With The Winery Dogs Veteran Rockers Create All-Star Trio

August 24, 2013

The Winery Dogs

Three veteran rockers have come together to create an all-star trio.

The names are familiar: drummer Mike Portnoy co-founded and spent 25 years with Dream Threatre, while recently playing with Adrenaline Mob. Bassist Billy Sheehan and singer-guitarist Richie Kotzen were together in Mr. Big. Together, the three call themselves The Winery Dogs.

The Winery Dogs’ debut album might not be exactly what Portnoy’s longtime fans expected. Portnoy, after all, earned his way into the Modern Drummer Magazine Hall of Fame performing progressive rock and heavy metal. He says The Winery Dogs is something different - music inspired by the groups they all grew up listening to.

“Bands like Zeppelin and The Who, The Stones, and The Beatles, Cream, and Hendrix. I mean, I grew up with that stuff," he said. "And, although I’ve been able to pay tribute to it throughout my career with tribute bands and things like that, I’ve never been in an all-original band that was kind of playing classic rock power trio stuff. That’s how I describe this band: just a straight up rock band.”

Portnoy says most of the songs on The Winery Dogs were collaborative efforts, written with the three band mates together in a room, just bouncing ideas off each other.

“In all cases, the music was the very first element and from there, Richie would start melodies on top of it. Sometimes the final lyrics were there, coming up on the spot, and other times he would take the melodies and write lyrics later," he said. "There were a couple of examples of Richie having something and bringing it in. In those cases, like “Damaged” and “Regret” we just left them. Because in those two particular cases, the songs were great as they were.”