Regret

The Zoo Crew has been spinning “Regret” off The Winery Dogs’ self-titled debut, and if you have been hanging with the Zoo Freaks long enough you already know this one does not behave like a typical closer. It sits near the end of that 2013 record, piano up front, Richie Kotzen singing like he has been carrying the story around for a while, Billy Sheehan and Mike Portnoy locked into a groove that feels more church basement than shred clinic. Over at THE ZOO we keep coming back to it because it is the sound of three road veterans deciding, for once, not to pile on.

The song was already mostly finished when the band even existed. Kotzen had it sitting on his hard drive at his Los Angeles studio, one of a handful of pieces he pulled up late in the sessions and asked the other two whether they wanted to turn it into a Winery Dogs song. In a 2013 talk he said “Regret” and “Damaged” were the most complete of the tunes he brought in. The rest of the debut was largely written in the room, three guys in a circle about ten feet apart, ideas spilling out from the first hour. “Regret” was the exception. Portnoy told The Rockpit that it and “Damaged” were solely Richie’s, and that they did not want to mess with them because they were already right. He remembered Kotzen sitting at the piano and banging the thing out, a gospel feel that made the room feel like church. Portnoy called it the track you play if you want to turn somebody on to Kotzen’s voice. Spine-tingling was the word he used.

Sheehan heard something else in it, and that is the part the Crew likes to pass along between records. He has said Mike’s groove on “Regret” is one of his favorite pieces on the album, not because it is flashy but because Portnoy, known for the big bombastic kit work, pulled back and dug in under the piano and that soulful lead vocal. Sheehan also told Classic Rock Revisited a little construction story that does not show up in the liner notes. Kotzen had two songs that were similar but not the same, both leaning piano-ballad, and the band did not want two of those on the record. Sheehan suggested tagging the first part of one onto the second half of the other. They rolled the dice, and everybody was pleased with how it landed. Kotzen later confirmed he plays piano, organ, and guitar on the finished track, nothing weirder than that. Credits list all three names, which fits a band that fine-tuned even the songs that arrived nearly done.

The lyric is a relationship song in the same neighborhood as “I’m No Angel,” which Kotzen described as one person staying in a bad situation until somebody finally says wise up and get out. “Regret” walks the other side of that street. How many times are we gonna play the game, thinking that it is gonna change. Hope shown and then taken away. The bridge turns the blame around: time to be a man and face the time spent using you, and the line that sticks is the one about not knowing he was losing her. Kotzen has said that if The Winery Dogs had never formed, “Regret,” “Damaged,” and “I’m No Angel” would have landed on one of his solo records. He writes that way at home. Tour, come back, pile of ideas, record the ones that fit. The Dogs adopted a stack of those skeletons and put meat on them. On the first album, he has said, at least half the songs came off that hard drive in some stage of completion. “Regret” was among the finished ones.

That is also why the track feels like a band and a solo song at the same time. The writing formula on the debut was split. Some tunes, Portnoy has said, were completely collaborative and cut live and old school. A couple, including this one, arrived whole enough that the job was to serve them. Jay Ruston mixed the record. The album came out in July 2013, and the band was already on the road treating the piano piece like a showpiece rather than a breather. Years later, talking about the difference between that first record and Hot Streak, Kotzen still pointed back at “Regret” as one of the songs that started life before the trio had a name.

How the Dogs got started is its own short story, and Eddie Trunk is the guy who made the phone call. Portnoy and Sheehan had been trying to build a power trio with John Sykes under a working idea sometimes called Bad Apple. That project stalled. They wanted to move, Sykes wanted a slower method, and the two of them decided not to wait. Trunk, who knew all three players from the metal-radio circuit, suggested Kotzen. Kotzen already had history with Sheehan from Mr. Big, the years after Paul Gilbert stepped out, roughly 1999 into the early 2000s, plus an earlier studio hookup on Kotzen’s own “Locked Out.” Portnoy and Sheehan had crossed paths too, on a Rush tribute and later a Who tribute run. The missing piece was a singer who could also write and play guitar at that level.

Kotzen has told the version where he is sitting around, gets a text from Trunk asking if he is around, and then a call: these guys want to do a power trio, what do you think. He got on the phone with Portnoy, who happened to be coming through Los Angeles on business. They met at Kotzen’s studio and started jamming. Out of that first sit-down came skeletons that later showed up on the debut. Sheehan has said the first day produced four or five pieces of music that ended up on the record. Portnoy remembers “One More Time” arriving in the first ten minutes. Nobody planned a soulful classic-rock trio in advance. They got in a room with small amps and a modest kit, the way Sheehan likes to compare to Grand Funk, and let it grow. The name took longer than the songs. They kicked around a long list for months. The one that stuck comes from the dogs that used to guard the vineyards. Sheehan has put it as holding down the fort against the onslaught of the artificial. Honest playing, three pieces, no decoration for its own sake.

Kotzen’s own start goes back further than any of those band lineups. He was the kid entertaining the family, jumping around with a plastic guitar. Piano lessons got suggested and did not take, because piano did not feel like rock to him. Kiss did. He picked up electric guitar at seven. His parents bought him a Gibson Marauder. The first song he remembers learning for a school function was “Jingle Bell Rock,” then “Purple Haze” around the same stretch, and he still talks about being upset at that recital because he could not tune the guitar until an older kid in the jazz band helped him out. By his teens he was in a band called Arthur’s Museum. Mike Varney at Shrapnel Records spotted him through a Guitar World column, wrote him up around seventeen, and signed him. The first solo album, mostly instrumental, arrived when he was about nineteen, with Jason Becker in the producer’s chair. Clinics and tours followed. Then the call to replace C.C. DeVille in Poison for Native Tongue, and later the call to step into Mr. Big. Parallel to all of that he never stopped making his own records, which is why a piano song like “Regret” was already waiting when Portnoy and Sheehan walked into the studio.

The three of them have kept the band alive between other jobs. Hot Streak followed, then a long pause, then III in 2023 on their own Three Dog Music label, still with Ruston in the mix chair. The social posts from that run still point fans back to the same trio: Kotzen on guitar and vocals, Sheehan on bass, Portnoy on drums. You can find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing notes on the records, including that first album and the later ones, gather over at the Winery Dogs community on Reddit. Their own site has been the address they print on tour posts, though the secure version of that page has been throwing a certificate warning, so we are leaving the click off until it behaves for a regular browser.

Put “Regret” on again and you can hear all of that history without a lecture. A song that started as a solo demo, got stitched from two piano ideas so the record would not list two ballads, and then got the kind of pocket Portnoy does not always get asked for. Kotzen at the piano, organ humming, guitar coming in only where it earns the space, singing about a road he has already seen and the moment he finally understands the cost. That is the cut the Zoo Crew is riding for the Freaks right now, and it still sounds like three players who trusted the song more than the résumé.