During a recent appearance on “Do You Know Jack?” podcast, legendary DOKKEN and LYNCH MOB guitarist George Lynch spoke about how the rise of grunge in the early 1990s forced most hard rock bands off the radio and MTV.
“Initially, I didn’t see it coming. I was just blind to it,” Lynch said. “And me and the people around me got personally blindsided by it and hurt by it, because we were still working under the assumption that everything was the same as it was in the ’80s — we were making records that way, and all that kind of stuff. Not that you should change to conform, or anything like that, but it was a period of adjustment. I was trying to get my head wrapped around it.”
“I’m very open-minded about things and wanna try new stuff and explore music that I’m not familiar with and all that kind of thing,” he continued. “So I was thinking, ‘What is it about this that is appealing or good?’, or whatever, and I started figuring it out and getting it.
“You know — don’t play guitar solos in the middle of every song, wear a flannel shirt, be depressed and talk about sh*t that matters. Drop all the trappings of silliness and superficiality. I get it. So it was kind of a learning curve. It affected me in my writing, to a certain extent, a little bit.
“The ’90s was really kind of a vacuum for me, and I’m sure most of my contemporaries, as far as guitar music. We all had to kind of take a step back. So it was probably my least productive period — not that I didn’t work and wasn’t productive, but I was kind of fishing around, so to speak.”
Lynch went on to say that he appreciated some of the “nu metal” bands that took over from grunge in the last 1990s.
He explained: “I had a [record] called Smoke This in the late ’90s and 2000 that I should have called LYNCH BIZKIT — [it was] in the LIMP BIZKIT [vein], a little bit. I loved it; I loved that music. In fact, I think LIMP BIZKIT is a great f*cking band, and I’m actually a huge fan. I just caught ’em a few years ago. They were great.”
