Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (21 page)

It’s a story for another
book, but Dutchman Adrian Vandenberg came well pedigreed, through three high
quality records with his band Vandenberg, as Olsen remembers: “Yeah, some
really good songs. I want you to note what key they’re in [
laughs
]. You
listen, this guy plays every riff in the key of A. You know, I could be wrong,
but it’s A, F sharp minor, A minor, or C, which are all A, the
key of A. But he was brought in just at the very end, and why he was brought in
was because we were doing this one version of ‘Here I Go Again,’ and I really
wanted eighth notes in the verse, (sings it). So I called up John, Dave and I
got John on the phone and I said, ‘John, could you just grab the
guitar and come by? You can plug into the studio amps. I just need eighth
notes. On two verses.’ And he said, he says to me, ‘No Keith, I can’t do that.
I would need my entire backline, or I would have to fly to England.’ And
Coverdale looks at me and I’m going, ‘It’s just eighth notes! It’s just jung,
to give it a little more push forward.’”

Er, sorry, he said he would need his
entire backline?

“He would need his entire backline or he
would have to fly to London to do it. And so I said, ‘It’s eighth notes!’.
Anyway, I could see this call wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I say ‘Goodbye.’
And I looked at David and said, ‘You want to try some eighth notes?’ So I
called Dann Huff. David had never met Dann Huff and he was the
No. 1 session player at the time in LA, and he was probably doing three or four
sessions a day, commercials and stuff like that. I mean, making really good
money as a session player. And so I call him, and he stops by at 9am on his way
to a 10 o’clock session, with a guitar, not even in a guitar case. And he plugs
it into my amp that is sitting there in the control room, with the
speaker in another room, and he hears the song once he goes, ‘Okay, jung, jung,
jung,’ and I said thanks very much. Unplugs it, and he says, ‘You know, I’ll
just send you a bill.’ And all of a sudden, it was oh. David, oh, that kind of
special… you know. And so I started introducing him to extra people here and there,
and then Bill Cuomo re-did all the bass on a Prophet DX, and on a DX7 Yamaha, yeah,
almost all the bass is electronic bass. Go listen to it again, and you’ll
figure out how cool that really is. About 50% of the stuff on it is keyboard
bass.”

So Dann Huff does the eighth notes, and
Adrian does the solo on the radio version of “Here I Go Again?”

“No, Adrian did the rhythm part of that
one too. This was another version. But I can’t remember exactly who played on
what. Vivian didn’t play on anything. He was brought in when Sykes was fired.
He was brought in that next day, and he really showed everybody how much he
could really play. And to hear him now, with Def Leppard...”

Recalls John Kalodner on the
crazy circus that was this record, “I was the A&R person; I decided about
all of these things. Decided about producers, about everything. David was a
great artist, and they allowed me to A&R him, especially for the
1987
record; which I almost got fired over. I mean, the
story is so interesting and so complicated because so many things happened,
with the different phases of it. It’s the most complicated story ever in my
career, just because the writing was a problem. Then he hated John Sykes, he
hated Mike Stone, he couldn’t sing the record for eighteen months. And you
know, like I said, he was one of the greatest artists ever to work with, but
that record was one of the toughest ones of my career ever.”

“So this is the whole complication,”
continues Kalodner, ready to expand on a few of these points. “The people that they
recorded the record with, because they recorded the tracks, the
tracks were spectacular. Mike Stone was at his peak. He’s done all those big
Journey records, he had done Asia. And the guy was a real problem; he had a
real drinking problem, he was really difficult, but the guy was just a master.
He was one of the most talented rock recordists that ever lived. So when I
heard the tracks, I was stunned at what they sounded like. That’s what I
thought Whitesnake should sound like. They were big, they just were everything
that I had hoped for.

