Dokken: The name is synonymous with hard rockers and metalheads all over the world. But it wasn’t always like this. Before selling more than 10 million albums, playing alongside everyone from Judas Priest to Aerosmith, and starring in a music video alongside Freddy Krueger, Don Dokken was a young, aspiring musician with a hunger for rock. There’s no better display of his determination than on the latest Dokken compilation, The Lost Songs: 1978-1981. We sat down with the legendary frontman to discuss these early days and how Dokken “broke the chains” into the mainstream.
So this is a big week for you as it sees the release of a new disc of old music, The Lost Songs: 1978-1981. I know you had come across these tapes earlier this year. What was your reaction upon their discovery?
Don Dokken: I was shocked for one thing. I just figured they were lost with time. After so many years, I just figured God knows where they’re at. Things get lost. I guess I can chalk it up to COVID because I was bored, so I decided to clean my garage after 30 years.
Let’s talk about some of the songs on this disc. There’s an early version of “Felony” which is much faster and heavier than the version we came to know and love on Breaking the Chains. What led to the transformation of that song?
DD: I wish I could give a more intelligent, prolific answer, but I don’t know. I wrote it and we just ended up letting it go for years. Then we brought it back out and it came out again.
Another track that really grabbed my attention is “Back in the Streets”. Honestly, if I didn’t know it was you, I would’ve thought it was a lost Diamond Head song. Were you inspired at all by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement that was happening at the time?
DD: Oh completely. That’s why I went to Germany. I was into Diamond Head, Judas Priest, Accept, Scorpions, Saxon, a lot of the euro bands. People don’t realize those bands weren’t famous in America yet. They were popular in Europe, but they weren’t that big here. I saw Judas Priest at the Whisky a Go Go.
It’s hard to imagine Priest playing such a small room.
DD: A lot of those bands played that small room. They just weren’t known here. People say, “Why did you go when the rock scene was happening on the strip?” It really wasn’t happening. It was happening in ’78 when Van Halen got signed. Then it all altered into new wave. There were all the New York bands with the punk scene. The Dickies, The Weasels…a lot of punk bands. Then everybody started cutting their hair off like X, Blondie, Kajagoogoo. That was popular. It seemed overnight, from the rock scene, all the clubs wanted to book was new wave.
I wasn’t down with it. So I started looking in Europe and seeing all these bands that I love playing. And I had the offer to go there and play some clubs from a guy who owned a club over there that I met in L.A. He was looking at clubs to get some ideas for his own club. I said, “We don’t have any money.” He said, “Well, I’ve got equipment if you can get plane tickets.” So we muscled up the plane tickets. We got all our girlfriends to hawk their jewelry and borrowed money and we went.
But my influences are obvious to me. Even when I listened to the album, because I mixed it, I can hear my guitar solos had a little Blackmore influence. Some of the guitar riffs had a Thin Lizzy influence. I heard all of the influences that I was listening to. I remember when Judas Priest released Sad Wings of Destiny. It came out, I think around ’78, and blew my mind. That album for me is iconic.
And that was right when you guys started, correct?
DD: Yep. Before that I was around in ’73, ’74, ’75, ’76, in my early 20s. But I was working. I had a job. I would play clubs at night and go jam and go down and watch the bands. Mick Mars lived down the street from me. He was in a band called Vendetta before Mötley Crüe. He’d call me at night and say, “I want you to come down and hang out and jam a little bit.” He was playing the club circuit too. We were all just trying to make ends meet. A lot of the bands all lived in the same house. A whole band would have a four bedroom, two bath house and they all made bedrooms out of the living room. So we were all roughing it. I can definitely say we all paid our dues. Which is unlike now. You get these YouTube people who have never set foot onstage, get a million hits, get a record deal, and get a hit. I’m not a big fan of American Idol either.
One thing I’ve noticed in many of your songs is something I like to call the “Dokken switchover”, where you’ll go from a soft section and then contrast it with a heavy section. We hear it on songs like “Dream Warriors” and “Into the Fire”, but the song “Hit and Run” might be the earliest example of this technique. How did this approach come to be?
