Jane

Alright Zoo Freaks, the needles are down and the speakers are already leaning forward. Over at THE ZOO, the Zoo Crew just dropped “Jane,” that 2020 lockdown lightning bolt from Dino Jelusick, Mike Portnoy, and Joel Hoekstra. This is not some polite little tribute. It is three heavy hitters taking a 1979 arena rock warhorse and riding it like they stole it. Dino handles the vocal, the bass, and the keys. Joel slashes through the guitar parts with that Whitesnake and Trans-Siberian Orchestra bite. Portnoy sits behind the kit and does what Portnoy does, which is make a simple backbeat feel like a freight train with extra cars. Simon Jovanovič mixed and mastered it over at Studio Evolucija, and Dino even cut the video himself. That is a lot of sweat for a cover that was never meant to be a product. It was a jam sent across time zones when the whole touring world was parked in the driveway.

The original “Jane” belongs to Jefferson Starship and the album Freedom at Point Zero. Mickey Thomas had just stepped into the frontman chair after Marty Balin and Grace Slick stepped away, and the band wanted something with more teeth than the midtempo ballads that had been paying the bills. David Freiberg later told interviewers the lyric was loosely about an old girlfriend, though her name was not Jane. He and Jim McPherson started with a baroque Rolling Stones kind of idea. Then Craig Chaquico turned it into a hard rock riff machine, and that famous guitar solo almost did not survive the control room. The manager showed up with a stopwatch and swore the solo was too long for radio. The band backed the guitar player. The song went to number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 anyway, and every time that solo still rings out of a car radio, Chaquico gets to smile about it. Decades later the track kept finding new rooms, from movie screens to video games, because that riff does not age out.

So why did this particular cover land so hard with rock people? Timing, for one. Summer of 2020 was full of remote sessions, and a lot of them felt like homework. This one felt like three guys who actually listen. Joel talked about those quarantine videos in interviews that fall. He liked that the business side fell away. Nobody was waiting on a label to bless it. You just play the song with people you respect and let the tape roll. Coverband Central called Dino a rock star in the making and said the clip could melt a face and shave a head in the same sitting. Listeners who grew up on Mickey Thomas still argue about whether anybody should touch that vocal. Plenty of those same folks came back and admitted Dino did not try to be Mickey. He sang it like a man who grew up on Whitesnake, Dream Theater, and Slash, then put the bass and the organ under his own voice so the whole arrangement sat in one pair of hands.

There is a little family tree hiding in the credits if you like that kind of thing. Dino and Joel already ran in the same circles through Trans-Siberian Orchestra and later Whitesnake. Portnoy had already clocked Dino’s voice and would later go public praising a Liquid Tension Experiment vocal experiment Dino posted just for fun. The “Jane” session was not a one-off crush. The same crew, plus a few more friends, came back the next year for Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time.” Joel posted a birthday thank-you to Dino for pulling that one together. Years after the fact, when a guitar player begged for a proper audio release of “Jane,” Joel pointed right back at Dino and said he produced it, so the audio lives where Dino puts it. That is the kind of credit you do not get unless the room trusted the guy calling the shots.

Dino’s own story is the long road that makes a cover like this make sense. He was born Dino Jelusić on June 4, 1992, in Požega, Croatia. Both parents played instruments, so music was not a hobby that showed up in junior high. He was singing at three and on television and festival stages by five. At eleven he wrote “Ti si moja prva ljubav,” took it to the first Junior Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen, and won the whole thing. A debut album followed. So did tours through the United States, Scandinavia, and Australia, including Danish dates that added up to a hundred thousand people. He became the youngest nominee for Croatia’s Porin award at twelve. Then the voice changed, the child-star chapter closed, and the kid who had been raised on King’s X, Slash, Whitesnake, Dream Theater, and Toto decided the rest of his life was going to be hard rock and metal.

That second beginning was not tidy. He cut Living My Own Life and released it in 2011. He worked in South Africa on a project that never fully saw daylight, sang to fifty thousand people in Johannesburg, and later had surgery for Reinke’s edema after his voice started giving him trouble. He turned that recovery into the Croatian concept album Prošao sam sve, built around a boy who survived a war camp. He collected festival prizes, won New Wave in Sochi, earned a master’s degree from the Academy of Music at the University of Zagreb in 2020, and kept stacking the kind of résumés that look made up until you check the records. Jeff Scott Soto helped get Animal Drive in front of Frontiers. The band put out Bite! in 2018 and a covers EP after that. Dino wrote and sang with George Lynch in Dirty Shirley. Trans-Siberian Orchestra brought him on in 2016 after he auditioned for Paul O’Neill in Tampa. In July 2021 David Coverdale called and made him a Snake. He has since fronted his own band Jelusick, sung for Michael Romeo, filled in with The Dead Daisies, and kept the same work ethic that turned a lockdown afternoon into “Jane.”

If you hang around Dino’s world long enough you hear the same thing from old heads and young players. The range is real. The work rate is real. The collaborations keep arriving because he can carry a song from the first riff to the last harmony without waiting for a committee. That is why a Jefferson Starship chestnut from 1979 still sounds dangerous when these three get hold of it. Portnoy supplies the engine. Hoekstra supplies the chrome and the sparks. Dino supplies the voice and the glue. Zoo Freaks who like their rock with a little history and a lot of horsepower already know the rest. Keep it loud, keep it honest, and if you want to follow the man who built this particular version of “Jane,” start at his official site and the accounts he actually runs.

You can find Dino at his official website dino-jelusick.com, on Facebook at Dino Jelusick and the band page Jelusick, on Instagram at @dinojelusick and @jelusick_official, and on X at @Dino_Official. His fans travel under the Chaos Masters banner, and the official fan zone lives on Facebook at Jelusick Chaos Masters, with more official doors collected at linktr.ee/jelusick. That is the map. Now let “Jane” run.