George Lynch is one of those guitarists that are constantly on any list of “Greatest Guitar Players” polls or guitar hero conversations. His inventive and unique ways of playing the guitar has influenced multitudes of players for decades. During the 80s, his talent can be heard on a number of recordings from the band Dokken including on the sound track for “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3.” The video for the song “Dream Warriors” received heavy rotation on MTV and featured the band inside of a nightmare with Freddy Kruger and George with his famous skull and bones guitar “Mom.” His guitar work on the instrumental “Mr. Scary” earned the band a Grammy nomination as well. After leaving Dokken, he formed the band Lynch Mob which differed musically from his previous band and was very successful and developed a large following. During the latter 1990s and earlier part of this decade he released a solo project and had a reunion with Dokken and reunited Lynch Mob as well as a project with Dokken bassist Jeff Pilson. In addition, George also is an artist and has a website called Dojo for online guitar lessons. In 2008 he started playing guitar with some friends including London LeGrand forming “Souls Of We.”
London Legrand up until this point was best known for being the vocalist for the band Brides Of Destruction which has included Nikki Sixx, Tracii Guns, John Corabi, Adam Hamilton and Kris Khols among others. BOD was very successful, including a headlining tour, an enormous fan base and a debut cd that reached the Top 100 of the U.S. album charts. He got the gig by impressing both Nikki and Tracii (who thought they’d seen it all during their lives) not only with his vocal style but also with the way he showed up for the audition all air brush painted to resemble a dead tree. After BOD was put on hiatus, London and George started hanging out and became good friends and now they’re touring and tearing it up together.
George and London sat down after a show recently to talk about how they met, life on the road together and what it’s like being shot at.
The Entertainment Nexus-What have you been doin these days?
George Lynch- We’ve been touring around “Guerrilla Style” the hard way. We’ve been on the road for off and on for two months and this is basically my “Love Band” ya know? I love these guys and London’s one of my best friends. He used to cut my hair! I walked in the place and go: “How much to look like him?!” I didn’t think that he was a real musician cause in Hollywood; people that looked like him weren’t really musicians. “It’s all form and no substance.” Then, I invited him down to the studio and he came down with a bag of Red Bulls and we stuck him in a broom closet with a mic and I was like; “Fuckin Hell! Here’s a guy that looks like Hollywood or whatever and fuckin actually has all of this juice…ya know?”
London LeGrand- I don’t think that I looked “Hollywood” at all. I think maybe “North Hollywood” maybe. No I’m kidding. (Laughs)
GL- He’s way cooler! Anything but “West Hollywood” please! Anyway, we did this project and he…
LL- That’s gonna hurt my business, you sayin shit like that.
GL- Oh shit! No, no because he DOES an amazing job…incase this whole “music thing” doesn’t work out. You definitely go get your hair cut by London Legrand at Sirens Salon on Melrose…
LL- “Sirens Rock N Roll Salon”.
GL- It’s called Sirens because it’s all girls except for London. He’s kinda “androgynous” so he gets to work there. (Laughs) I’m just kidding, London’s all man.
LL- “Sirens” actually means “mermaids”…
GL- And you’re a “merman.”
LL- It would be cool if I could get the title of “King Neptune” dude.
GL- Well ya gotta earn it dude. Ya gotta go in there and…
LL- I gotta walk in there with one of those, what are they…tridents. (Laughs) I was gonna say pitchfork.
GL- That’s a land trident. He has one of those. (Points to London)
GL- We felt pretty at home with the pitchfork rollin through Amish country today. It was a great drive. We took the back roads.
LL- They were real friendly to our bass player.
GL- Our bass player has a beard so they thought that he was one of them. They were like “high fivin” him and yellin at us. (Laughs) They totally identified with him. We were sorta jealous. We all went to the Halloween store and got beards but they saw right through that shit! They knew that we were fuckin posers! (Laughs)
LL- We were just joking around with Johnny right. We didn’t know that we were gonna come into country that people actually…you know what I mean? They probably thought that we were making fun of them…but we weren’t. We were just fuckin with Johnny.
GL- We just told them that we were rich rock stars and that we had an Amish driver. But anyway, we’re out on the road and for London and me, it feels like when we were in bands just starting out right outta high school and all of that ya know. Or even like when Dokken first started and before that…when you were just playin with your friends and doin whatever ya gotta do, I mean sleepin at peoples houses…rentin U-hauls…takin your own car out there…booking shows…playin for a hundred people and changin their minds.
LL- And, meeting girls that want to pay for your rent for the rest of your life…ya know?
GL- Girls that worked at Jack in the Box or McDonald’s so you get to eat for free. We just used girls for basically whenever we could to get free shit. Well he does, I don’t I’m married.
LL- No, I always pay girls back with a little like…somethin somethin.
GL- Yeah, a “James Brown Payback!” Have you ever heard that song “The Big Payback?”
