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It’ll be a long time yet before Dokken becomes a candidate for the VH1 show “Where Are They Now?”  After 20 years, Dokken is still putting out albums, still touring, and hokey as it may sound, though true – still rocking.

Having just embarked on tour in support of their upcoming release Hell To Pay, Music and the City caught up with drummer Mick Brown while he sat in the Dokken tour bus just outside of Albuquerque.

“I’m excited about the tour, [I’m] in anticipation,” chuckles Brown in simply a fun and carefree conversation with Sass – but one wouldn’t expect any less from the man who had the adjective “wild” added to his name.  “I’m really looking forward to it, we were in the studio for quite a long time.  And playing live is the immediate reward for all the work you do in the studio.”

So is it awkward starting out the tour and performing the fresh songs before the new album is even out in stores yet?

“No, it’s not weird to me now because we have enough backlog stuff to go ahead with.  I remember when it was a weird time; when the band’s popularity got probably to it’s peek in the 80’s we came out [on tour] about three weeks before Back For The Attack [was released] and we were playing a lot of the songs on it.  And if people didn’t hear it on the radio or see it on TV then they didn’t know what the hell we were doing.  They all had that question mark look, like deer in headlights,” he laughed.  “But we went on with it anyway and then a week after the record was out everybody was getting it.  And that was a big record for us.”

Even so, for now, Dokken will only do a few songs off of Hell To Pay.

“We’re probably going to do about three, I think that’s all we need to do.  We want to keep what people are familiar with and that’s everything we did in the 80’s.  There are so many great records that we’ve done.  I think [there are] a lot of the band from the 80’s that their audience doesn’t know that they’re still around.  But I think we’ll mix up some brand new stuff from Hell To Pay and then just follow it up with old backlog stuff from the 80’s.”

And Dokken is just one of the many bands of that era that are still out cruising the rock and roll highway.  This is a great thrill to music fans – particularly children of the hair-era who can still go see these acts play live.

“It’s obviously not about the fame anymore because we had our moment.  It’s about being a musician and playing.  What are you supposed to do when you’re 47 like I am and you’ve been rocking your whole life.  The ones who are really musicians and really enjoy it stay with it.  In fact, I just recently saw Styx and Peter Frampton and I couldn’t believe how great those bands were, but there weren’t these huge audiences.  You know it’s an older crowd now.  But I thought that Styx was better that night then they were even at their peek.  They were just a great band - I couldn’t believe it.  I’m not a big Styx fan but I thought that they did what they did well.”

Brown continues:  “I think the people who are [in the audience] now are the real fans.  They’re still making the trek out to see it, that’s how much they want it.  We [also] find ourselves finding new audiences because Dokken’s kind of aggressive and kids still kind of dig aggressiveness.  And when we play some of these festivals the kids just go, ‘Wow!’  So we just go out and give it to them.”

Yet, competing with current musical powerhouse fads makes it difficult to keep touring.

“I think it might be a little easier for bands that had, and still have, that gigantic fame thing.  A lot of the 80’s bands – you know, Slaughter and Warrant and all these band that were gigantic in the 80’s, they’ve fallen off that big brass ring.  It’s a little more difficult to really keep it going.  We’ve really tightened up our belts and our expenditures and it’s still hard to make ends meet.  But we go out and we do it anyway.”

One of the things that Dokken is excited about, however, is touring with new guitarist Jon Levin.

“We’re really happy with Jon, who [also] happens to be our lawyer – so don’t mess with Dokken anymore.  We’ve got a guy in the band who’s watching out for us now,” laughs Brown.  “Every time paperwork comes up, we’re like, ‘Hey Jon, what’s this?’  He’s got his office at the front of the bus.”

“We wanted to hold on to that George Lynch style because that’s where we come front, and Jon does that well.”

As for Lynch himself, there doesn’t seem to be any love lost among these guys.

“No, we don’t speak with him.  Don tried on this last record.  There was this little old song that George and I used to do before Dokken, and Don wanted to do it on this last record.  So Don called George and said, ‘Listen, can you come up with this song?’  And he dug it up on a video somewhere that we played at a nightclub.  Apparently right before we were going to record together – we were actually going to have George play on this one song, and I kept telling Don, ‘You know you’re inviting trouble back,’” Brown chuckled.  “And so a couple days before we were getting ready to do it Don was reading on the Internet and there was George just ragging him up and down.  You just don’t need the grief.  We were afraid that George would be up to his old tricks and turn the session into a nightmare and it would just cost us a bunch of money.  But people are over it, they don’t care if he’s there or not.”

Currently there are several bands that continue to go on sans primary and founding members of those groups.

“In the period that I grew up in, I used to think that was a really unfortunate thing to have happen to a band, but now a days I think that bands go on with member changed gracefully.  Look at that guy in Judas Priest, man!  I’d never thought a guy could walk in the Halford shoes and pull it off but it was amazing – so I was like, wow!  I was digging it, he sounds like him so what the hell.  Kiss is a band that had that strong – ‘it had to be these guys,’ and they got away with that too.  And who would think that Van Halen would change singers that many times?  Like Journey – how’d they get away with that?  People are like, ‘I don’t care if it’s Steve Perry as long as he sounds like him.’”

So the Dokken show does go on Lynch-less.

“What our goal is now is to tour this thing as long as we can.  I hope to tour for a long time.  We’ve only got about two months of dates lined up at the moment and I hope it turns into a hell of a lot more.  I’ve heard that Whitesnake is going to go out in October and I’d love to tour with them.  We did that last year with the Scorpions and Whitesnake.  We’d love to get on something like that – a little bigger package.”

“[And] I’m sure we’ll go to Europe, we’ll squeeze it in somewhere,” chuckles Brown.
 
 

Official Dokken website: www.dokken.net

Sanctuary Records Group: www.sanctuaryrecordsgroup.com

Don Dokken’s website: http://www.dondokken.com
 

Email Sass at: [email protected]