During a recent conversation on the 80’s Glam Metalcast, George Lynch, the former guitarist of DOKKEN, disagreed with Don Dokken‘s claim that the lead singer and band’s namesake was the primary songwriter for many of their most popular songs.
He said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “[Bassist Jeff Pilson, drummer 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 bulls**t. 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. 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.
“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.”
“On Tooth And Nail and the record after that, a lot of these were — I think especially Tooth And Nail; I think it was all TV Guide titles, pretty much,” he continued. “‘Without Warning’, ‘Tooth And Nail’, ‘When Heaven Comes Down’, ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’ — those were all movies. I remember looking at the TV Guide and seeing the names of those movies — they were old movies, usually. [And I’d go] ‘Oh, that’s a cool name. We’ll name a song that.’
“So Tooth And Nail was me and Mick and Jeff sitting around just going Tooth And Nail, okay. Run around the streets and start a fight.’ Silly f**king lyrics, but whatever. It worked. ‘Don’t close your eyes or I’ll be there.’ I remember having that whole hook and that melody and everything in my head. And we based it on that. ‘When Heaven Comes Down’, I wrote that. I spent a whole night; I stayed up all night. And Jeff had gone home. We were working in Anaheim in my home studio. And I was really frustrated with the song and I wanted to finish it. And I had an idea for ‘When Heaven Comes Down’. ‘When Heaven Comes Down’ was a movie. I stole the title from it. And then I came up with the lyrics. And then I sang it all into a harmonizer, an octave low, so it sounded like the devil, with all this echo on it… I was really proud of it. Of course, that got redone and everything, but… I can’t sing.”
