Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (17 page)

Above:
Mathematically speaking, as Whitesnake is
to Purple, Company Of Snakes is to Whitesnake. Three Purple to Whitesnake,
three Whitesnakers to Company Of Snakes. (
Martin Popoff Collection)

Previous page:
White suit, beard, hit songs running through his head,
it could only be John Kalodner, Geffen Records A&R genius who took
Whitesnake to another level. (
Jeff Kravitz/Contributor
)

Over the page:
Geffen pulled out all the promotional stops to make
Coverdale Page a success. John Kalodner wrote a letter of apology to Robert
Plant, who felt slighted at the pairing. (
Martin Popoff Collection)

Above and next page:
Whitesnake have traditionally had two guitarists. For
much of this century the honours went to Doug Aldrich (above) and Reb Beach
(next page), though Doug has now left. (
Bill Baran
)

Above:
You'd have to say that the Whitesnake stage
set is pretty impressive. (
Greg Olma
)

Above and
next page:
The rhythm
section for the middle years of the century: Chris Frazier (above) on skins and
Uriah Duffy (next page) on bass. (
Bill Baran
)

-9-

Slide It In
– “You’ve Got To Get Rid Of The Old Guys”

It gets tricky, but fear not.

At the end of this process, fans are left
with a fetching album called
Slide It In
... in fact, two of them,
two
Slide It In
s: one presented to the home team back in the
UK, and a newly polished and invigorated one to sate the appetite of American
audiences, throngs of a new sort of metalhead drawn to a West Coast music soon
to be known as hair metal, but for now, consisting of the likes of yer Ratts,
Dokkens, Mötley Crües and Quiet Riots.

First it would take a new record deal,
with rising US label Geffen, named after its mercurial leader David Geffen.
David had heard the other David was switching management and soon had A&R
maven John Kalodner flying to the UK, where he and Cozy Powell had taken
Coverdale out for dinner. Just in case things didn’t work out, Coverdale had a
telegram in hand from Ahmet Ertegun and Doug Morris, saying that he had a home
at Atlantic if he needed it.

“The story is very intricate and
complicated,” begins Kalodner, “and it involves the survival of Geffen Records,
and me being fired and going bankrupt, according to David Coverdale. So it’s
not exactly a lightweight story. It’s been sanitized quite a bit by him. I’d
always loved Whitesnake. It started with me following him for a long time in
Whitesnake; I always loved David Coverdale’s singing. I thought he was one of the
best singers in the world, and, when I was at Geffen, I did everything to try
to sign him. When his contract somehow lapsed with Jerry Greenberg [Mirage
Music] — I’m not sure why — but then he was available for United States, Canada
and Japan. So I signed them, in late ‘83, for the United States and Canada,
because Geffen didn’t want to pay, you know, for all of it, because he didn’t
really know about them. So
Jack
Matsamura at Sony Japan
signed them.”

“I thought they were a great commercial
rock band,” continues Kalodner. “The problem is, that I told Coverdale, even
though I really loved the other guys in the band, they weren’t as good as him.
He was a superstar, and we were entering the age of Bon Jovi, you know, all of the
big superstars, and I thought Coverdale’s voice and songs were better than
anything.”

The band that would begin the
long, circuitous process of swinging its way through the making of two
Slide
It In
s – plus the subsequent landmark tour cycle –consisted, first of
all, of three guys featured on the last record,
Saints & Sinners
:
namely Jon Lord, Micky Moody and David Coverdale. Next on the
grey scale was guitarist Mel Galley, credited with backing vocals on the last
record, but to all intents and purposes new to the band. Well, not all that
new, for Mel, bassist Colin Hodgkinson and drummer Cozy Powell had been added
as part of the new Whitesnake as
Saints & Sinners
was virtually
hitting the shelves (with a thud and not a bounce), participating in the
touring.

Explains Micky Moody, soon to be an
ex-‘snake, “We recorded
Slide It In
in Munich and it was kind of
clinical to me and it was not the same sort of band that Whitesnake had been. At
the end of the year, I left the band, after the end of a European tour in the
fall of ‘83. I really didn’t have a particularly good time. You would have to
ask David the rest of it. Geffen was interested in bringing him to the States
and creating a new Whitesnake. They ended up taking a lot of Mel Galley and me
off it and putting on John Sykes. I was gone by then, so I really can’t tell
you anything further. You’d have to ask David on that point. It wasn’t the
same, let’s put it that way. That band in 1983 was not the Whitesnake that I
knew and loved.”

