Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (19 page)

“I’ve helped insofar as I’ve always
helped him, to try and realize the sound he wants to hear. I always find it
difficult to write things for Whitesnake. I find that my role seems to be much
more as, well, the best keyboard support he’s going to get, if I can blow my
own trumpet. Or blow my own organ or whatever, I don’t know. But Mel has turned
out to be a very useful songwriter as well, and he and David have come up with
some stunners. I think you’ll be very chuffed. To me, this is what Whitesnake
has always been aiming at. It’s not so much your bog standard rock ‘n’ roll
band, or a hard rock band, but a modern R&B band, which I’m glad to see is
happening. But the songs on the new album, I think will set the
style for Whitesnake for the next couple of years. It’s not that we’ve moved
away from what we’ve been, it’s just that we’ve added to it.”

Adding colour to the Eddie Kramer
dimension in conversation with
Kerrang!
’s Neil Jeffries, Lord said that,
“Martin Birch has always done the job in the past and I’ve known him from the
third Deep Purple album, way back when! He’d virtually become a seventh member
of the band. I suppose there might have been a lack of discipline in a few
areas as a result of that. But with Eddie, it was a different kettle of fish,
because he didn’t know us too well and we didn’t know him too well either.
So he was able to say things that Martin perhaps wouldn’t have said, like, ‘For
fuck’s sake, let’s work!’ Or his favourite, ‘What is in that drink?
Is
it just mineral water and orange juice?!’ He was right in the
end though, when he said that if we were going to produce something that’s
going to be important to the band and important to the people that are going to
buy it, then we should at least be together!”

“The band sounds much
bigger
now,”
continued Lord. “People always used to say we had a huge sound on stage, but,
even with a six-piece band, on albums, it tended to sound a little constricted.
The new sound Eddie’s got for us, although not
violently
different, is
that old sound ‘blown up’ a bit. We used to have, with Bernie and Micky, two
guitarists playing the same part at the same time, and then I had to get in
somewhere! So we were getting this enormous amount of sound squashed into a
small space. With Eddie, we went for the one guitarist, the bass player and the
drummer. And with Cozy’s sound, which is huge anyway, it tended to make the
backing tracks much more live. He plays so hard that he can only do three or
four tracks before he’s had it for a few hours! He wants the commitment to be
on the tape rather than just the sound. So if we didn’t get it in three or four
takes, we had to stop for a while. The chances of getting it with six people
initially would be far less, of course. With just three, there were less
distractions for him.”

As for Mel Galley’s role... “Mel did most
of the initial recording because he was involved in writing most of the
songs,” said Micky Moody. “So therefore he knew them quite a lot better than
me. He went in with Colin and Cozy. This way is more natural. Mel’s rhythm
parts are very big chord things, which he’s incredibly good at doing. My role
now — and I’m very pleased with it — is similar to what Jon is doing: putting
colours on top. Whereas before with Bernie, there was a little bit of a battle
going on!”

Added Lord: “The way it seemed to work
out to me, was that Mel took over more the traditional role of the
rhythm guitarist with Micky putting the sparkle on the edge of it all. Even
though that sparkle might be another rhythm pattern against Mel. Rather
than as before, which was often a case of, ‘Let’s overdub some more guitars!’”

“Yeah, definitely,” answers Murray,  when
asked if the guys had been cognizant of the metal revolution taking place in
LA, thanks very much to people like Brian Slagel [founder of Metal Blade
Records] putting out independent metal compilations. Personally, I had wanted the
band to change and certainly I guess LA was where things seemed to be happening
with Van Halen and all those bands coming out at that time. It just seemed to
be more current, really, image-wise and musically. And so I was perfectly happy
for the band to change.