DD: I just think when a song goes the same tempo for 4 minutes it gets a little old. When you break it down a little bit, I can concentrate more on the lyrics and the melody and the storyline, so the music’s not crowding it. I really don’t have an answer because I’ve never been able to pinpoint my writing style over the last 40 years. If I knew how to write a hit, I’d write a 100 of them. When stuff comes to you in your head, it’s a cosmic thing. Unfortunately, it usually comes at 3 in the morning when you’re peeing. *laughs*
The disc ends with a couple live tracks from what I believe is your 1979 tour of Germany. How long was that tour and who was in Dokken at that time?
DD: Yes, it lasted about three weeks. It was Juan Croucier on bass who a couple years later went on to join Ratt. The drummer’s name was Greg Pecka. He went on to be in a band called Valentine. I did all the guitar work and the vocals mostly. And actually, Juan sang “Felony”. So we were a three piece. That’s all we thought we needed. When I went back one more time in 1980, the guys didn’t want to go, so I put together a different lineup temporarily for a quick tour of Germany. That was probably a bad decision because it was snowing and very cold, but we were still playing the same clubs. I was just happy to be playing the clubs The Beatles played. A lot of people don’t remember that The Beatles, before they were famous, they were in Hamburg.
Did you play the Star-Club? Was that still around back then?
DD: Yep. The Star-Club closed about a month after we played there. The Top Ten was still there. Chicago Club was still there. We played a lot of the clubs that The Beatles played.
That’s amazing.
DD: I dug it. *inaudible* down there at the Reeperbahn. It’s the red-light district. It’s weird to go to a country where prostitution is legal. You just walk down the street and there’s these little things called the Eros Center. You walk down to a parking lot and the theaters going. There’s women walking around in scantily dressed nighties and it’s a whole different thing than in America. So it was a little bit eye opening at 24 years old.
Back in those days, you were the singer and guitarist for Dokken. Some of these riffs are a force to be reckoned with. In particular, the disc closes with a song called “Prisoner”, not to be confused with the song of the same name on Back for the Attack. The riffs on that song are super heavy. Who were your favorite guitarists growing up?
DD: The first album I ever bought was Fresh Cream, so Clapton was a big influence. I think everybody was influenced by Hendrix. That was the 60s during the hippie days and Hendrix was a big thing. In my really early 20s, I was influenced by Dave Meniketti from Y&T. I really liked his style of rhythm. Ritchie Blackmore was a huge influence. And I liked KK Downing and Glenn Tipton in Priest. I liked their rhythm playing as much as their solos. All those guitar players of that era influenced me to some extent. When I was in high school, I was listening to other things. I was listening to Grand Funk Railroad and people like that, but that wasn’t really more guitar oriented. Then I went through my phase when I was listening to “Whipping Post” by The Allman Brothers Band. I was listening to that stuff with these long, drawn out solos and I was trying to learn that more southern type of playing. So I wandered around from record to record, just trying to pick up what I like and ditch what I didn’t like. But I’d say Blackmore was my biggest influence. I don’t think anybody wasn’t influenced by Ritchie Blackmore.
Is there a chance any of these lost songs could appear in a future Dokken setlist?
DD: No, probably not for the simple reason that I’ve done so many records now. There are many, many, many, many songs that I’ve written in my career that I’d love to put into the live set, but you only get to play so long. You play an hour and a half and you’ve got to pick it. You’re committed because I have an obligation to our fans that when they come to see a Dokken concert, it’s a lot about nostalgia now. That nostalgia is they want to hear the hits. That takes up about an hour right there. *laughs* We throw in some deep tracks. We do “Don’t Close Your Eyes”, “Too High to Fly” off Dysfunctional, “Maddest Hatter” off Erase the Slate. But I don’t think these songs…I wrote these songs so long ago, I’d like to move forward, not backwards.
Speaking of one of those classic albums, this year marks the 35th anniversary of my favorite Dokken album, Under Lock and Key. What are your favorite songs off that album and what memories come to mind from that era?
DD: I would say that was a good representation of when the band all pulled together, instead of the arguing and bickering that we were famous for. We finally had some success for Tooth and Nail and pulled it together for Under Lock and Key. I just remember “In My Dreams”, one of the hits on that album. I remember I wrote it in Mexico sitting on the beach one night, playing my acoustic guitar. You never know where inspiration is gonna come from. And I remember “The Hunter”. George wrote that music and he wanted it to be an instrumental.
Really?
DD: Yeah he wanted it to be an instrumental and play a solo over it. I said I think it’s too slow, too medium tempo. It’s not gonna work. But he was hell bent on doing it. I said at least let me take it home and have a crack at it after rehearsal. So I remember taking “The Hunter” home and writing the lyrics.