LL- If the payback is not big enough; I buy them a “prosthetic piece payback.” (Laughs) Is it wrong to enjoy women enjoying themselves? It would be nice to be in the mix there somewhere though.
GL- He likes to stop at all of those places.
LL- I don’t understand the guy that takes a chick into one of the shops and gets pissed off because she buys something like bigger than a pinkie. I wanna see some toe curling! (Laughs)
TEN- With her eyes rolled back in her head.
LL- Oh yeah!
GL- I have to listen to the shit all day long dude. (Laughs) Porn on the fuckin computer. Porn on the fuckin cell phone. Now he’s got me doing it. (Laughs) It’s all frustration; ya stop at the Ferrari dealership and look at cars that you can’t have, and let’s go to the fuckin strip club and look at girls you can’t have, let’s go to the bank and look at money you can’t own. Here’s a giant house that you can’t live in. (Looks at London) what else do you want to do that is frustrating…pretend to be rock stars? We do a good job at pretending. We are actually getting paid to be out here, and that’s awesome. We have a plan for “world domination.” I can’t tell you about it, its “super secret.” We came up with it at our secret lair. This is inside of a volcano and has a secret entrance. Your mind would explode if I told you.
LL- We may be personalities but we can’t talk about it right now.
GL- Yeah, it’s super secret. We shouldn’t have even said anything. But anyway, were doing these 20 hour drives, were staying in these hostels, we’re onstage in these little mining towns and the fuckin miners are getting into fistfights in a dressing room and onstage. I ain’t lyin! They’re gay miners so they’re fighting over London. (Everybody laughs but George) They were serious coal miners dude!
LL- Why did you have to fuck it up?
GL- I might have embellished that story slightly.
LL- You’re just jealous because they weren’t hitting on you!
GL- How many shows have we played where I’ve had my toes on the edge of the stage playing my solo “Mr. Scary” and there’s a fat chick with hairy nipples finger banging herself…
LL- YES! NO! She was in front of you dude!
GL- She had a cesarean scar and her pimp was banging her. She had her leg up on the stage, no panties…
LL- She was your fan dude!
GL- So what else has happened? Oh yeah, we were on that other 20 hour drive, its 4 AM in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. We stop at a Come N’ Go gas station. All of the cops there are eating doughnuts and we’re sitting there talking to them telling them about our trip and what does London do? He walks into a cornfield and lights up a fuckin bowl and there’s an unmarked car watching him from across the street. So then we get pulled over and laid up against the U-Haul, they find the shit on him and our other guitar player has all these illegal knives and swords but they let us go.
LL- Like those guys don’t “blaze” with all these cornfields everywhere.
GL- The “Bill of Rights” and “The Constitution” are both written on hemp. I won’t get political on you.
TEN- Tell me about your latest CD.
GL- It took five years to make that record. Mike Wengren from Disturbed is on five of the songs. Morgan (Rose) from Sevendust is on a track. We got fuckin Jeff Pilson playing bass on nine songs. (Looking at London) Who’s that guy that looks like a girl besides you? Oh yeah, Sebastian Bach. It’s a compliment when you tell a guy he looks like a girl.
LL- Sebastian Bach. The first time that I saw him I thought; “Does this guy have a sister?” (Everyone laughs) Some of the new album, no one’s gonna believe this shit. I stayed awake for 250 hours on Meth one time and some of the shit that’s on there are stories and stuff that I experienced.
GL- “Freaks in the Windows”… “Holes in the Floor”… “Under a Dead Tree” all that crazy shit. You’re a street poet dude.
LL- You could look at it like a kind of Pink Floyd without us getting too pompous.
GL- Aw, no…
LL- No, they’re up here (raises hand) ya know what I’m sayin…
GL- I like Pink…I don’t know about you. Remember when Pink was in Pink Floyd? It was “Pink N Floyd” and then they just dropped the “N.”
LL- Whenever I’m in Hollywood people say all of the time: “You like hanging out at your mansion somewhere.”
GL- I have an Airstream and a teepee and I live in the fuckin hills.
TEN- I saw something on VH1 where you lived in the desert.
GL- That was when I lived in Arizona. I got a solar cabin out in the desert by The Joshua Tree. It’s all boulders and it’s all up in the rocks. You gotta drive three miles up a dirt road and nobody knows how to get there. You’d never find it. There’s “wild n’ wooly” mountain lions/deer/bobcat…it’s crazy. There are thousands of boulders that are bigger than this building and caves and shit. I’ve got a guest house and a bomb shelter that I converted into a solar studio. I have 18 solar panels all grid tied with a battery back up. There are three wells. I put all of my amps up on the boulders and I play all that I want because there’s nobody around. It just sounds like God. My nearest neighbor, his name is Garth. He’s a six foot four inch hippy with a beard that walks around in a muumuu. He lives in a concrete teepee. It’s all hippies up there that run around naked and have concerts powered by generators. He’s a Shepard. He has donkeys and sheep. He walks around with a great big gold medallion and a staff. Yeah…that’s my world.
