth gets even sharper.

Portnoy and Sheehan are phenomenal at what they do, but neither has ever been the primary architect of timeless songs on their own. That’s not an insult. It’s an observation about creative ecosystems. They thrive when partnered with a defining voice, a guitarist or songwriter who stamps the work with something unmistakably singular.

Look at Sheehan: a monster on his instrument, a pioneer even. But the biggest hits of his career came when he was orbiting giants, Vai, Gilbert, Roth. Leaders need other leaders.

Portnoy’s no different. He’s an amplifier. A catalyst. A force multiplier. He enhances the right team. That’s his genius.

But genius still requires the right partner.

James Hetfield once said that side projects dilute the core product. He understood something most musicians don’t want to face:

Attention is finite.

Energy is finite.

The muse plays favorites.

When the creative radar is pointed everywhere, it points nowhere with the same intensity.

Portnoy’s output is enormous. Admirable. Occasionally brilliant. But the law of diminishing returns doesn’t care about effort. It only cares about focus.

So maybe the point isn’t whether Kotzen is special enough. Or whether Sheehan should shoulder more. Or whether prog epics should be shorter or longer.

Maybe the real question is this:

Has Portnoy been chasing the feeling he once had with Petrucci and does he know it?

Because that’s the paradox:

A great creative partnership isn’t something you replace.

It’s something you spend the rest of your life trying to rediscover.

And maybe that’s not a flaw.

Maybe that’s the whole point.

Because the audience doesn’t want “more.”

They want magic.

And magic only happens when the right people collide at the right moment with the right hunger.

Everything else?

Noise.

Standard
Music

Mike Portnoy

I’m not a casual listener. My name sits in the liner notes of “Lifting Shadows”. I chased the bootlegs, bought the club editions, stood in the crowd in Australia. I saw Petrucci and Portnoy together on stages where the electricity felt like a revelation. I paid for that music because it was the songs that grabbed me, not the spectacle.

So let’s be straight: technique is everywhere now. Virtuosity used to be a miracle; now it’s a YouTube commodity. A kid can learn a sweep pick and a double bass blast between breakfast and lunch. What still separates the great from the merely flashy is songcraft, melody, arrangement, that singular idea that lodges in your skull and refuses to leave.

That’s why I struggle with some of Portnoy’s post-Dream Theater output. Not because he’s a bad drummer, he’s not, but because being prolific isn’t the same as being precise. When someone spreads their creative capital across a dozen plates, the best work can get crumbs.

Dream Theater worked because the band added up to more than the sum of parts. Petrucci’s riffing and compositional voice gave those albums a spine. The drums were essential, sure, but they were the heartbeat of something built around guitars, keys and bass. “Pull Me Under” hooked me because the music did more than impress; it told a story.

Does that make Portnoy small-minded?

No.

Does it make him the wrong man for every project?

Also no.

The point is structural: some players are catalysts. They need the right chemistry to make magic. Portnoy amplifies greatness. He doesn’t always manufacture it on his own. That’s an observation, not an insult.

Adrenaline Mob is the closest thing he’s had to raw, no-nonsense heavy rock that actually lands. Those songs hit. The riffs bite. The singer cuts through. That project finds a balance: muscle and melody. It’s proof that when focus and songcraft align, everything else follows.

Flying Colors? Not my cup. The ambition’s there, but ambition without bite becomes languid. It’s like watching a celebrity-level practice session and being asked to call it an album. That’s okay to say. We want fewer filler projects and more full-blooded records.

Now The Winery Dogs. The concept, three masters in a room, sounds promising on paper. But promise isn’t product. When the guitarist is also the frontman and the primary songwriter, the record needs a distinct voice that wasn’t borrowed from other eras. Technical chops are table stakes. The question is: does the music say something new, or just recycle yesterday’s influences?

Richie Kotzen can play, no argument there, but the job at hand isn’t to impress other players. It’s to write songs that refuse to be background music. To front a trio, you need a personality that sings through the riffs, not a voice that echoes familiar silhouettes. Again: not an attack, just a reality check.

And the final point, because this is where the truth lands hard: a career built on collaboration requires choices. Spread yourself across side projects and the core product decays. That’s not celebrity shade; that’s simple math. Attention and intention are limited resources. Pick where they matter most.

If Portnoy wants to recapture that lightning, he doesn’t need to be “the guy” in every headline. He needs to be the guy who brings his full attention to one record, one song, one uncompromising statement that can stand beside the true classics. Focus. Patience. Let the songs breathe.

Because at the end of the day, fans like me didn’t sign up for fills and bombast. We signed up for the songs that make you feel something you can’t name. Deliver those, and the rest writes itself.

Standard