Stinging guitar coaxes its way into the picture and climaxes with a roar.
Let’s start by peering into Dokken’s Tooth and Nail, shall we?Ī steely acoustic duet fades in and is accompanied shortly by deep toned synthesizer keys and what sounds to be a harpsichord fingering out some polyphonic pattern. Maybe it’s that I don’t want to spoil what few pristine memories of the decade I have by overexposure to music of the time. So why take time to get to know an album from 1984? Truly, it’s been decades since I revisited any of the music of my childhood. At the same time, my taste evolved when confronted with the likes of Metallica and GNR as the decade came to a finish, then cemented around the the '90s Seattle scene with stalwarts like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mad Season, Mudhoney, and Melvins. They were my personal gateways into heavy music, with INXS, Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, and the GhostBusters soundtrack surely paving the way. You really couldn’t go out anywhere without encountering that robust heartbeat peculiar to so many great bands, like Def Leppard, Ratt, Scorpions, and Cinderella.
Now Ozzy was a solo artist and cultural boogey-man, while Sabbath recruited Dio for the pulpit – and what a preacher he was! Bands like Motörhead, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden touched the heights of greatness, shaping expectations for this grotesque (but hellishly exciting) mutation of rock ‘n’ roll that was increasingly becoming worthy of airplay.īy the mid-80s, heavy metal was a thing and it was on fire! Dangerous music for dangerous times.
Something new was afoot in popular music as the 1980s dawned, however. That is, to listen to and discuss the discography of the Los Angeles metal band, comprised in its classic line-up of Don Dokken on vocals, George Lynch one guitar, Jeff Pilson on bass, and Mick Brown on drums.īlack Sabbath blew the lid off of the new medium nicknamed “heavy metal” and pretty much dominated the 1970s with those daring, evil, and experimental Ozzy-era albums. Sometime midway through the haze of pandemic, my co-host John Gist from The Doomed & Stoned Show issued the DOKKEN challenge.