During the 1980s, Dokken became and remained one of the biggest metal bands worldwide. Don Dokken is a good singer but his real talent is his ability to make average material sound exciting. Still, most fans and critics concur that guitarist George Lynch was as much a part of the band's success as Don Dokken himself was.
Dokken, Lynch and Mick Brown had been working together for several years in a low-profile band called the Boyz. After Dokken spent time in the German music scene, they regrouped with Jeff Pilson as simply Dokken. But it would take the Scorpions' German producer to get the new band noticed and recorded professionally. Those demos, and a successful German tour, led to an American deal with Elektra in 1983.
They would go on to have a strong career in the metal scene, both here and abroad, before splintering into different projects in the late 1980s, when George Lynch decided to launch his own band, Lynch Mob. This original lineup did reunite again between 1992 and 1998 and made both studio and live albums, but by then the metal scene had changed dramatically, and they split again at the turn of the decade.