How are things goin’ George? I know you’ve got a full plate already this year.
The Souls Of We record has been out for a couple of months. We’re working on a video for the song “January”. We’re also in the middle of working on a new Lynch Mob record called “Smoke And Mirrors”. We’re doing that at Sound City Studios in the San Fernando Valley in LA. It’s actually the first studio I ever recorded at in the mid 70s and they haven’t changed anything. It’s the same as it was. Metallica was just in there for six months. You name any band and they’ve been through there. It’s just an awesome studio. It’s so original and it’s got so much mojo. Lynch Mob is going to be out this Summer and Fall touring pretty extensively and we’ve got Oni Logan back in the band. He’s commuting from Switzerland back and forth if you can believe it. We’ve got Marco Mendoza on bass and Scott Coogan on drums.
That is very exciting news for Lynch Mob fans. Those guys are super talented and it’s great to see Oni back. You’ve also got the Guitar Generation Tour that features Richie Kotzen, Paul Gilbert and yourself.
Yeah, we’ve been rehearsing for that. It starts today in San Diego and all the shows are at House Of Blues venues.
Who had the initial idea for this tour?
Paul and I are managed by the same management company. It was just a brainstorming idea, really. I had been playing with the idea of something called the Strung Out Tour for years. It’s the same idea but different in the aspect that it would represent multi-generations of guitar players. You’d have a guy from the 70s, a guy like myself who was known through the 80s, and someone more contemporary and modern, like Alexi from Children of Bodom. You’d have a variety of generations represented. The Guitar Generation Tour came as an independent idea from my management company.
Each guy gets 45 minutes on stage each night. You’ve got a pretty extensive catalog. What do you consider when it’s time to put together a set list for a show like that?
I wanted to stay away from the expected choices. I don’t want to do the same set I would do for a Dokken or Lynch Mob set. I’m doing two Souls Of We songs, a Hendrix tune, an extended version of Mr. Scary, and some things off “Sacred Groove”. We’ve mixed it up quite a bit. We’ve got some guest singers coming in as well. Jeff Pilson is coming down to sing “Tooth And Nail,” Oni Logan will come up to sing “Wicked Sensation”. London may be getting up to sing the Souls Of We material. We’ll see.
There’s only a handful of dates now. Will you be adding more later?
I don’t know yet. We have to balance it out with the Lynch Mob tour and that takes priority. It all depends on what Lynch Mob will be doing this Summer.
Any ideas of what songs you guys will do during the jam at the end of the night?
There’s about a dozen songs being kicked around – Frampton, old Deep Purple, the Doors, the Allman Brothers. It’s a little more organic-y rootsy stuff that I would have expected but it’s challenging to get three guitar players who are already playing way too many notes to come together so the songs have to be somewhat simple. You can’t do something more complex without a lot of rehearsal because it just gets turned into a huge, chaotic clusterfuck!
I know people are diggin’ the Souls Of We project. How does that project differentiate from what you do or could do with Lynch Mob?
It’s really more of an evolution. I could trace it back to a project I did with Matt from Saigon Kick. We were doing a project in an old barn up in the foothills of Nothern California. It was really cool. Through the years that just morphed. I had these backburner projects that I would develop and never really finish. There was a project called Microdot that involved London LeGrand as well. I had another project called Band Of Flakes because nobody showed up but me! That had a cool post-Alice In Chains kinda vibe to it. I had all these projects that kept getting backed up and I just started putting it all together. In the eleventh hour London came in and help sew it all together. It was rehashed material I kept reworking. It kept changing and changing. It was a five year process. Pretty enjoyable and painful at the same time. Kinda like S&M!
It sounds like there’s always something there you want to explore creatively. Do you have so much stuff gushing out that you don’t have a place for it all?
