Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (20 page)

Then with “All Or Nothing” it’s back to the
snarling metal, simple metal, but no simpler than the bluesy hard rock that was
the band’s trade from say
Ready An’ Willing
through
Saints &
Sinners
. Things lighten up for the chorus, but all told, this could fit on
a Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister album. And, come to think of it, the
raw quality of David’s voice... it’s not far off Kevin, Dee, or Dio, or even
Stephen Pearcy — these are all some metal men with roughness.

“Gambler” is another regal and thumping
hard rocker from the band, its moody and mystical melody lending it gravitas,
David’s lyrics and vocal delivery underscoring the dark clouds of this fine and
measured modern metal track. And its keyboard solo? That’s more Colin Towns,
crazy circus master from the Gillan band, than typical Jon Lord. As with nearly
everything on the record, the song’s relationship to the blues is in the
abstract only, and possibly in the way Coverdale phrases.

“
Slide It In
... a lot of those songs
I wrote in a place called St. Lucia in the Caribbean, and having a very good
time,” notes David. “Actually that was one of my least blues albums, least
blues in the ‘My missus has disappointed me and broken my heart yet again’
lyric. My wife and I at that time were getting on very, very well and we were
very physically active [
laughs
], which was certainly promoting a lot of
those tunes.”

“Guilty Of Love” offers high relief to the
balance of the record, its melodic twin leads and its
joie de vivre
in
general evoking memories of Thin Lizzy’s “Get Out Of Here” from the
Black Rose
album. “Guilty Of Love” was issued as a picture sleeve single
(backed with “Gambler”) in the UK back on August 13th of 1983, four months
prior to the release of the album, and was played at the high profile Monsters
Of Rock gig of 1983. Of note, the versions of these two tracks represent the
only released material from the very first of the
Slide It In
sessions,
namely the ill-fated work the band had done with Eddie Kramer, before scotching
the idea for a return to Martin Birch as producer. The track hit No. 31 on the
UK charts but was never one of the high profile songs stateside.

“Hungry For Love” takes us back to old
school Whitesnake, so old, in fact, it sounds like a Gene Simmons-penned Kiss
song, with its honky tonk premise, its funky post-blues boom bass line. “Give
Me More Time,” well, that one’s Kiss-happy as well, sort of a “Dr. Love” thing
although like “Hungry For Love”, John and David and the stakes involved make
sure there’s a “lift and separate” come chorus time, that the
song moves from ‘70s party rock into something at least modestly anthemic.
And as a bonus, there’s another Lizzy-esque guitar solo.

“Spit It Out”... more stacked chords dependably
delivered by the likes of Kiss and Twisted Sister, with David getting away with
another X-rated lyric. Again, there’s all manner of exclamation marking between
riff and Cozy, pregnant pauses, vampy breaks, and another party rock classic is
born, each time David taking the band brightly away from its more academic
past. It is the last of fully five music writing credits on the
album for Mel Galley, and one wonders what would have happened had he retained
his place in the band, although standing shoulder to shoulder next to the
mercurial Sykes, one doubts if it could have lasted.

“‘Standing In The Shadow’ was creeping
into my ‘Fool For Your Loving’” says David, on the thumping, dramatic, melodic
Slide
It In
closer, Coverdale growing convincingly into his role as spokesman for
those unlucky in love, the empathy in his voice winning over his charges and
providing comfort, letting them know that relationships are a perilous terrain
even for rock stars.

-10-

Whitesnake
– “There Were 30 Something Tracks Of Guitars”

“When I was no longer part of the
band with
Slide It In
, that’s when, for me, it started to become a heavy
rock outfit,” says Bernie Marsden, summarizing the scenario now from the
outside; a scenario that was soon to spiral out of control. “And that’s fine; there’s
nothing wrong with that. I think the
1987
album almost borders on a
metal album, a melodic metal album, whatever you want to call it. I think it’s
great. I can listen to that album like I would listen to Sabbath or to Journey
— it’s the band I was in, only by name. So I can kind of divorce that and
listen to it as an outsider, so to speak. And the biggest song on it is one of
my songs, so I suppose it’s easy to understand. But it’s nothing to do with me
really. I can just listen to it as a good album. And obviously it sold
millions. The band was just becoming more and more successful.”

Obviously, the drama that is Whitesnake
began to intensify fully two records ago, but even after the success of
Slide
It In
, David couldn’t hold a winning combination together. After the
inaugural Rock In Rio, held over ten days in January of 1985, the
metal-stamping machine at the back of the band, Cozy Powell, would leave, due
to ego clashes with Coverdale, both being men who know what they
want, but alas, one only the drummer and not exactly a writing one at that.
Cozy’s last show with the band would be on January 19, 1985, the
second of Whitesnake’s two slots after they had played with Queen and Iron
Maiden on opening night, back on January 11th.

