Jane

Zoo Freaks, turn this one up. The Zoo Crew is spinning "Jane," that lockdown-era one-off from Dino Jelusick, Mike Portnoy and Joel Hoekstra, and it is still one of the wildest remote jams to come out of the quiet year. Jefferson Starship cut the original for Freedom at Point Zero back in 1979, Mickey Thomas out front, and it climbed to number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. Dino, Joel and Mike did not try to photocopy it. They rebuilt it from three different rooms, Dino singing and playing bass and keys, Joel laying the guitars, Portnoy on the drums, mixed and mastered by Simon Jovanovič over at Studio Evolucija, with Dino cutting the video himself. It went up in August 2020 and has since rolled past three million views, which tells you the Freaks out there were hungry for a real rock singer.

Joel has talked about those quarantine clips as the closest thing they could get to a jam with no label meeting attached. In one sit-down he said it took the business out of it, nobody asking if the record company would be cool with it, just people covering a song for kicks. Years later, when Dino posted that the clip had cleared three million plays, Joel left a comment that still makes us laugh. He remembered thinking the outro solo was not his best and that he should have done better, because some people might watch it. Three million views later he called it insane and thanked Dino for having him on it. Fans in the comments still swear they forgot about the whole outside world for those four minutes and twenty-four seconds. One listener put it plain: these guys took an underrated, beautifully written song to a whole new level.

Dino Jelusick, born Dino Jelusić on June 4, 1992, in Požega, Croatia, and raised mostly in Zagreb, did not wander into this. His folks played, so music was in the house from the start. He was singing around age three and already on television and festival stages by five. He wrote his first song in English at seven. At ten he wrote "Ti si moja prva ljubav," took it to Copenhagen, and won the very first Junior Eurovision Song Contest in 2003. The debut album, No. 1, followed that same year, with an English version a year later, and the kid was out touring the States, Scandinavia and Australia, even sharing a Danish festival bill with UB40 and Ronan Keating. He was the youngest Porin nominee in Croatia at twelve. Then the records in the house changed the direction. He grew up on King's X, Slash, Whitesnake, Dream Theater and Toto, and he pointed the whole thing toward hard rock. Animal Drive, the band he founded and wrote for, came together in 2012. Trans-Siberian Orchestra brought him on the road in 2016. He finished a master's at the Academy of Music in Zagreb in 2020, and David Coverdale welcomed him into Whitesnake in 2021. That "Jane" session sits right in the middle of the climb, a Croatian singer who can also hold down the bass and the keys, trading lines with two of the busiest players in the business.

If you want the man himself, his official site is dino-jelusick.com, and the band home is jelusick.com. He is on Facebook at Dino Jelusick, on Instagram at @dinojelusick, and on X at @Dino_Official. The band page is Jelusick on Facebook. Fans keep a light on over at the Jelusick Chaos Masters group, and there is a smaller fans club over on X at @dinojelusickfan. Go say hello, then come back and let this one finish loud.