DON DOKKEN On GEORGE LYNCH: 'There's Something Wrong With That Guy Between The Ears'

Peter Lindblad of Powerline recently conducted an interview with DOKKEN frontman Don Dokken. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Powerline: You had vocal surgery in 2010. Your voice seems to have come through it remarkably well. What kind of rehabilitation did you have to do and how would you compare it now to what it was in the '80s?

Don: Well, you know, I'll never be able to sing as high as I could back then. I mean, I could name a dozen singers who can't sing like they did back then. It's like a car. You put 100,000 or 200,000 miles on it, it doesn't run like it did when it was brand new. I've done 7,000 to 8,000 shows in my career, but yeah, I tore my vocal cord in Germany. It was my fault. You know, most bands are two days on, one day off or three days on, two days off. We ended up doing 27 shows in 34 days I think, and I started having this funny taste in my mouth, like iron. And I realized it was blood. And I went, "Oh, shit." You know, I was in Germany and I went to the hospital, and the doctor went to an EMT guy, and he looked at my throat and he said, "You tore your vocal cord." And I still had 10 shows to go, and he said, "Stop." And I didn't. I kept going, and that was it. And I thought, "Okay, I'll just heal. I'll just stay here." But it just got worse and worse and worse and worse, and I had the surgery, and I thought, "Okay, three months from now, I'll be good." And I started playing again, and I was singing like crap. And people on the Internet were going, "Boy, Don can't sing anymore," or "He's lost it," and well, I can't deny it. So, I was really struggling to try to hit any of the notes, and people see it on the Internet, on YouTube, and "Ish … he ain't what he used to be." It's depressing. It's like saying, "Here's a guitar. It's out of tune. Now go play." So I just told the band, "We have to stop." On this record, which we started writing last September, I didn't sing a note the first six months. I mean, I had to go back to my old vocal teacher, warm-ups … I had to put three humidifiers in all the rooms of my house to keep the house humid all the time — warm up for an hour, do scales, keep my mouth shut, quit smoking … blah, blah, blah. You know, don't talk a lot. I've got more at stake, so I've been doing press for four days straight, six hours a day and I'm hoarse from doing it. And sometimes, we get together and I go to sing a song, and I say, "You know, guys, I can hit the note, but my voice will have a little too much buzz in it." And some days, Jon [Levin, guitar] will go, "Wow. Your voice sounds like it did on 'Tooth And Nail'. Your voice is nice and clean and clear." And I go, "That's the way I like it." But it is hit-and-miss — sometimes you have good days, and I've had bad days where I couldn't figure out why [my voice] was doing what it was doing and it wasn't good. The insanity of the thing is after I spent tens of thousands of dollars on my voice, it turned out to be hit-or-miss because I was snoring. I was overly tired, because we were working 14-hour days, flying to gigs, getting two to three hours of sleep and going to Europe. We flew 16 hours to Bulgaria, and we did the M3 Fest where we had two hours of sleep. We sucked at that show, but when you're really tired, you snore. And when you snore, it's like … haven't you gone to a club and you're trying to talk to somebody over a loud band, and you wake up the next day and your voice is all raspy? And you wake up and you're hoarse, and you try and talk loud for conversation. Well, that's what snoring is. So I had to go get sleep studies done, with the cameras on me watching me sleep, and as it turned out, I was snoring with sleep apnea and that was trashing the cords, too. So, that bites. But, I don't snore anymore.

Powerline: Why did it not work out with George [Lynch, guitar] and Jeff [Pilson, bass] for a return to the classic DOKKEN lineup?

Don: Well, do you want the lie or do you want the truth? We'll there's about 20 versions from George — I'm just an asshole, I want all the money and I'm hard to deal with. Well, that's just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. I mean, Mick [Brown, drums] will tell you that … and Jeff. We got together. We were going to do it last year, and we were excited to do it, and it was going to be great, and we thought it would put the exclamation point on our career. We had an offer to make an extreme amount of money to do it, so that was nice. And the truth is we got back together and Mick flew down, we all met, and Jeff said, "I want to do this, but I'm committed to FOREIGNER for two years." And I said, "Two years? That's the last of that." I couldn't sit around waiting for two years, so that's the truth. I know George posted all this shit that I held it up and I wanted too much money, and he didn't want to be a hired gun and all that. I don't know why George does all that stuff. There's something wrong with that guy between the ears. He's always been a little weird. Someone asked me when we started not getting along, and I said, "It wasn't toward the middle. We didn't get along from the day he joined the band." He's two different people, man. I mean, we played a couple of shows with him this summer, and he's always nice to me, saying, "How are you doing, Don?" I said, "You know what George? You're always, 'Hi, hi. How are you doing?' And then the very next day you talk shit about me on the Internet. What the fuck is that all about? Why do you keep this up?" And if you say something, he'll lie. Just tell the truth. Practice what you preach. The truth will set you free. He's just a different personality. I don't hate. I don't worry about it. And I gave up trying to defend myself on the Internet a long time ago. You get a guy, he goes to the show and then he blogs, "I saw DOKKEN and they sucked." I just say to people like that, "Well, that's your opinion, and don't skimp on the avocado. If you think you can do better, here's the microphone. Knock yourself out."

Powerline: With the state of the music industry, what are your hopes for DOKKEN going forward?

Don: Well, you know, we're in that strange situation — like everybody is — where you don't make your living off selling records anymore. You make your living off touring, because nobody sells records anymore. METALLICA is not selling 10 million records like they used to, or a hundred million, like the Black Album. Those days are gone because the Internet came along and changed everything. Napster changed the world. I was really proud of Lars [Ulrich] that he actually went to Congress and fought to get this thing stopped. People had this attitude like, "Well, what do you care? You're making millions of dollars. What's the big deal if a person downloads music for free?" Well, if you make a painting and spend 11 months on it, you pay for your brushes and you pay for it with your sweat and blood, and you go sell it to pay the bills, and the art gallery sells it to somebody sitting outside the art gallery and made 500 copies of it and posters of the painting, you'd be pissed. It's your art. It's your art! This attitude of kids going, "Well, I'm not going to spend 10 bucks, even though it's a bad copy and it sounds like shit, I'll just download it for nothing" … Lars fought to stop that, and I respect him for it. And so now, it's just touring. You have to tour. And somebody said, "Why are you making a new record?" It's because it's my love, it's my passion. I don't think painters or artists paint to make a living. If they make a living it's a bonus, but they do it because they love to paint. If you can make money at it, that's great. I never got into this business to get rich or to live in mansions. That wasn't the point. I was a musician. My mom was a musician, my father was a musician, my brother's a musician, my daughter is 25 and a classically trained pianist — it just runs in our blood, you know. It's our family.

Read the entire interview from Powerline.

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