Stylistically, given the
shift to American-influenced music, had there been a parallel shift in
absorbing influences from commercial, melodic American hard rock bands?

“Not really,” says Moody. “You know, we
talked about other bands, but I don’t think we ever sat down and said we should
go in this direction, or that. But I could just see what was happening, the
kind of people who were coming over from the States and listening to the
band, looking at the band, and talking business with David. And I thought, ‘I’m
not part of this anymore. I’m in the wrong band here.’ So you know, musically,
it was more what David was writing with Mel Galley, really; I wasn’t involved
with any songs apart from ‘Slow An’ Easy,’ which was a slide guitar epic. So to
be quite honest, I could see that I was really there as a session man, at that
particular time, and it wasn’t a happy period for me, to be perfectly honest.”

The band’s other guitarist, Mel Galley
(who isn’t with us anymore, having died – gracefully and with good humour —
from oesophagus cancer on February 7, 2008) soon wouldn’t be part of the
equation either, although not through any sort of firing. But Mel’s
lyricist/producer brother Tom has a wrinkle to add to the tale. It seems the
two had worked up a new Trapeze album, and, “Basically, when Mel went to
Whitesnake, we had just done six demo tracks that were presented to Warner
Bros. Then David Coverdale heard it, he offered Mel the job, replacing Bernie.
He then wanted two of the tracks off the demo, which ended up on
Slide It In
,
one which he re-titled ‘Gambler,’ and the other one was ‘Give Me Just A Little
More Time,’ and those showed up on
Slide It In
. But we had the
option to go with Trapeze with Warner Bros., and Mel chose to join Whitesnake.”

Mel would badly injure his arm in a
fairground accident, the attendant nerve damage causing him to lose the
ability to play guitar. He later regained some of his abilities through the
use of a mechanical aid called “The Claw.”

Still part of the US version of the
record, Mel would be accompanied on that version (but not the
UK version) by a brash new guitarist by the name of John Sykes. Flashy,
good-looking, heavy metal all the way, but a somewhat American sensibility too,
John was actually British, having first cut his teeth with Tygers Of Pan Tang and
then Thin Lizzy. Sykes was one choice, but not necessarily the
first. Coverdale had thought about Michael Schenker and more seriously Adrian
Vandenberg, who had turned David down, given the success he had been having
with his own band Vandenberg, most notably through the self-titled debut and
its minor hit “Burning Heart,” which David found to be a fine song.

“I knew David Coverdale could sing a
hit,” muses Kalodner. “So it was a very hard decision, because the
only way it was going to happen is that I was going to have to replace the
guitar player with, you know, a guitar player who is young, vibrant and a great
writer, and that was John Sykes. I had followed Thin Lizzy, I had followed his
career. He was pretty young. He was pretty arrogant, but I had a meeting with
him and I had heard some of the stuff he’d written himself, and I just decided
this was the guy to try.”

Kalodner’s vague about Mel Galley’s
future, but figured that the guitarist was going to be on the
chopping block, hand injury or not. When asked whether Galley would have stayed
with the band had he not injured his hand, Kalodner says: “Not to my knowledge,
I mean, he was going, yes. Maybe to Coverdale he wasn’t, but to me he was. John
Sykes was a guitar player in the league with Jeff Beck, Clapton; he was in the
league of the greats. And he was a really great writer and a great singer,
which most people don’t know. He obviously isn’t David Coverdale, but he was
just an okay lead singer as a guitar player. He definitely could sing. But I
saw Thin Lizzy once, and he just stood out so much to me. You have to
understand; remember it’s the ‘80s. This guy was, you know, in the
top ten best-looking rock musicians. He looks like Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, the
guy was big, he was tall, blonde, perfect face, great body, and the
guy was a great musician.”

And, it appeared to Kalodner, no drug
problems, despite Sykes having dabbled with heroin back in the
waning days of Lizzy. “No, not then. He had plenty of personal problems. I
mean, there are so many funny stories of like, his wife and wives, I don’t even
know, his girlfriends or whatever. Anyway, they would always come to Geffen and
dump his clothes in the lobby. That happened like two or three times over the
years.”

“
Slide It In
was the
first album I did under my own steam, the first one after getting rid of the
ex-manager and revamping the band,” explains Coverdale, taking us through the
paces. “There are actually two albums: one the US copy, one the
European copy. John Sykes came in to audition after we recorded the
album. He actually came in to audition while we were recording it and Cozy
Powell didn’t like him at all [
laughs
] and it didn’t work out very well.
But I kept the flame going for him and ultimately, obviously I call the
shots because it’s my band and I said ‘I have to override you. I feel very
strongly that he can take us to another level. He’s a very powerful guitarist,
a very talented young man, no question at all.’”

