According to the former Dokken guitarist George Lynch, Don Dokken is lying about having written the most of the hit songs of their career.
In a recent episode of the 80’s Glam Metalcast, the ex-guitarist addressed Don’s assertion of being the primary songwriter for most of the hits. Dismissing it as ‘bullsh*t,’ the rocker expressed his disagreement with Don’s claim:
“Jeff [Pilson], Mick [Brown] and I wrote almost everything. There was a point where the manager… This is always a thing with Don. He goes off about how he wrote everything. That’s bullshit. Jeff and I, and Don and Jeff wrote some things, and Don wrote a thing, something on his own here and there, and important songs, but the bulk of the material was written by Jeff and I, and that’s just the truth.”
He continued while jokingly claiming that he took his lyrics from a magazine:
“And even the lyrics and the melodies and the titles were… Jeff and I joke all the time. There was a thing called the TV Guide, and I would get all my titles and the lyrics, obviously, flowed from the titles, from TV Guide.”
The rocker clarified where Don’s success came from, clarifying that most of it was not from Dokken:
“So you look and see a lot of those early records, they were either reworked Xciter[George’s pre-Dokken band] songs or new stuff that Jeff and I wrote — sometimes with Mick’s help — and then we’d end up with Don too; we’d collaborate with Don at the end of the process. But for 90 percent of material, that was the case. And these titles were out of the TV Guide — they were movies.”
Dokken’s Claims About Writing The Top Hits
While Lynch claims that Don Dokken has not written songs as much as the rest of the band did, Don Dokken claims otherwise. In another interview, the frontman claimed that he wrote the 75 percent of the hits and the remaining members did the rest. He also acknowledged in the same interview that he faced substantial financial losses while writing some of their top hits:
“[…] I wrote a lot of the hits and I gave up 75 percent to the three of them. So instead of me getting four bucks, I got a dollar and Mick got a dollar and George got a dollar and Jeff got a dollar and the management took theirs and the accountants took theirs, and I thought, ‘Jesus.’ I go, ‘I lost millions’ writing ‘In My Dreams’ and ‘Just Got Lucky’ or ‘Alone Again.’ I mean, I can name a bazillion songs that I wrote by myself on the guitar and wrote all the music.”
One Of The Members ‘Scored’
Formed back in 1976, Dokken didn’t achieve instant success in their music career. It took a while for their current popular songs to be acknowledged, especially during the early stages when the band wasn’t widely recognized. Although the band had planned to divide the earnings in the band evenly, the way rehearsals and recording sessions unfolded differed among the members. What’s intriguing is that one of the bandmates quickly found success even though he ‘did not write’ according to the singer:
“Mick’s the one that scored. He didn’t write. We rehearsed the songs for a week, go into a rehearsal studio, flesh it all out, pick the 12 best songs, Mick comes in the studio for four or five days, knocks out his drums and he goes to the drug dealer and then he heads off for the Rainbow [Bar & Grill in West Hollywood]. I said, ‘Mick, you scored. You made millions of dollars and all you had to do was spend a couple of weeks playing drums.'”
You can see the interview below.
