DON DOKKEN On Groupies, Family Life And Touring With POISON

Charlie Steffens of KNAC.COM recently conducted an interview with Don Dokken. An excerpt from the chat follows.

KNAC.COM: You guys had beautiful women at your beck and call every night back in the '80's, didn't you?

Dokken: Yeah. We did. And I had a lot of women because I was the baby-faced androgynous-looking-kind-of-singer guy and chicks would go "Oh, I'll fuck you in a heartbeat." I'd think "You don't even know me. You know the guy in the video. You don't know what I'm like, who I'm like, what kind of person I am." It didn't matter. At some point you think they're all just sluts and whores and you wake up one day and you say, "No, I'm the slut. I'm the whore." You wake up and you realize there's more to life than that. It became tedious. First it was a game for your ego. My kids came along after the Monsters of Rock tour. I had a boy and a girl, and everything changed. The whole world looked different. They're innocent, and you see through their eyes. It's the normal story: do you want to go to The Rainbow Friday night when they're seven or do you want to go to the Cub Scout meeting? It sounds corny, cheesy, and domestic, but that's real life. My son's coming out next week to spend a week with me on the road and I'm totally excited about it. Am I excited about meeting bimbos backstage? No. I'm excited about my son coming out and hanging out with me for a week. He just turned 20, and just got his pilot's license yesterday. So we're going to celebrate. After he goes home my daughter's coming out for a week. That's life.

KNAC.COM: It was devastating, to say the least, for you to watch your band go to pieces. How did you deal with it?

Dokken: I was angry when DOKKEN broke up. It's the story of my life and I went to therapy. I go, "My whole life is fucked now." Nirvana came out and I thought, "Well, I had a good run. Ten years. It's over." I kicked back for three years, got my head straight, and then said, "Well, I'm just going to continue on. I'm just going to keep fighting the fight and making records. That's what I do. I'm not going to go through life angry, because it will make you old and haggard and tired and bitter. Nothing good comes out of it."

KNAC.COM: What does the typical audience look like on your current tour with POISON?

Dokken: I'm laughing, because there are a lot of people I've noticed at the shows who don't seem to know the POISON songs. They're not really hardcore fans of the genre. A lot of them come because they want to see [POISON singer] Bret Michaels from the reality show "Rock of Love". All these MILFS. These forty-year old women, screaming "Bret Michaels, Bret Michaels!" And they're wearing the cowboy hat. You can see they're having a good time, enjoying watching the show, and liking DOKKEN. It's been a very strange, interesting demographic of women. I'm used to going onstage and hearing the roar, and now I go onstage and hear this high-pitch screaming. It's mind-boggling. It's like I'm on tour with David Cassidy. God bless Bret. I'm glad Bret found all this success. I'm really happy for him, but you gotta chuckle at this point in our career and go, "You girls don't get it, do you?" They just wanna see the David Cassidy up there. Bret's reinvented himself as a reality star, and it's paying off for him and POISON. It's like curiosity…I don't know what it is. That TV show turned a whole generation of people on to POISON, who had never heard of POISON.

Read the entire interview at KNAC.COM.

DOKKEN live in Charlotte, NC – July 19, 2008: