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Don Dokken Was Asked To Join Former Bandmates In The End Machine


03-28-2019
In The End Machine

George Lynch revealed that The End Machine's new album was at one point intended to be a new Dokken record but the missing link was frontman Don Dokken, who declined to take part.

The group feature classic Dokken members Lynch along with Jeff Pilson, Mick Brown, and Robert Mason and George spoke with Ultimate Guitar about their just released debut album and said that Don was invited to take part in the project while discussing how the band came together.

George said, "Jeff lives very close to me and we're very close friends, and we've tried to work together as much as possible. So we come up with these projects that we don't really need to do but we do them as an excuse to work together and write songs like we used to in Dokken. And we have a lot of fun doing it. We've done a number of projects like that. We did LP, which is Lynch/Pilson, we did T&N, and now we're doing The End Machine. They're all sort of the same thing, maybe a couple of different people playing in it, but just me and Jeff in our studios working together and still chasing that same kind of songwriting vision that we had when we were working together back in the '80s.

"This time around, it is very close to being really almost as the Dokken lineup, with Mick being in there. At one point, we actually asked Don (Dokken) to be involved and make it a Dokken record. He declined, obviously, and it was very disappointing because I thought this could have been a great, great Dokken record. Because if we ever do a record, it's gonna have to be great."

Lynch was then asked, "Were these the same songs you planned for Dokken?" He responded, "Jeff and I were just writing to write. We were just writing songs with no... we didn't have any project in mind, just writing. And then as this started to come together, we started to wonder how to build this and what we would call it and what it would be. And one of the ideas was to have Don come in and make this a Dokken record. So we talked about that, but we actually talked to our label and we had some deals being discussed and so forth. And I was hoping this would have been that record, but... not that I'm disappointed in what it is - it's wonderful. It would have been a different record with Don. But Robert Mason is an absolute monster, I mean... (laughs). He just continues to blow my mind, he's so good.

"I'm very happy with the end results of it. It's kind of like the butterfly effect, it could have gone in a completely different direction had Don agreed to come on board. This record is kind of the record that Jeff and I had always wanted to write in Dokken. It's a little bit more aggressive singer to match the music. And that's what we got. It only took us 25-30 years, but we finally figured it out."


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