Don Dokken was recently asked if he and Dokken’s bandmates will perform again very soon, even though the band released their 13th album and said it will be their last.
In an interview with Justin Young of Monsters, Madness And Magic, Don Dokken said:
“We’ll keep touring. I’ve done a lot of interviews. I’ve been doing interviews when I’m off the road, and I tell them this is our last record, and that’s true, but we’re not gonna stop touring. I mean, there’s nothing I can do.
“I’m hoping the surgeon that screwed my life up will get ran over by a bus… He really screwed me up. It took a year for me to be able to raise my hand above my head… So I was depressed, obviously. I came home. I was in a walker. I’m in a cane, and yeah, it sucked, man. But the bottom line is I would love to keep going as Dokken, but I can’t write any more songs.
”I’m screwed. I took my Steinway piano and shipped it to Los Angeles ’cause my daughter is a concert-trained pianist. She was happy to get that. But I don’t know how I can write another record. […]
“I was talking to Jon Levin the other day. I said, ‘If this album is successful, you wanna do another one?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know if I have it in me.’ I’m the writer, I’m the singer, just like I was in (the classic lineup of) Dokken.
”I’m not throwing my old guys under the bus, but I was the main writer. I wrote the hits: ‘In My Dreams’ and ‘It’s Not Love’ and ‘Alone Again’ and ‘The Hunter’. Even though when you look at the record credits and it says ‘Don Dokken, George Lynch, Jeff Pilson, Mick Brown,’ they didn’t write those songs.
”And everybody knows in my camp that I wrote the songs, the guitar and the lyrics. Those other three guys were in Orange County with an ounce of cocaine trying to come up some good songs. And that’s why I couldn’t write with them, because I don’t do drugs. Never did.”