“So Coverdale hears them,
and already, somehow he’s fighting with John Sykes. I don’t know if it’s about
publishing or credit, but it’s already getting into like a situation where
Coverdale doesn’t want to know John Sykes. In fact, John Sykes wanted to do
some overdubs with Mike Stone in Toronto in order to beef up some of the
tracks, and I said ‘Okay,’ I ordered it, I wrote the PO, and did the
sessions, and Coverdale was even more pissed. This is Toronto, not Vancouver.
People want to remember, most of the stuff I always did was in Vancouver with
Bruce Fairbairn or Bob Rock, any of those people. But Mike Stone recorded
somewhere, some hellhole in Toronto. He did not record in Vancouver. I mean, at
least not the guitar overdubs.

“So the tracks come back; it’s ready for the
vocals. I mean, there’s even some guide vocals John Sykes had done, and there’s
various things on there, and Coverdale had written all the words. I mean, we’re
all poised to go. Now, you gotta remember, this is like early 1986. This is a
year before I actually could get the record done.”

So, Kalodner’s ass is on the
line as he explains: “Costing so much, and also there’s nothing to play for
anybody. Also it’s the only cold streak I ever had in my career. Usually I had
hits, one hit a year. I only did
Vision Quest
, I think, in 1986.
Aerosmith had a flop record with
Done With Mirrors
, and I had signed
Cher against David Geffen’s wishes. So I was not in big favour at the
time.

“So Coverdale comes and he tries to sing.
I think it was with Mike Stone. But he can’t sing. Now, I had encountered this
problem with him when I needed to redo some things on
Slide It In
that
Martin Birch had screwed up. So he tells me, ‘Well, this is why I use Martin
Birch, because I can’t sing with any other producer. I can’t, I can’t do it.’ I
said, ‘Well I think you repaired some things with Keith Olsen.’ He said, ‘I
think I need Martin Birch.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to get Martin
Birch, because Clive Calder, who managed Martin Birch, wanted to kill me. Let
alone, he’s not gonna let you sing, because I just fired Martin Birch from a
project that’s really important to him.’ So I said to him, ‘That’s not gonna
happen. Clive Calder is powerful enough to make sure that doesn’t happen. Which
he did.’ Because I would’ve tried that, even. But that was not an option. So we
tried with Mike Stone.”

“Then Coverdale is having trouble with
his voice,” continues Kalodner. “So I take him to Joe Sugerman, the
famous ear, nose and throat guy. So he has some sinusitis, various other
things he has. Then he’s recovering, and I’m using all the famous LA voice
teachers to work with him, even though David Coverdale pretty much has a
perfect voice. So this is going on now, I’d say, between seven and nine months.
Then he says he feels good enough to sing. So I get Ron Nevison. Trying to get
his vocals — can’t sing with Ron Nevison. Now I’m not sure why he didn’t want
to sing with Keith Olsen, but I remember that was one of my original ideas, and
he didn’t want to do that originally. So, as it’s coming into the
late summer, early fall, I say to Coverdale, ‘You know, I’m gonna get fired,
you’re running out of money. We have to give Keith Olsen a try.’ So he goes out
to Goodnight L.A., and they started working, he started singing the
record, and he sings the record, you know, within like a month, perfectly. You
know, all those great vocals were done with Keith Olsen in Los Angeles after a
year of like going through that he couldn’t sing the record without Martin
Birch.”

“I didn’t know he had a house,” continues
Kalodner, asked if stories about David having a house under construction at the
time were complicating matters as well. “I mean, he might have bought a house
right then, but when this all was happening, he was living at the
Mondrian hotel, and I was paying for it. And it didn’t cost anything, because
it was an old age home about to become the Mondrian hotel. So it’s not like it
was some gigantic expense on me. And I think I got Geffen to give him an
allowance so he could keep his beloved Jaguar, which is in the
video. Which barely, by the way, ever ran. That was, you know British, of
course.”

