TESLA drummer Steve Brown, who is the younger brother of ex-DOKKEN drummer Mick Brown, recently spoke to Chaotic Riffs about his brother’s retirement from music.

Back in 2019, Mick said that he was “taking a break” from touring yet still implied that he would return to the road at some point in the future.

Discussing Mick‘s physical setbacks that forced him off the road, Steve said:

“It’s not so much the playing, but it’s the travel on top of it. He’s a lot bigger guy than I man, and cramming into airline seats for long flights… They would play in Washington state on a Friday and somewhere on the East Coast on a Saturday. Those two things, you just can’t do it forever. And he’s been doing it — what? Fifty years. So I was kind of surprised. To be honest with you, I thought he would do it till he just keeled over on stage one day.

‘When [Mick] was playing with Ted Nugent at the same time [as DOKKEN] and trying to do both, he kind of got tired of that,” he continued.

“And then when the Ted thing was done, he stuck it out with Don [Dokken] as much as he could. But then just came a point where he just physically couldn’t do it anymore. And both of us have the same type of thing — I have it worse. It’s psoriatic arthritis.

“So it’s an immune deficiency thing. And he kind of worked his way through it; it kind of passed. But I know the kind of pain that I’m in, so for him to continue on like that kind of untreated too — ’cause I take shots and I do this and that and try to stay ahead of it a little bit… And one thing is when you’re sitting on a plane and then you’ve gotta get up, and you’re, like, ‘Oh, God.’ [Laughs]

“So I wasn’t surprised that he had decided to do [retire from touring]; I just didn’t think he was gonna stick with it forever,” Steve said. “And a couple of years later, I told my wife, I go, ‘Let’s go down and see him, see what’s going on down there.’ And he was great — and he was in the best possible mindset I’ve ever seen him in. And I thought, ‘Well, there you go.’ And soon after that he sold every piece of drum gear, everything he owns. And all of his friends that I run into out here, they’re just, like, ‘He really retired?’ I’m, like, ‘He doesn’t even have drums. He doesn’t even have drum sticks.’ [Laughs]”