“We’d kind of done the previous style as
much as we could, I think. And to me, it was getting repetitive. Great stuff
that we did and I still play it now. I still have a band with Micky and we’re
going out fairly soon. And also the songs and the style of the
earlier Whitesnake are more suitable to my style of playing. But I could
certainly see the band needed to move with the times a bit. And so, by chance,
Mel had a bad accident where he couldn’t play, basically, and therefore
he was out of the band. So just for a short time it was kind of a five-piece
band. Then Deep Purple reformed and we became a four-piece band. We did a video
for the track ‘Slow An’ Easy,’ even though it’s really Micky’s song and he
plays on the recording. But the video features me, John Sykes, Cozy and David.
And suddenly it’s like, oh, look at this! It looks more like a kind of…
up-to-date look.”

So, summarizing and sprinkling in a few
more specifics, Murray explains that, “Martin Birch mixed the
album for Britain in Europe, and Kalodner didn’t like it, so it coincided with
me and John Sykes coming into the band. So it happened that we were able to go
to Keith Olsen’s studio, in the beginning of ‘84, and I overdubbed all the
bass. John did some of the guitars, and so there’s still some of Micky on there.
There’s also a ton of Mel Galley on there, but the remix is much more to
Geffen’s taste, and it took quite a long time for some of the
other guys to come around to it. So yeah, it kind of slowly changed, ‘82, ‘83,
‘84, etc., and, you know, the band became much more David’s band, and David and
John Kalodner’s band, in a sense.”

Offering more on the specific changes
done to come up with the US version, Neil adds, “I can point to different
tracks and say, well, this is Micky’s slide guitar playing, this is Micky’s
solo, and so even if it’s not mentioned on the credits, he’s still on some of the
American remix tracks. I mean, John was going to probably record as many solos
as he could, but in fact, Keith Olsen got ill, so we had to finish. By which
time, I had re-done all the bass parts, but they’re pretty much following what
Colin Hodgkinson did anyway. The songs kind of dictated that in most cases. But
John mostly did rhythm guitars, and only a couple of solos.”

As for the original version, the
UK version? “It’s a much bigger, much more reverb-y drum sound, and that makes
it kind of... whenever Cozy comes into a band, he puts his stamp on it
sound-wise. He wants it to be that kind of sound, and Geffen didn’t want that
kind of sound. So, when Keith Olsen stripped that back and made it much less
reverberant and punchier, in a way, Cozy really hated that. David wasn’t happy
with it either. But like I say, they got used to it [
laughs
].”

Was there anything else about Martin
Birch and his production characteristics that made his sound not suitable for the
American market?

“It’s tricky, because for me, I
benefitted greatly from Martin’s style of sound or mixing,” admits Murray. “The
bass is very prominent on the earlier Whitesnake records, and it’s sometimes
virtually inaudible on the
1987
album, for example. The whole fashion
changed during the ‘80s where you started to get a huge great kick drum sound —
the drums became all-important, and forget about the bass. But even though it
was benefitting me on records such as
Ready An’ Willing
and
Come An’
Get It
, I always thought the guitars should be louder and I thought it
lacked power because of that. They’re good records, but I could see that maybe they
weren’t aggressive enough for what kids wanted. When Martin started working
with Iron Maiden, the bass is still loud but the guitar is more in-your-face,
whereas Bernie and Micky are not as aggressive and not as harsh or metal sounding.
So it’s just a combination of things.”

I wondered if the gesture of having Neil
change the bass parts... did the new treatment to Cozy’s drum tracks
necessitate that? “No, not really. It was more just, I was back in the
band, and you know, I was probably sent over there to look after John Sykes in
order to keep him out of trouble as much as anything [
laughs
]. I don’t
think the expectation was for me to do anything particularly different. It was
more that they would rather it featured the people who were going to be in the
band from then on. Of course, in a few months’ time, Mel Galley is out, because
he’d had this bad accident and couldn’t play anymore. Jon Lord is out because
he’s rejoined Deep Purple, and so it becomes yet again, different than what’s
on the album. And then the same thing happened again in ‘87.”

