Dead Daisies Guitarist Doug Aldrich Talks New Music, Auditioning For KISS And More

The new Dead Daisies album is due out in September, so it’s good to have Doug Aldrich from the Talkin’ Rock with Meltdown band tell us about it. Plus, they’ll be playing the Machine Shop on June 11th in Flint, Michigan.
As far as song ideas for the new album, he said everyone chipped in. “We all, all we all were, brought different parts in different song ideas. And that’s generally what we do with The Dead Daisies is we’ll bring in ideas, and then, you know, in this situation, Marty Fredrickson was producing, and he’s like an amazing songwriter in his own. So he had a couple of ideas already. He and John (singer Corabi) had a couple of ideas. I had a few. Michael Devin had a few. David (Lowy) had a few. I kind of helped David, finish off a couple of his ideas, and then we, we played them off for Marty.”
He told me that the first single’s main riff for “Light Em Up” was written by Stevie D. from Buckcherry. “Yep. And Stevie had he had a whole song, but we just basically pinched the riff, and Stevie gave his approval, and then we kind of wrote a little bit new around that riff and, and then we, you know, originally I don’t remember, I can’t remember his demo, how the riff was played. It might have been played down here, or I’m not sure it might have been played in this position, but this is how we ended up doing it. And it’s got kind of a classic Daisy’s. But yeah, it’s obviously derivative of kind of the way we played. It was derivative of kind of AC/ DC.” He told me the new album covers a wide range of rock and was recorded in some historic studios. “There’s there is a bunch of stuff that’s in the vein of what we just talked about that’s that fits together really well. But then we had a couple of songs that came in. We wrote one in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in Fame Studio. That is a crazy, important studio for, you know, early rock and R&B. Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin recorded their hits there. Duane Allman worked there with Wilson Pickett. And we were in the studio working on just playing through some blues stuff and kind of noodling around in a little bit for a week, and we wrote this tune that turned out to be way is really deep, it’s like an album cut, it’s not a single. It won’t be a single, but it’s probably one of the coolest songs on the record because it’s like a cornerstone track that makes the album so much better just because it’s on it.”
Doug told me about earlier stuff he’d done with other bands, including auditioning for KISS. “I got a call from Eric Carr, who came and saw me play, and I met him, and he invited me to come down to the studio and meet Paul and Gene and, and I played on a couple of tracks in the studio just to see. And then they had me come and play a couple times live with them. And it was it was, you know, I felt guilty because these guys, nobody had seen them without their makeup yet. So I really felt awkward about looking Gene Simmons in the eye and, and, and seeing his face, you know, it’s like shouldn’t, shouldn’t be doing this. But the bottom line is, is that they wanted a little bit more of a technical guitar player.”
That’s just for starters on this wide-ranging conversation with Doug.