The New Man In Dokken
Sunday, November 5, 2017 at 07:16AM Ira Black is the new(est) guitarist for Dokken. The band, featuring Ira, played live last night at the Rockfest 80s festival in Houston. If you don't recall, Ira has been in a lot of bands including Metal Church.
Watching the clip below, you can tell that Ira is a great guitarist. The rest of the performance is just okay. Don Dokken sounds tired to me and maybe he was. He's human and everyone gets worn down from time to time.
When the time falls back, it's always one of my most dreaded days of the year. I hate that it gets pitch black at 5 p.m., right when it's time to leave work. You get up when it's dark and go home when it's dark. The "light" in between is usually gray. And it's cold. I can see why so many black metal bands come from Norway. The darkness makes anyone ready for corpse paint and screaming.
Reader Comments (8)
Although Phil Lewis is four years younger, LA Guns still “bring it” live and PERFORM.
Don seems content in a T-shirt playing to 250 people. Complacency is dangerous at ANY age.
It’s amazing to me that Don Dokken exclaimed to a Metal female acquaintance of mine that he doesn’t need the money when it comes to touring. Then why the h*ll do it, Don?!
Why be a bored, fat t-shirt wearing shlubbo who can’t sing his way out of a paper bag even bothering to get on stage?
If only he would get the picture and make a real commitment to his god-given talent by doing everything he can to take better care of himself — quit the boozing, quit the cigarettes and get with it!
There’s a whole audience of thousands just waiting for you to get it together, Don! DO IT!
He needs to hang it up... Between the detuning, & a batch of C list stand in's. This is embarrassing. Ira's a good guitarist, but this is not the right gig for him.
Steve Whiteman of KIX still sings like it’s 1981!
Steven Tyler sings almost 100% of his ability when he was at his height.
Jack Russell lost, regained, lost and has once again, regained his voice. My buddy saw him just this past Saturday night and said he sounded great as others have commented on BBG! the same!
Tom Kiefer can fake it more than passably and went through h*ll with multiple surgeries to do it!
Phil Lewis, though a mediocre singer, at best, can still fake it as identically has he’s been doing over the last 30+ years.
Don Dokken should at least try. He had the voice of an angel. Though he should have taken better care of himself all along, you would think he would do anything to get it back now. But he’s not, smoking like a chimney and drinkin’ whiskey.
This is very true and it reminds me of what Sebastian Bach wrote in his book, "18 and Life" about Sid Row going to Russia to play the Moscow Peace Festival in 1989 with several other bands.
He writes, "The undisputable star of the show was not Bon Jovi or Motley Crue. The biggest star of the show, to the Russian people, was without a doubt, the Prince of Darkness himself, Mr. Ozzy Osbourne. I was awoken from my sleep because of sheer pandemonium outside the hotel. I looked into the lobby and saw this huge commotion. There was Ozzy, greeting the Hells Angels of the Soviet Union, who gathered en masse upon the hotel. Every Hells Angel contingent from the USSR had ridden from the USSR had ridden the Harley Davidsons from the farthest reaches of the Republic to this hotel hoping to meet their hero, Ozzy Osbourne."
"One can only Imagine the early 1970s, in a place like communist Russia, what hearing music like Black Sabbath must have been like." The ominous tones, the dissident chord progression, the dark power of the music must have spoken to the desolate souls inhabiting places as downtrodden and seemingly depressing as a communist republic would have been to live in, back then. Of course records were hardly available, found only on the black market. It must've been unfathomable to live in an environment such as this and hear a song like "Black Sabbath". Everywhere we went, we heard the familiar refrain, "Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy"."
At times, I think back to my youth and process the opportunities that I had- buying records, have a state of the art stereo to play them on, music magazine subscriptions, going to concerts, a Mom and Dad who put up with the noise coming from my bedroom, etc.. Many things that I took for granted. Music in many ways has been my escape, my sanctuary, my relief, my refuge and even at times, my salvation. It has given me strength, peace, comfort, hope and pleasure. As much as I may complain about the sad state of affairs in politics today, I know that I am one of the lucky ones to have been afforded the fortunes and the freedoms provided to me.