Jeff Pilson Interview - Page 4

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Page 4

Jun 18, 2003

With Aerosmith, they were just so cool to us. It was the peak of our success, and a period when we were drawing a lot. We would have a full crowd when we would go on at the beginning of the night. It almost felt like we were a co-headliner. Aerosmith was great to us. They were really supportive, the camaraderie with everybody was great. They were real pros and they are not uptight. So many bands tended to be really uptight. They would try to do things to your sound and not let you have lights. Aerosmith was the opposite. They said, "you guys do whatever you want. We want your show to be great." They weren't threatened by us. It was really a pleasant, eye-opening experience because their professionalism and positiveness was really powerful.

It was actually the peak for Dokken. It was also the period in which we were getting along the best. That was kind of ironic because Don announced he was leaving the band during that tour, which seemed so out of nowhere. I could not figure it out. It had me stumped.

Did you have fun on the Monsters of Rock tour? (It was the 1988 stadium tour with Kingdom Come, Metallica, Scorpions and Van Halen in addition to Dokken)

We had a little too much fun chemically. It was not a fun musical tour for us because the band had kind of fallen apart at that point. We knew we were breaking up, it was an awful, awful vibe within the band. It just felt really bad. We played poorly, we were very hung over. I've seen tapes from that tour that are pretty embarrassing, really. I remember being upset at the time, because I remember thinking this is what we wanted our whole lives, and here we are going out there with a half-assed attitude. I wanted it to be great. It wasn't.

We had a fabulous spot. The crowd was usually packed when we went on. Had we had our shit together we would have been great. We did follow Metallica, which wasn't easy, but the worst thing you can do is come apart when something like that happens. If we would have gotten tougher as a unit and gotten stronger, then we probably wouldn't have broken up. We knew it was over, so we made it kinda just go out in a fizzle.

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