Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (18 page)

“I’ve always been proud of my voice. And
I think it’s been given a good forum in Whitesnake,” says Coverdale.
“Unfortunately, the type of music we were playing was very bluesy, and a lot of
Americans thought it was outdated. They saw blues rock as something from the
early ‘70s, not the 1980s. Well, the music we’re making now is still bluesy,
but it’s been updated.”

And so it was engineered that David would
need a new band. Of Bernie and Micky, Kalodner reiterates, “Those people are so
great; it’s just they were never good enough for Coverdale. They were such great
guys. It was one of the hardest things for me to do, and even Jon Lord, another
amazing person. He went of his own will, but the other two guys, they
wanted to be in Whitesnake. I mean, they had always been in Whitesnake with
Coverdale.”

The UK version of the
Slide It In
album would meet with mixed reviews, and it was never going to pass muster as
Kalodner’s first US “product” with the band. Martin Birch’s version —
production, mix, arrangement, whatever you want to call it — was said to
feature too many keyboards and too much articulated bass. Debatable all round,
nor is it easy to assert that it’s less “punchy” than the US version — it’s the
songs that were punchy, literally riddled with punctuation, and nothing short
of rewriting could take that away from them.

Perhaps, if anything, the
guitar solos are more melodic and Lizzy-esque on the UK version. Odd, given
that the ex-Thin Lizzy member is on the US version exclusively. But let’s grant
that they are different, in many details, along the way. It’s just that those
details don’t add up to any specific philosophical thrust, so to speak. And if the
party line is that the Martin Birch record is somehow more “old school,” that
doesn’t ring true either. Very much so, even his version of
Slide It In
is worlds ahead in detailing and fidelity and punchiness over his five records
with the band so far, all of which indeed were old school in various ways,
save, perhaps for
Come An’ Get It
, which was no school.

If that sounds like a big mess of opinion,
including even a few contradictory ones, such is the abstract nature of art.
Let’s just say that the versions sound different from each other.
But let’s also venture to say that one didn’t sound any more or less British
than the other. I mean, of something like 25 significant deliberate changes
made for the US edition, an astute listener would likely call a mere third of them particularly appealing to Americans, maybe another third actually more British, and another
third of them worthy of debate long into the night.

Says Kalodner in summary, “There was a
big fight between me and David because I demanded... you know, he finally
started to trust me that Martin Birch was not the appropriate person to mix the
record. So you know, the
Slide It In
that was released in Europe was
mixed by Martin Birch, but the one that was released in Canada, US and Japan
was mixed by Keith Olsen.”

“Basically, if he was going to stay with
me and succeed,” continues Kalodner, “past the first record in ‘84, he was
going to have to remix it — the only thing I had to do with it is the
remix. So I took that record and had it remixed by Keith Olsen. And it’s funny,
because I did it for the United States, Canada and Japan, but eventually Rupert
Perry, who was head of EMI International, eventually went to use that mix in
pressings of the ‘84 record. But it was mixed terribly; it just sounded
terrible. Martin Birch’s mixes always had a lot of high end, a lot of mid
frequency and not much bass. They were imbalanced. His style was just to mix it
very un-American; you know, it was very narrow spectrum-sounding. It sounded
little and thin. Overall though, I thought it was a really fine record, a
really good American AOR rock record. I just felt that it didn’t have any hits,
for American rock radio and pop rock radio at the time.”

“Gee, impressions of John Kalodner,”
laughs the perpetually amused Mr. Olsen. “He had a firm grasp on how he wanted
this presented. He spent a lot of time with us until it came time for his
annual Kalodner trip to… Asia someplace. He says they treat him like a God,
because he walks around in that white suit and has that long beard. Someplace
in the archives I have a drawing that David did, and I copied it. He did a
drawing as a
bon voyage
card, and it was his annual trip to Asia or some
place. And as John Kalodner would say [nasal voice], ‘It’s not what’s going on;
it’s the concept.’ I really can’t do him anymore. I used to be really good. I
could mimic him perfectly. But I haven’t talked to John since I ran into him at
an airport when he was with Sanctuary.”

Asked what Kalodner’s “function” was,
Olsen goes with, “A&R guy. A&R
guy
! But he was also one of the
best A&R guys in the business. When people were on other labels, that
weren’t even on Geffen, or Atlantic, they would call him and say, ‘Please,
listen to all our songs and tell us which ones to do on our album. Please,
John, listen to this, and tell us which song to lead with,’ and he would do
this. So he became friends to every major rock artist. I mean,
every
major rock artist! There’s a ‘Thanks to John Kalodner’ on everything because
he’s the one who put it together. I’d first met John because he brought me in
to produce this band of his with Lou Gramm and Mick Jones called Foreigner. And
that’s when I first got to work with John.”

“There were some things that were done in
England, and then they wanted to change it,” says Olsen. “John Kalodner got
involved and signed me up, signed the artist, and then when he got involved he
said, ‘Keith, I’d like you to meet David Coverdale, and you guys should talk.’
So we started talking, and he brought in this new guitar player, John Sykes,
and we started talking and talking and working on that record, and finished
this record. And as far as
Slide It In
, as far as I knew, I thought that
was the definitive version that was released around the world by Geffen.
Kalodner wanted it to be a lot more intense, with the new guitar player, who
was a much more intense guy. He brought him in, and we also did a whole bunch
of new guitar parts, a couple of keyboard parts. I think Bill Cuomo came in to
do some of it, and then I mixed it. And you know, it was one of those things
where I worked on it for maybe three weeks? So it wasn’t a long time. But that
led to the next Whitesnake record.”