As for the shift in the
band’s musical direction, Coverdale says, “At that time I still wasn’t
embracing the idea of a guitar hero. I’ve worked with very competent,
proficient musicians, but they weren’t real rock... what one would determine to
be rock guitar people. Kalodner sat down with me one night and said, ‘David, there’s
nobody who comes near to what you do. But you will never reach, your full
potential unless you have a guitarist that complements your power,’ and he
quoted Jagger/Richards, Page/Plant, Daltrey/Townshend, and it resonated very
well. And what it was, subconsciously, was the backlash of seeing the
abuse of power that Ritchie manifested. So, without even being consciously
aware of it I was nervous to go that route, even though that was the
style of guitarist that was really inspiring to me. So, eternal gratitude to
John Kalodner for bringing Sykes in, because there was definitely an
electricity between us. And it could have been an unbeatable scenario.”

Speaking with
Hit Parader
’s
Winston Cummings back in the day, Coverdale pretty much framed his new reality
alongside John Sykes the same way. Responding to the loss of Mel Galley,
Coverdale figured, “John proved he could handle everything all by himself. In
fact, he even gave the older material an urgency that made it more exciting
than ever. His background is heavy metal, not blues, and that gives our songs a
stronger focus. When my mother first saw pictures of John, she said to me,
‘David, are you crazy? Now you’ll never get any of the girls.’ Up until then,
I really hadn’t thought about that, but he convinced me to get in the
best shape of my life. Getting John in the band not only revitalized us
musically — he is an absolutely brilliant guitarist — but it gave us more
motivation to make our stage show hot. Together, those elements have made us a
top band to tangle with in any situation.”

“I never felt particularly enamoured with
keyboards,” continued Coverdale, addressing another end of the
personnel spectrum. “Jon Lord’s role in the band was minimal over the
last few years. I love Jon like a brother — after all we go back to the
Purple days — so when the call came that he was going to rejoin Purple, I
understood completely. I just decided that any keyboards we kept from now on
would only be to round out our sound.”

Referring to
Slide It In
Coverdale
recalls: “This was my first Geffen record, so John Kalodner recommended Eddie
Kramer as producer, whose name I was totally familiar with through Jimi
Hendrix. And I was very, very excited on that premise, and, in my modest
opinion, I felt he was an imposter. I didn’t feel there was any producer
overview. The other musicians didn’t like him at all. It was very
disappointing. It was running very, very late and I was headlining a huge
festival, Donington, Monsters Of Rock, and the album wasn’t ready for it. So I
was like, well, let’s put an EP out in England, like three or four songs. At
least there was enough material for that. And while we were mixing this, he had
to fly back to New York, and I was going, this is just ridiculous.”

Remarked Sykes to writer Paul Hunter,
when asked about Whitesnake versus Lizzy and Tygers, “I try not to compare
bands. I love this group, so there’s no point in making comparisons. The one
thing I will say, is that I enjoy being given the freedom that Snake allows me
on stage. I don’t have to worry about getting in another guitarist’s way, and
that’s a nice feeling. David pushes everyone hard, but no harder than he pushes
himself. We know we have a good opportunity to become a major band in America,
and we want to take advantage of that. David’s not domineering. This is very
much a band. No one has to take a backseat to anyone else.”

“John’s [Kalodner] skill was basically
taking existing bands and reconfiguring them,” explains Geffen A&R Tom
Zutaut, who is no slouch himself. “So he would get this guy from this band and
put him in this band and it would be like a supergroup, like Asia. Aerosmith
was a mess because Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hated each other,
and John was involved in getting those guys back together and getting them re-energized and re-inventing Aerosmith. And ultimately, he turned them into a pop band.

“John had a great ear for rock music that
could cross over into pop formats and sell millions of records. And he would
introduce Diane Warren to Aerosmith and they would have a huge song that was in
a movie [‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.’] And he resurrected Cher’s career,
even though she’s not metal. He had this real knack for taking people who are
washed-up and over with and reinventing them. Whitesnake, for instance, was a
band who had a couple of obscure records in England and nothing was happening.
John was able to make them one of the biggest bands in the ‘80s by re-inventing
them and working with them to find better songs and co-writers; make better
records with better producers; not letting them record until they
had enough good songs, and basically helping mold them into a more commercial
sound from their more rootsy blues sound.”