As for the songs on
Slide It In
,
great stuff all ‘round. American sounding? Maybe subtly so. For when one makes
an utterance like that, it’s usually in the presence of something more poppy,
melodic, AOR.
Slide It In
isn’t exactly that. If anything, the
main difference is that it’s more metal and hard rock, mostly more hard rock,
and a lot less blues. And a lot less variety stylistically. Of note, one other
difference between the UK and US versions of
Slide It In
is track
sequence, so, having to pick, we’re going to run through this crunchy, solid,
happening record using the US version, given its wider distribution and impact.

The album opens with the
joyous yet squarely hard rocking title track. A sullen acceptance seemed to
have set in that David’s sexual
double entendres
knew no bounds, and
resigned to that fact, folks just snickered along with Dave and his dic...
tionary. Whatever he’s talking about here, the musical backtrack was a canny
mix of stacked US metal power chords with a slightly Stonesy twist. “‘Slide It
In’ literally was just a bit of tongue-in-cheek,” explains Coverdale. “One of the
things that I had developed with Whitesnake, Okay, long story short. I’d worked
with Deep Purple which were a deadly serious rock band, you know, and that’s
how they were perceived. And you know, I like a good laugh. And I would write
songs, once I got Whitesnake up and running, I would write songs like ‘Wine,
Women An’ Song,’ ‘Would I Lie To You’ (just to get in your pants), ‘Slide It In.’
These were all tongue firmly in cheek, end of Saturday night, knees-up,
sing-along songs. And it was only the narrow-minded female, militant female
feminists [
laughs
], who couldn’t see the joke. But you know, when I was
in concert, the loudest voices I would hear singing the
Slide It In
songs were women. It’s basically a bit of fun. I’ve got my deadly serious tunes
as you can testify, but a lot of them are just definite rock ‘n’ roll
a-wop-bop-a-lula Little Richard knees-up songs.”

Next up was “Slow An’ Easy,” precursor to
and blueprint for “Still Of The Night,” the band’s most overt stab at something
Zeppelin-esque in the catalogue. Again, what we have here is top notch radio
grade metal, with the added bonus of a history lesson concerning slide guitar,
nod of the hat to Micky Moody. Notes David, “‘Slow an’ Easy,’ I had written
basically to replace ‘Lovehunter’ because I was bored sick singing it. And it
was going to be a vehicle for my then slide player Micky Moody.” David has also
said that it was recorded virtually in drunken jam mode in the
middle of the night in Munich, with most of the lyrics being ad-libbed on the
spot, and then cleaned up later for the final version.

Strength to strength, “Love Ain’t No
Stranger” would offer a third variant of style and flair within the
album’s first three tracks. It starts as a serious power ballad (apparently the
signature keyboard parts were originally written for guitar) and then
rocks out, on the way to No. 44 in the UK chart and ten slots higher in the
US. In effect, the song is one of the more serious and heartfelt love songs
from David’s bag of mostly one trick ponies so far. “Love Ain’t No Stranger” is
arguably the song with which David succeeds in seducing America, and Cozy
Powell had said to David that it was the best track he’d ever played on. A
production video was cooked up for this spot of AOR genius, as was the
case with “Slow An’ Easy,” both doing much to ease the band into the
MTV era, a strategy that would pay off in spades come the next record.

Asked about this instant Whitesnake
classic of an adult nature, Coverdale opines, “It was very interesting when I
looked back on my earlier songs, they give me an indication of where I was
emotionally, like a kind of diary. And it’s interesting, with my first
marriage, it blessed us with a beautiful daughter. But my God, most of the
songs I had from that were blues songs! You know, don’t break my heart again
like you did before, otherwise I’m out of here. And, of course, it was
obviously destined to crumble. ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger’ was one of those kinds
of songs. And of course I had this awful aspect of me, where I was totally
committed to my partner and also totally committed to being a rogue on the
road. ‘I was alone, I needed love, so much I sacrificed all I was dreaming of.’
That’s just messing around on your relationship, and it’s a toughie. Not now,
but then it was. There are still temptations, although now I know that if I
lose what I have, it will be the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”