And while all this was going on, always
in the background was this idea of an “image upgrade.” Says Murray: “There was
no pressure coming from anybody saying we’ve got to wear this or that, it was
just more the reaction from Geffen because of the video, ‘Oh, the
band looks much better like that. Without the keyboards, without guys with
moustaches.’ Fairly superficial but that was the era, early ‘84. So we’d gone
out with that line-up that summer in the States and Japan with extra keyboards
on the side, but basically it was now a four-piece band. And, unfortunately, then
you had almost a power struggle at the end of ‘84, beginning of ‘85 where
certain members thought it should all be equal. Other members thought they
deserved more than other members. There was definitely a move to try and make
it more of a band in a business sense instead of just being David plus his
hired hands. Which, even if somebody like Cozy or John had gotten a good deal
for a weekly wage, it still wasn’t anything like what should be the
case in terms of royalties and all that kind of thing. Whitesnake was still
David plus sidemen, really. And in the early days of the band, by the
time we started making money, it had been sort of like that anyway, except
David was almost one of the sidemen as well. So yes, in early ‘85, because of
disagreements about percentages and stuff, Cozy decided to leave. So then
there’s three of us.”

“Cozy was one of the great drummers of
all time,” figures Kalodner, when asked about the exit of Powell from the
ranks. “He was just hard to work with. He didn’t like that I changed around the
band. He was a very independent soul. I think he thought he could do better.
And I think he sort of quit. My memory is kind of fuzzy because it was a
whirlwind right then. Cozy Powell and Jon Lord are the two people I knew the
most.”

“By the way, Cozy Powell did fit into
it,” continues Kalodner, meaning the planned concept of a new band to conquer
America. “I forget really, after all these years what happened. Whether
he just quit because his bandmates got canned, or Coverdale was momentarily
pissed at him, I actually don’t know the answer to that. But to me, the
guy was a legend. Just like when he died, you know, at 150 miles an hour.
That’s how he lived. He took me on the M4, or whatever, and he was driving at
120 miles an hour. It’s like, I witnessed it. He was living at the
edge, about as much as you could.” Cozy Powell was killed as he was ejected
through the windshield of his Saab 9000, April 5, 1998. He had been
commandeering the M4 motorway in inclement weather at 104 mph. On the
phone to his (married) girlfriend, Cozy was not wearing his seatbelt and his
blood alcohol was over the legal limit. Due to that phone call, we know his
last words were, “Oh shit.”

Jon Lord would be gone for an entirely
different reason to Cozy, and that’s the much-hyped reformation of Mk. II-era
Deep Purple. “I loved Jon Lord. He was one of my personal favourites,” says
Kalodner. “He was a cool, fine person. I thought he was irrelevant to the
sound of Whitesnake. What I’m trying to do is separate my personal feelings
from what I know I needed to do. Like I had no hard-on or issue with Bernie
Marsden or any of those... the other guitar player, whatever his name was. I
just didn’t think they were good. I had no animosity. It’s one of those things
where I had to tell these people, and it was very hard on me to do that. Also,
unlike American musicians, they were not taking care of themselves. And David
Coverdale looked like the ultimate rock star. Every minute. Even when the
guy had a dollar in his pocket. I think these guys were probably pissed at some
asshole LA A&R guy. That’s my impression. Maybe except for Jon Lord and
Cozy Powell. I really don’t know the answer to that.”

Time for a next record, and Coverdale in
fact once more wanted to knock the whole thing on its head. No drummer, really
no keyboardist, and having his doubts about the megalomaniac locked inside of
his new guitarist, Coverdale nonetheless was convinced to give it the
ol’ college try, decamping in the ensuing spring months to a hamlet in the
South of France called Le Rayol with John Sykes to try to pen some new anthems
for the ages.

“David admired the kind of cockiness and
arrogance and self-confidence that John had,” reflects Murray, soon sent along
to help with arrangements. “But of course he didn’t want it to go too far to the
point where his leadership was threatened, and that’s eventually what happened.
I think at a time when he was writing stuff, I think David found it pretty
inspiring. John would come up with rhythm tracks and stuff, and then
they worked on songs to some extent and then I went out and joined them.
This is kind of May, June ‘85, and I’d made some contribution, but by that
point David was fired up by what John was coming up with. It needed to be
produced. It needed to be made to sound like a proper band.”

So the three of them headed out to Los
Angeles where they auditioned upwards of 60 drummers, winding up with storied
UK journeyman Aynsley Dunbar, 39, an odd choice it would seem, given the
growing mandate from above that the band needed an injection of youth.

“We’d spent about nine months writing
songs and searching for a drummer and finally getting into the
studio, I suppose the end of September ‘85,” continues Murray. “Then we went up
to Little Mountain in Vancouver and recorded all the basic tracks with Mike
Stone producing, October, November ‘85. And from my point of view it was all
done at that point. But then after that, David had all sorts of vocal problems
and trouble with his voice, seeing doctors, and they all went to many different
studios. John kind of got very excessive in terms of we’ve got to have 50
guitars on this, it’s got to be re-done and re-done and made better endlessly.
Very much a big production where there’s a wall of guitars. Sometimes it sounds
great and other times it’s just overkill, in my humble opinion. And I would
love to have that album re-mixed, not just re-mastered. Just to hear some of the
stuff that’s on there. But because I wasn’t there, John came over back to
England and did some recording over here, which is when I was able to go in and
use some of that time to redo some bass parts. But basically they
were either together or separately recording most of that year, and I wasn’t
part of it at all.”

