Love Is Alive

Pull up a chair, Zoo Freaks, because the pack is loose and the groove has teeth. This is "Love Is Alive," The Winery Dogs taking a 1970s radio staple and dragging it through a power-trio workshop until it sounds like it was built for a club stage and a stack of half-stacks. It lives on Dog Years, the five-song EP that rolled out on August 4, 2017, through Loud & Proud Records, tucked inside the Dog Years: Live in Santiago & Beyond 2013-2016 package. Three originals sit up front, Criminal, The Game, and Solid Ground. Then the covers kick the door. Gary Wright's "Love Is Alive" comes in at track four, and David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream" closes the set. Studio audio on the EP was mixed by longtime associate Jay Ruston and mastered by Paul Logus. On the deluxe physical set the cut clocks in around four minutes and change. Short, mean, and built to get under the skin.

The song itself is older than the band by a couple of decades. Gary Wright wrote it, sang it, and built most of it on keyboards for his 1975 album The Dream Weaver, with Andy Newmark on the drums. Warner Bros. issued it as a single in 1976, and it ran up the Billboard Hot 100 to number two, tying "Dream Weaver" as Wright's highest peak on that chart. The Manhattans' "Kiss and Say Goodbye" and Elton John and Kiki Dee's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" kept it out of the top slot. It hung on the chart for 27 weeks, seven longer than "Dream Weaver," and Billboard later ranked it the number nine song of 1976. Canada took it to number six. Olivia Newton-John sang it on her 1976 live album Love Performance and on television specials of that era. Joe Cocker cut a version in the early 1990s. Plenty of hands have held this tune. The Winery Dogs are the ones who put a bass guitar the size of a small car under it.

What the trio does with it is the whole point. Richie Kotzen takes the vocal and the guitar, and he does not treat Wright's melody like museum glass. He leans into the soul of it, then opens the lane for a guitar break that sounds like a guy who spent his life in clubs and studios rather than in a sample folder. Billy Sheehan locks the low end and then refuses to stay locked, that famous right-hand attack bubbling under the chorus until the pocket feels like it might tip over. Mike Portnoy plays it straight enough to swing and busy enough to remind you who is back there. The original was a keyboard record with a drummer. This one is three musicians in a room, no safety net, protecting the old idea that a song gets made by people who can actually play. That is the Winery Dogs argument in four minutes, and they did not even have to write the tune to make it.

They had already been playing it on the road before the EP existed. Set lists put the first documented concert airing on March 27, 2014, at the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles, Illinois, well before Dog Years hit the racks. Across the years that followed, the song turned up a few dozen times, heavy in 2014 and then in smaller bursts later, including dates in 2019. It was never the set-list bully the way "Elevate," "Desire," or "Regret" were. It was the deep-cut cover, the one that told you the band had been listening to AM radio in the mid-1970s and still trusted a hook. Pair it with the Elvin Bishop cover they cut for the Japan live set, "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," and you get the picture. These guys like a great song more than they like protecting their own catalog.

The pack itself started in 2012, and the origin story is pure radio-guy gossip that happens to be true. Mike Portnoy and Billy Sheehan wanted a straight power trio with a singer who could also play guitar. An early pass with John Sykes, floated under the working title Bad Apple, did not hold. Eddie Trunk heard about the opening and pointed them at Richie Kotzen, who had already stood next to Sheehan in Mr. Big from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. The three of them jammed at Kotzen's studio in Los Angeles, walked out with skeletons of songs, and decided the chemistry was the band. Naming it was harder than writing it. Kotzen came up with The Winery Dogs, after the old working dogs that guarded vineyards and kept stray animals off the vines. The joke, which he has told more than once, is that the name doubles as a mission. Plenty of modern records lean on programming and tuned vocals. These three wanted to stand in the vineyard and play. Portnoy heard an old-school ring in the name, the kind of handle that sits next to a Stones or Crowes record on a shelf. Sheehan put it plainer. They were waving the flag for people who still want to play and sing.

The résumés behind that flag are ridiculous, which is why the band gets called a supergroup even when the members would rather talk about the songs. Kotzen came out of Reading, Pennsylvania, a teenage guitar prodigy who cut solo records, joined Poison in the early 1990s, later fronted a lineup of Mr. Big, and kept a solo career running on the side the whole time. Sheehan came up in Talas, then David Lee Roth's late-1980s band, then Mr. Big, with side trips alongside Steve Vai and a reputation as one of the most identifiable bass players on the planet. Portnoy was the original drummer in Dream Theater and the guy who kept building side bands, from Transatlantic and Flying Colors to Adrenaline Mob and Sons of Apollo, the last of those also featuring Sheehan. Put those three in one room and the risk is showing off. The Winery Dogs bet the other way. Hooks first, shredding in the cracks.

The debut album arrived in Japan in May 2013 and worldwide that July on Loud & Proud, produced with Jay Ruston in the chair. It landed in the Billboard 200 and stacked up rock-chart numbers that a new power trio is not supposed to see anymore. Hot Streak followed in 2015. Then the road. The Santiago concert filmed for the Dog Years video set was recorded at Teatro Cariola, and the package that followed in 2017 bundled that show, a run of music videos, and this EP of leftovers and covers. A Black Friday Record Store Day vinyl edition later in 2017 pressed the live album and the EP onto red-and-white marble wax. After a long studio quiet, the band came back on its own Three Dog Music label with III in February 2023, self-produced, mixed again by Ruston, and took the new songs around the world. Same three guys. Same argument.

So when "Love Is Alive" comes around on The Zoo, hear it as a handshake across eras. Gary Wright built a number-two hit out of keys, a drummer, and a chorus you cannot shake. The Winery Dogs rebuilt it as a club weapon, Kotzen out front, Sheehan and Portnoy making the floor move, no samples required. That is the vineyard, still guarded. Spin the rest of Dog Years if you want the originals and the Bowie cover in the same sitting, then go dig the debut and Hot Streak and III. The pack is all over the log at The Zoo, commercial-free and listener-supported, the way album rock was supposed to work. The band keeps the porch light on at the official Winery Dogs site, posts the road news on Facebook, drops photos at Instagram, and still barks on X. Love is alive. So is the trio that proved it with their hands.