5 minutes alone: George Lynch

KXM man George Lynch talks destroying guitars, stolen gear and a potential return for Dokken.

Got my first real six-string

“My first was a no-name acoustic. My first electric was a Teisco Del Rey. I think a lot of people had those as first guitars in my era, this was in the 60s. It was maybe a year or so before I graduated to a 1960s Les Paul Special.”

Dream on

“Initially I tried to turn my Del Rey into my dream guitar even though I had no knowledge. I took a hacksaw to the guitar, I changed the body shape, I replaced the Japanese pickups with different Japanese pickups. I attempted to file the frets by putting the guitar in a vice and working on it with a metal file. I also repainted it. I totally ruined the guitar, basically! It became unusable, which led to me getting the Les Paul Special.”

Baby, come back

“The two Soldano amps that I used on [Lynch Mob album] Wicked Sensation sounded incredible. I’ve played through lot of SLO’s in my time and these were two of the three best that I’ve played. I had a snakeskin one and a grey one. They were both great but the grey one was better, even though I wanted the snakeskin to be better because of how it looked. 

“I’ve had gear stolen over the years and I had been trying to find that amp, embarrassingly I thought someone in a very popular band had that amp. I went as far as to have the police to go their house to collect it. That was very embarrassing because it turned out not to be it and I know the guys in this band. It was uncomfortable but we smoothed it over in the end. 

“Anyway, a guy got hold of me a few years ago and informed me that he thought he had the amp. He very nicely sold it back to me at a reasonable price. That is back in my stable of amps now and I used it quite a lot on the KXM record.”

Ch-ch-changes

“I wouldn’t change any of my songs that are well-known. The songs that became well-known did so for a reason, because they’re probably crafted well. I did a project called Souls Of We with London LeGrand and Johny Chow, it was an interesting band. There were things about that record that I go back to and think, ‘Man, I really went off the rails here and didn’t finish this idea properly.’”

Show me what you got

“I played a nudist colony. I wouldn’t say that was the worst gig but it was definitely the strangest. We didn’t know it was a nudist colony until we arrived. It was in the desert and we drove up the entrance way to a trailer when a nice middle-aged, kind of heavy-set lady came out and she had nothing on but a pair of shoes. We thought, ‘What the hell…’ She had some papers to sign us in and she said to us, ‘Okay, sign here… and clothing is optional.’ I was just very fortunate at that point in my life that I was a guitar player and not a singer.”

Back on the road again?

“There’s a decent possibility that [Dokken] could do something [in the future]. But it would be limited, I believe. Anything beyond that right now is pure speculation. We have talked loosely about putting something more extended together but that would be way down the road. There has been discussion about some limited touring, even some one-off s here and there, but it is still in the preliminary stages.”

KXM’s new album, Scatterbrain, is out now on Rat Pak Records.