jon_chaisson | W is for Who's Behind the Door

I will totally fess up here--this was the first band I ever went to see live (they opened up for Loverboy at the Worcester Centrum), and I was completely obsessed with their debut album from 1983. I loved the interplay between the Felix Hanemann's synthesizers, Randy Jackson's intricate guitar work, and Guy Gelso's thunderous drumming, and this song definitely had that EPIC sound that drew fans. It all might sound a bit dated now, but if you put that aside, you'll actually hear some pretty damn good prog musicianship there. There's even a few tracks that, if they were arranged and mixed slightly different, could easily be Porcupine Tree songs.

Before my foray into Top 40 music and well before discovering college radio, for a time I was into the straight-ahead stuff you'd hear on rock stations. Along with the classic rock, you'd hear the occasional hair-metal/hard rock stuff. A lot of it went by the wayside--mostly for good reason--but some of it actually wasn't too bad. It was lightweight fun, something to listen to that you didn't have to take too seriously...a lot of arena rock was like that. Zebra didn't get too much airplay other than this and a few other songs ("Tell Me What You Want" from the first album, and probably "Bears" from the second one), and they were a little too serious to be taken lightly. This wasn't your typical throwaway hard rock, it was prog-metal a way. The lyrics might have been a bit bland, but their musicianship was pretty impressive.