So obviously David not being able to sing
was a huge deal. As John has explained, his sinus infection led not only to
surgery and rehab, but the insane notion from John Sykes that the
band should carry on with another singer. Through this, John had aligned with
Mike Stone, which made Stone
persona non grata
with Coverdale. This is
where the switch happens toward Zeppelin/Bad Company/UFO legend Ron Nevison,
before Keith Olsen saves the day.

“I had some troubles with my voice,”
Coverdale explained to
Hit Parader
’s Rob Andrews, at the
time. “At first I believed there was something physically wrong with my voice,
and I did have some serious sinus problems. But then, it got to the
point where I began developing a mental block toward singing. All the
backing tracks for the album were done quite a while ago, but when I went in to
cut the vocal tracks, I wasn’t getting the results anyone expected. It was
scary because it was in my head. There was nothing really wrong with me. My
first reaction was to go back and work with someone I knew who could get the
best out of me. That man was Martin Birch, who I’ve worked with, on and off,
since my days with Deep Purple. But to be honest, Martin and I haven’t been
getting along that well in recent years, so that part of my plan went awry. The
next person I could think of was Ron Nevison, who’s had some incredible success
in the last year with people like Heart and Ozzy Osbourne. I heard that he
wasn’t the easiest man to work with, but while that may be true, I found him
quite compatible with my own needs.”

A three-ring circus of eccentrics this
band was turning out to be… “Right, I mean, they all were,” reflects Kalodner.
“Mike Stone was, Coverdale was. You know, Coverdale had no money at the
time. Keith, he’s hilarious. He was high, but talented, and Coverdale was just
crazy and talented. And he eventually did get along with Keith Olsen. I mean,
Keith Olsen and I completely redid ‘Here I Go Again’ after the
entire record was done and in production. Because I thought it was going to be
a big single, but I didn’t think it was right. Changed things with Coverdale,
and it’s an amazing story. And that was done, like in January of 1987, when the
record was already in production —complicated.”

“David was just a diva at that point,”
continues Kalodner. “He was, an incredibly talented diva who always got
whatever he wanted his whole life. I just wouldn’t give up about this record. I
wouldn’t do it his way. His colloquial British way, that was not going to
happen. Especially with those songs.”

Offering more insight to what the
mysterious Mr. Kalodner was bringing to the situation, Neil Murray says that,
“Certainly after
Slide It In
and after the remix of
Slide It In
and a sort of image upgrade, as it were, whether deliberate or inadvertent,
he’s saying ‘Look, there’s a huge gap in the market for a band like Zeppelin in
the States.’ That sort of rock god sex idol-type guy front man with a guitar
hero. And that prompted a couple of songs on the next record looking for
Zeppelin as influence, such as ‘Still Of The Night,’ which is rather
reminiscent of ‘Black Dog.’ But a lot of other songs are nothing like that at
all. And then of course Kalodner was saying you’ve got to remake a couple of
songs, in particular ‘Here I Go Again,’ which was on
Saints & Sinners
.
It had done quite well as a single, certainly in the UK, but America didn’t
know it at all. So we recorded it for the album, the one we called
1987
over here, but it’s just called
Whitesnake
in the States, and even then
that wasn’t quite right. I mean I re-did the bass on it a year after I’d first
done it, and then even those changes that Kalodner was asking for then,
it still wasn’t commercial enough.”

But along with this, Murray was slowly
being cast adrift. “Yes, so they re-recorded it completely in early ‘87. The
whole of ‘86 was spent recording the album. Like I say, all the
backing tracks had been done in October and November ‘85, and the
next year was spent with David and John doing guitars and vocals. And in the
meantime, Aynsley Dunbar and myself stopped being paid. Even though I wasn’t
earning anything from Whitesnake at that point, I was still being treated as
though I was a member of the band, except that I was in London, impoverished,
working with Bernie and Mel, another little band, which possibly wasn’t seen as
being the best thing to do by David, but that was all that was going on,
really, for me. Whereas he and John were in LA and still getting paid lots of
money and all their expenses covered and that kind of thing.”