“The Whitesnake deal was more of a
financial thing,” dismisses John Sykes, speaking with Drew Masters soon after
his coming exit from the band. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse at that
time. They were just finishing off the
Slide It In
album when I joined
and what I did was a few overdubs and got my name on the American version to
establish me as ‘in.’ After we toured the album, Cozy Powell left and David and
I went to France to write the
Whitesnake
1987
album. We
auditioned drummers and found Aynsley Dunbar, and from there we went to Little
Mountain Studios in Vancouver, Canada, to begin recording and production. David
had vocal troubles and it was frustrating, but I hung in there.”

If there was any sense of mission or
briefing for the new record, producer Keith Olsen says, “Well, actually, it
started off with the amount of costs involved with doing the
Slide It In
record, and the amount of money that David spends on a daily basis. When they
started working on that, when they started to do that record, David was ready
to do just about anything to make sure he had continued success. So Kalodner
definitely wanted that record to become Americanized, to a certain extent. But
that’s not really a good way to put it. Mike Stone was brought in, because John
Sykes wanted… I think it was because John felt he could control Mike Stone.
Because when I worked on the
Slide It In
record, I think I gave him
[Sykes] definitive direction what we needed to do to make sure we get a record
that would at least go gold. What did I suggest? I think clean it up, make sure
that there’s not as much garbage in it, simplify the parts, make sure it’s
chunky, distinctive, that it had definition. But remember, back in the
day, when music was an art form [
laughs
] — Okay, I said it, all right? —
back then, there were three things that made hit records, and that was the
song first, performance of that song second, and the sound, third.”

“Now Coverdale and Sykes wrote some
really amazing songs for the
Whitesnake
white album, I guess you would
call it,
Whitesnake 1987
,” continues Olsen. “They wrote some great
songs. The arrangements were great, the drums were really great — the
guitars were totally out of tune. Sykes was going through a period of time
where he wanted to have a harmonizer, wanted all the effects, and the
harmonizer going up and down so everything was really wide. And Coverdale found
out he couldn’t sing to it.”

Did you say out of tune?

“Oh yeah, really out of tune. Well, there
were 35 tracks... you know, when Mike Stone took the record and did the
first onslaught of guitars, there were 30 something tracks of guitars, and
almost, maybe, there were one or two of the guitar tracks that were in tune?
And you know on every track. And so I would pull, extract those two guitar
tracks, and then John played a few others, and then later on when John became a
little more impossible, Dann Huff played some more. You know Dann Huff? Super
good guitar player; he played some.

“David had an awful, awfully hard time singing
it, and Mike Stone, he couldn’t… I don’t like to say anything bad about the
departed, you know, Mike was really good at what he did, but working with
Coverdale and Sykes was really hard on him. And it got to be more about things
other than the music. And so Kalodner pulled the album from Mike Stone and told
me, ‘Keith, fix this record.’ So I jumped in and, six weeks later, delivered the
record. But we redid all the vocals, cleaned up all the guitars so everything
was in tune, got rid of all the effects that were out of tune, re-did the
bass on a lot of it, because the bass was all out of tune. It was because the
guitars had the effects on it, while they were cutting tracks, and everybody
was playing really wide. The pitch center was not centered. It was very wide.
You understand what I mean? If you had a bass that was five cents sharp on
every note, and you had a guitar that had a harmonizer printed on it three
cents sharp, and three cents flat, to widen it, Okay, now you’re the
singer, where do you pitch this? Yeah, exactly.”

Had it all gotten just too complicated then?

“No, in the studio it sounded really
big,” laughs Olsen. “And it was like, guys, hello, there’s a time when you have
to think forward and think more big picture.”

So as to who is playing guitar on
Whitesnake
,
“That album, it’s John, and it’s Dann Huff,” states Olsen. “Adrian Vandenberg
came in at the very end on ‘Here I Go Again,’ on version three. And he tried to
play a solo on a couple of things, but it was just the ‘Here I Go Again’ solo,
on the radio version. I think that’s the only thing he’s on. Adrian was around.
When David asked him to be in the band, he was brought in at the
same time that he brought in Vivian Campbell. I was thinking: wrong guitar
player. I mean, Vivian was a dedicated player that when he woke up, he picked
up a guitar; when he went to sleep, he put down the guitar, and everything in
between. He was practicing, playing; he was one of those guys who drives you
crazy.

“Lindsey Buckingham, same way. He never
ever put the guitar down. He always has something, usually an electric guitar —
not plugged in, thank God — but it’s always… you’re hearing this tinkle tinkle
tinkle all the time. And that was the way it was. And so Adrian was okay, he
looked good, for the time.  As for backup vocals, when it came to backgrounds
and things like that, I brought in Richard Page. He’s Mr. Mister! (sings the
band’s hit). You know him; look them up — Mr. Mister. He had two big hits
around the same time, and he was a stunningly good singer. The other
singer that looked like Sting. So yeah, he did some backups along with John
Sykes.”