George Lynch is sorry not sorry for the fake-out. The Final Ride, Lynch Mob’s one last tour before disappearing across the horizon, the band to be scuttled, was not quite to be. He’s back. Lynch Mob have returned, and they’ve got an all-new studio album, Dancing With the Devil.
The question is why? Why call it quits, announce the end, celebrate 35 years of his post-Dokken career, then come back, hit the studio, and go again?
“The whole thing was to get free publicity,” he jokes, in a new interview with Guitar World. “I mean, we’re talking about it right now! It gets people talking about Lynch Mob, but I mean… nobody wants to talk about Lynch Mob.”
He’s not wrong. It does get people talking about Lynch Mob, and this he says has been the problem with the band since the beginning.
The name, Lynch Mob, is unfortunate. In 2020, he said he wouldn’t perform under the band’s name. If he had his time over again he might have been more aware and called it something else, something better – and he did try, performing under the Electric Freedom banner.
“It’s a touchy subject. The optics are terrible,” he admits. “I tried a couple of times to change the name, but it didn’t stick.”
And thus he was stuck with a project that he loved with a name he couldn’t get rid of. It’s a bind.
I love the band, the music, and playing with my friends. But the connotations of the name are just too dark and heavy
“I love the band, the music, and playing with my friends,” he insists. “But the connotations of the name are just too dark and heavy. I made a critical mistake 35 years ago, and I try to walk away from it, but I end up coming back. I don’t get it. I’m a really bad businessman, I’ll tell you that right now. [laughs]”
The same can’t be said for his guitar playing. Time has not diminished Lynch’s abilities with an electric guitar one iota. You think of Lynch’s career, the sliding doors moment when he might have been Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, and can’t help thinking there’s something yet to be fulfilled. Lynch feels the same.
What keeps him coming back for more – even if Dancing With the Devil is, again, Lynch Mob’s final studio album – is the search for the perfect track. He hasn’t found it yet.
“I don’t think of it as keeping it fresh as much as continuing to chase that ideal dragon. It’s that thing in your head that you’re trying to grab by the tail, you know, that perfect riff, song, groove, and solo that gives you goosebumps and that takes you over the top,” he says.
“That thing that’s in the back of my head is the soundtrack going through my brain since I was a kid. I’ve never captured it… I never put that Genie in a bottle. I think I get close, which makes me more frustrated because I’m like, ‘Man…’ I hear other bands do it, at least from my perspective. I’m like, ‘Holy crap, this is life changing.’”
Lynch says the closest he got was with Dokken, or with Lynch Mob’s 1990 debut studio album, Wicked Sensation.
“I think I’ve captured lightning in the bottle for a few moments, but not really consistently,” he says. “But that’s what drives me.”
Dancing With the Devil is out November 28 via Frontiers. Our full conversation with George Lynch is coming soon to Guitar World.
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