Who was the woman on the other end of the phone in “It’s Not Love”?
DD: That was my son’s mother. She passed away a few years ago, but yeah, that was her. She was kind of our manager in the early days. She actually worked for Columbia Records and she looked after bands like Journey and Santana. She worked in the A&R department right under the president.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but there’s a Facebook page called Everything Glam Metal. The members are predominantly 18 to 30 years old and absolutely obsessed with Dokken. How does it feel for you to see younger generations latching on to your music all these years laters?
DD: Well I’m proud of it. I don’t consider us a glam metal band. Glam metal was something somebody invented. Glam metal can mean it was more poppy songs and predictable choruses. I wouldn’t consider “Kiss of Death” a glam metal song. Or “Tooth and Nail” or “Paris is Burning” or “Til the Livin’ End” or “When Heaven Comes Down”. These are not glam metal songs, but we got stereotyped down the road because we had long hair. I remember when that scene started happening, when I came back from Germany the second time. All of a sudden there were bands all over the Sunset Strip with huge hair and wearing crazy clothes. I think David Lee Roth started that because he always wore these crazy outfits. So I think these bands thought, “Oh we gotta look like David Lee Roth.”
It’s funny because I’ve heard that debate of “Is Dokken really glam metal?” or “Is W.A.S.P. really glam metal?”. Like you just said, “Kiss of Death” is no glam metal song.
DD: No. A glam metal song would be more like “Unskinny Bop Bop” or something like that. Which is fine. It was a very catchy song. I’m not dissing the band, but we didn’t write songs like that. We didn’t come from that era. It seemed like a lot of the bands that came out of the midwest and east coast, they came out to L.A. to find their fame and fortune. They all went into the glam thing. W.A.S.P.? No way were they glam metal. They were heavy. Everybody just got pigeonholed. It used to be there was just rock, new wave, and punk. Then all of a sudden it was hard rock. Then they came up with the term heavy metal. Then it was speed metal, thrash metal, grunge. They started slicing up the pie and everybody started categorizing every single band and what they were which is stupid because only the band knows who they are.
Is there going to be a Lost Songs 2 or is what we hear on this disc everything Dokken did pre-Breaking the Chains?
DD: That’s totally it. There were about 4 or 5 more songs on the tape and the tapes wouldn’t play. They unraveled. It was just too old and started *inaudible* getting sticky and gooey after 40 years. All these songs are pre George, Jeff, and Mick. Most of the stuff I wrote with a lot of people. Juan Croucier did a lot of the playing on these demos and in Germany. Two of the songs I wrote by myself and made a 45 single in ’77. Bill Lordan, who was the drummer for Robin Trower, and Rustee Allen, the bassist for Robin Trower, came in and did the session. They played the rhythm, I played the guitars and vocals on “Broken Heart” and “Hard Rock Woman”.
That was my very first single. I pressed 300 copies of it, took it to Europe, and sold them all. They’re long gone. There was no way to find a copy of it. I found the songs on YouTube. They sounded horrible. I don’t know how people got these songs, but a lot of these demos are on YouTube. Probably somebody who gave a cassette to somebody who gave a cassette to somebody who gave it to his girlfriend who gave it to somebody else and made copies. They sounded horrendous. I couldn’t put them on a record. So here I was lucky to find the masters and the songs I couldn’t find the masters to, there were just two tracks, I just remastered them and made them sound as high fidelity as possible.
I think that says it all because this disc is an excellent look at Dokken before all the hits the world came to know and love in the 80s.
DD: This is literally the first incarnation of Dokken. I didn’t know anything about studios or how to record. I had the good luck that most of these songs were recorded by Michael Wagener, who wasn’t famous at the time as a producer. He was working in Hamburg as an engineer. We met him. He’s the one who ran the cables around the side of the building, set up some microphones, and recorded me live. A couple years later, I told Michael, “You need to come to America.”, because then the German scene was changing. There was this real popular music called schlager. It was really off the wall. There were people singing in German and I don’t know what the hell it was. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So Michael came to America and we did Breaking the Chains. I told him off handedly, “If I ever get a record deal, you’ll be the guy to do the record.” So I get a record deal in Germany and had Michael do it. And then on we went. We had a long, long relationship together. And the rest is history.
Check out The Lost Songs: 1978-1981, out now on Silver Lining Music!