LL- Tell him about the “Integratron.”
GL- We recorded this album at a place called; “The Integratron” which is this place out in the desert. There’s this place called: “Giant Rock” which is the world’s largest free standing boulder and nobody knows how it got there. This guy, George something or other in the fifties leased it and called it “Giant Rock Airport.” Nobody ever flew there, but he moved his family there and dug a little cave underneath the rock in a little 4 seat diner. They said that he was visited by aliens from Venus who over periods of time, through automatic writing, instructed him on how to make this giant geodesic structure. There’s no internal structure, no metal and it’s built on top of the “World’s Largest Aquifer” and is lined up with the “Harmonic Convergence” where all of these astral bodies align at a certain time of the year and all of these hippies just come out and play harmonicas and shit. Anyways, I know I sound crazy. This guy built this place and all of the writing is documented and there are pictures of them. This is all real. The purpose of all of this was to refuel the Venetian spaceships and in return…be a cellular rejuvenation machine for humans so that we could live forever.
LL- And, supposedly there was no way that anybody could have made this unless they were beyond virtuoso.
GL- We go there and I record there…right? It does this thing and I don’t know why but if you stand in the middle of this place-it’s two stories high-it’s massive and if you stand there and you sing, it will bifurcate the frequencies of your voice into like the Buddhist monks. It’s just creepy. That’s why London’s voice sounds like it does. There’s no effects on his voice in the studio. That happened because of the room. The guitars sound like that because of that room. We just took a mobile recording set in an old RV and recorded it and it’s awesome. It’s owned by these Birkenstock wearing, tofu eating, hairy arm pitted lesbians with guns who shot at us once when we tried to hop the fence after hours.
LL- Have you ever been shot at from a distance?
GL- By a lesbian with a 22 cal?
LL- You’re like; “Oh look dude…there are like crickets and shit jumpin in the dirt and then it’s like “Oh shit!”
GL- She didn’t shoot at me to hurt me…just to scare me and get me back over the fence real quick…I’ll tell ya that! That’s how it is out there man. My neighbor had “desert squatters” on his place. They’re all “Homestead properties” out there. Anyway, this guy moved his family in on my neighbor’s property about a mile away from my place. There wasn’t any electricity there. No windows…nothin, they just lived in there. Finally my neighbor got fed up with them and he waited until the family went to Wal-Mart and then he went over there with his friend’s front end loader and backhoe and dug a hole and then pushed the building into it and buried it so when they came back…it was gone! That’s how it goes out there. It’s “Desert Justice.” Ya carry a gun; ya play poker and if ya do somebody wrong…ya just end it. It’s hippies and desert rats and fuckin red necks all livin together. It’s pretty awesome. Anyways, I’m just gonna get all misty eyed here talkin about it. I miss my house dude!
LL- BURRRP! That made it a little more tasteful there.
GL- That was a good ending to a class act.
TEN- How has the music industry changed since back in your “Dokken Days?”
GL- We used to be rich and now we’re not. Somethin changed. It’s very complicated. It’s all about these labels having a monopoly and laws over the decades that just favored the labels and not the people creating everything and playing everything and making sacrifices out on the road for years and years. You know, the ones actually taking something out of vapor…out of nothing and creating something tangible- like a commodity that they could sell and reap 95 percent of the profit using every trick in the book to keep all of it or at least most of it. It was a really bad system and I’m glad it’s crashed and burned to a certain extent. Change is always uncomfortable especially when you’re an old guy like me. I’ve welcomed it personally because when things are changing…your alive. When things reach the point of status or entropy where there’s no movement, well that’s basically death. I’m glad things are always moving and evolving…hopefully for the better. I’m cautiously optimistic about that. What do you think about that London?
LL- I think that’s awesome!
GL- No…no. What do you think about the state of the music business and what’s been happening to it?
LL- I think what he said was an amazing response.
TEN- London, you’ve done other projects besides this one.
GL- Ya think!? Brides of Destruction…
LL- Yeah I did some stuff. Nikki Sixx was in the band, Tracii Guns who is the founder of Guns N Roses and L.A. Guns from what I hear. Nikki’s the founder of Motley Crue. Somehow I fronted them and I’ll be sitting there every once in awhile and I’m like; “Wow!”
GL- Looks good on your résumé.
I want to thank George and London for taking the time to talk and for being so cool. Please visit the “Showin Some Love For TEN” section for exclusive pictures.
For more information on George please visit www.georgelynch.ning.com/ and www.myspace.com/georgelynch
For more information on London please visit www.myspace.com/thereallondonlegrand
For information on Souls Of We please visit www.myspace.com/soulsofwe