So, John Sykes was a big part of the
US version, as was a returning Neil Murray, who provided a welcome spot of
continuity to a crazy situation.

“I guess Geffen Records, with John
Kalodner, were after signing David,” begins Murray. “And I think he had to pay
a fair sized sum of money to John Coletta to get out of his deal, but then
once he was free he decided to change the line-up, and the next line-up was
sort of a bridge between the more blues era and the straight rock era. So, the
line-up was with Cozy and Mel and still Micky, though he left at the
beginning of ‘82 and returned about six or eight months later. So, Jon and
Micky were still in the band, but myself and Ian were kind of dropped.
Particularly because David wanted to work with Cozy and Mel, and for some
reason didn’t think that I was necessarily quite right to work with Cozy. But
also he wanted a different sound from the bass, a much more twangy aggressive
sound like Glenn Hughes had in Purple.

“My feeling was David did want to change,
but he didn’t like to be told. In many cases my impression is that he digs his
heels in and is kind of holding onto what he knows, but then once he makes the
change he sort of very quickly leaves that behind. It’s quite hard to get him
to change, but once he has, it’s almost like the past doesn’t exist and what
he’s doing now is the thing. So it took him from let’s say from ‘82 to I guess
‘84 to really make quite a massive change in the band. That sort of interim
line-up was getting there. People like John Kalodner were saying ‘Look, you’ve
got to get rid of the old guys, image-wise and musically. It’s not what’s
happening in America.’ If you hang on to Micky and Jon, that’s not really
right, and my replacement, Colin, didn’t really fit in, it turned out. Though
he’d been one of David’s favourite bass players from the jazz fusion band Back
Door, and he did have that kind of twangy pick-type playing, which I don’t have
at all.”

“So they’d made the album
Slide It In
,
which was much more melodic rock rather than blues rock, because of Mel’s
songwriting style,” remembers Murray. “Then Micky left and I guess they
fired Colin, and so Mel pressed for me to be brought back into the
band, which was very nice of him, and John Sykes had been recruited after Thin
Lizzy split up. They took him on. And his look and attitude and style of guitar
playing, that was in a way as much a catalyst as anything else because he
wanted the band to be more American style and didn’t have any reverence for the
old Whitesnake songs or the way we used to be. He was totally into the
Ozzy Osbourne line-up, Randy Rhoads, etc.; that was his kind of direction that
he wanted the band to go in. And then Cozy was much more of a power, straight,
heavy rock drummer than Ian Paice. He didn’t have Ian’s jazz and funky influences.
So there were various little things, plus a fair amount of pressure from
Geffen, I would imagine.

“I wasn’t around, because what had
happened also when David left John Coletta, David really became his own manager
for a couple years until they signed with Howard Kaufman/Frontline Management
who were quite big. They had Heart and various other big bands in LA. So he
would be dealing as almost the sole major person with Whitesnake. He was the
person that Geffen would deal with and the members of the band would not really
be consulted very much. That’s the way it seemed to me, but certainly Kalodner
would think that John Sykes was a very good addition and Micky leaving was also
something that was good.”

“At every point, David would be really
proud of what he was doing in that particular moment,” says Murray, when asked
if he and David ever discussed the new direction, “Americanized,” for wont of a
better term. “The guys who are in the band at this point — let’s say in late
’82 — that band with Cozy and Colin is much better than the previous band, and then
when that line-up changed, ‘Oh no, this line-up is much better than the
previous band.’ That kind of thing. Great in terms of PR and being interviewed
because he had massive confidence, and knew what journalists wanted to hear.
But you had a situation where various things happened in sort of early to mid
‘84. So I’d come into the band late ‘83 after John Sykes had joined. Geffen
wanted to remix the
Slide It In
album and so because of that we — myself
and John — got the chance to overdub and replace the bass and some of the
guitars. More of the guitars should have been done — it was only one or two
solos that John did — but mostly just rhythm guitar stuff.”

As for what the philosophy was behind the
concept of a “remix,” Murray figures, “They thought the sound wasn’t suitable
for radio. Martin Birch had come in after Eddie Kramer and produced the European/Japanese version of
Slide It In
, and it’s big… big drum sound but not very
in-your-face. In a sense, not quite punchy enough, so Keith Olsen remixed the
album. Mostly, there’s not a huge difference between the sounds of the
instruments. I mean, I don’t play anything particularly different from what
Colin had played on the record; not vastly different at all. The guitar sounds
are a little bit more American metal than they had been before, but you’re
still talking about the basic songs being the same. It’s just the
overall… I don’t know what you would call it, really. There was a more
radio-friendly mix, and Cozy and David hated it when they first heard it, but
came around to liking it later, particularly as it started getting promoted and
played in the States.”

It’s interesting that on the
eve of Donington, Jon Lord had been under the impression that the
record was impending and that Eddie Kramer had in fact produced in totality
what was going to be issued, as Lord related at the time: “We’ve just come back
from Munich where we did the album, which took about seven weeks, I think — I
think the longest we’ve ever spent on a Whitesnake album. And the
backing tracks are produced by a guy called Eddie Kramer. He goes right back to
Hendrix, did all the Hendrix albums since the first one, I think. And it’s good
to work with someone [new]... like we’ve always worked with Martin Birch
before. He’s having great success with Iron Maiden. And it was quite a change
to work with someone who we didn’t really know. And I’m really chuffed with the
album. Very, very chuffed indeed. David’s got two or three more vocals to put
on it, and then there’s the mixing. But I think it’s out in about the
beginning of October. The songs, I think, are the best that David’s written for
some time.