Um, can we leave my sex life out of this?! Of course. The creative juices don’t stop flowing just because you don’t have a current record to write for. Sometimes when you do have a reason to write the creative juices stop flowing so you have to take advantage of it when everything’s operating correctly. If you feel the urge you’ve definitely got to document it. There’s always a record being record. Putting it on an album and naming a band is kinda an afterthought! The Lynch Mob record has been very focused. We knew what we wanted to do. We already had a template. We’re using “Wicked Sensation” as a springboard for this new album and evolved beyond that. This is going to be a monster record. It’s what people would have expected after “Wicked Sensation,” just many years later. The same band, the same vibe. I’m pulling shit out of my ass that’s fuckin’ surprising me! I’m like, “Holy shit! How am I gonna pull that off live?” I’ll worry about it when I get there!
Last year Dokken put out a CD that sounded an awful lot like someone trying to play like George Lynch. What do you think about that?
Lots of people are out there trying to sound like other people. It doesn’t really bother me. There’s a whole industry built on clone bands doing tributes to other bands. I consider them a Dokken tribute band. They really are just a tribute band except they have the real singer. I actually did a couple of shows around NAMM in January and the band that was backing me up was a Dokken tribute band called Rokken. I didn’t think I could do it. I told them I’d do it if they dressed up in stretchy pants and big hair and makeup. It will be “in cheek” that way. It won’t be like I’m taking myself seriously – it’s a little cheesy. They did it and it was actually a lot of fun. We were not pretending to be cool. We were just making fun of ourselves and enjoying ourselves at the same time.
I’m not going to talk about Dokken too much, but do you think you four guys will ever get up and do it again?
I would just have to speculate and I have no idea. The question has been raised and I’ve raised it several times over the past few years. I could see a window of opportunity happening in 2010 but that’s just me speculating. I can’t control the minds of the other three people! I’m sure everybody’s thinking about it but we’ll see. I think it all comes down to economics to be quite honest with you. In particular, for Don. If it makes more sense for him financially to put the band back together, he’ll do it. If it doesn’t, he won’t. That’s really the bottom line. I’ll just cut to the chase.
So let’s just forget about that for now! You’ve got Souls Of We, Lynch Mob, the Guitar Generation Tour, your online dojo…
We’ve got these art pieces that I’m doing. They’re going in galleries and being sold through the internet and selected stores. We did some exotic location shoots and then I’ll take the prints and do a bunch of interesting stuff to it. I do handprints and give them pretty curious names and autograph them. You can see them on my website. It’s kinda like meditation. I’m excited about it. I really get into ‘em. It’s a creative flow just like music. It makes me money and that’s cool, too! I’m not a money whore, but when people get these things they flip out! They really do. It’s not so much that it’s about me. It’s about how the whole project was put together. It’s a beautiful thing that just kinda fell together. It’s cooler than I could have imagined.
With all of that stuff on your plate – and it’s only February – what’s the rest of the year looking like for you?
I always have commitments for my endorsements with ESP, Randall, Lynch Box, Zoom, Morely, Dean Markley, Washburn. I go to trade shows and then I do clinics. That’s part of what I do to support my guutar line wih ESP. The nicest people alwaya show up. They’re very forgiving and very sweet. It’s been wonderful to meet these people. I see a lot of young kids that weren’t even born when Dokken was out and I’m still trying to figure that one out! Young metal guys – even 15 year old hippie lookin’ kids – care about this stuff! I always enjoy talking to people and not doing the routine cattle call and running them through a line. At some point there’s possibly going to be another Souls Of We record, definitely another Lynch Mob record, possibly a Dokken record, possibly another L/P record. I’m never going to run out of things to do!
George, thanks for taking time out for us today. What would you like to say to your fans?
The bottom line is that I think a lot of fans have been patiently waiting on me to get it right. The stuff I’ve put out has been a mixed bag – in their opinion, not my opinion. I think this Lynch Mob record is going to cement people’s opinion of me getting my shit together and doing the obvious thing, which is sometimes the right thing. Sometimes musicians tend to be too quirky or creative and go off on a tangent and go too far left or too far right. Sometimes you’ve just got to go right up the middle. It makes me happy and I’m sure it’s going to make everybody else happy.