Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (22 page)

Indeed, John Sykes was making sure he was
getting paid. “He certainly struck a hard bargain,” continues Murray. “He was a
pretty good negotiator and knew his own value. He was very anti-redoing the
old Whitesnake songs, so he was wrong in that sense, but he co-wrote and came
up with all the musically new ideas for the
1987
record. Musically, it
was quite a different thing from the Marsden/Moody era, and the
Galley era. So he was an important part of it in many ways, but he wanted to be
as equal as David was, and David didn’t want to allow him to be that.
Particularly financially. It was going to be David’s band, whereas John wanted
just a bit too much power, and the showdown came when David didn’t want John to
come to the mix, which, once again, we’d gone back to using Keith Olsen, having
done most of the album with the producer Mike Stone. So they had a big row at
Olsen’s studio and John left the band. So in a sense, you’ve really only got
David and me left, and I’m in London. Depending on how you look at I’m not
really in the band any more, or I am. It just depends on what point of view you
want to take.

“So therefore, when they
need a video for ‘Still Of The Night,’ they put together a band in LA where,
basically, if you look at it, you can’t really tell who’s in the
band. Because that was just for the video. That could be John Sykes with the
long blond hair, but actually it’s Adrian Vandenberg, who had been pestering
David for years to collaborate with him and be a member of Whitesnake or
whatever else. So whether or not it was going to be a good writing partnership,
I don’t know, but he was the next guy that David wanted to work with.”

“Well, it was called
Whitesnake
,”
announces John Kalodner, concerning the game-changer that would hit the
shelves April 7th of 1987, after a mountain of cash had been burned in its
birthing, “because I had no energy left to figure out what the
record should be called. I mean, that’s not the case with almost every other
record. But in this case it was. I just considered it a miracle that I had a
finished record, and then a mastered record by George Marino, who was a genius
as well. Everything about it was great, in the end. And when it went to the
plants in November or early December of 1986, I considered it, you know, the
greatest record I had ever done, even surpassing
Double Vision
.”

“I like every single thing about it,”
defends Kalodner of the album’s clean and corporate cover image. “It was
totally Hugh Syme and David Coverdale’s idea together. And, you know, I really
thought it should be simple and just say what it was, and I just think it’s brilliant.”

Trying to be classy? “Well, David
Coverdale is a classy British guy, and so that’s what he wanted.”

Past the wrapper and right out the
gates, one of the big ideas from the mind of Kalodner had been set in motion.
The album’s opening track was a bulky, powered-up re-recording of “Crying In
The Rain,” rescued from
Saints & Sinners
infamy, given pole position
on a record that would storm the charts.

“That was Kalodner,” says Olsen, asked
about the two tracks that were hand-picked for the record, this one and “Here I
Go Again.” “John said, ‘You have to redo this.’ And I said, ‘Oh, there
are songs that are better [
laughs
]. David’s written a bunch of better
songs, you know.’ ‘No, Keith, I bought the rights to those other
albums just so I could get this.’ So no, he was very involved and very much a
part of it.”

“‘Here I Go Again’ and ‘Crying In The
Rain’ I heard on previous records,” says Kalodner. “I thought the
songs were incredible and poorly arranged and incredibly poorly produced.
That’s how they came about.”

But why then, weren’t they
redone for the first Geffen record,
Slide It In
? “The ‘84 record? That’s
because Coverdale wouldn’t do ‘em.” Had he needed more convincing? “I think so.
And I didn’t have enough power over him. He still had the backing of EMI, with
Rupert Perry, who’s a great guy. But I was fighting everyone, including
whatever manager he had at the time.”

Structurally, the track wasn’t radically
altered vis-à-vis the original, it was more that it was flooded with guitars,
and then hawkishly and mawkishly over-played by everybody, point pounded home
(the point being the blues never sounded so metal-mad.)

If the hard-as-nails hijacking of “Crying
In The Rain” wasn’t enough, then it was into a straight shred metal rocker
called “Bad Boys,” on which David abandons all reservations about big an’ bold
US stadium rock and just turns over the reins to John Sykes and the
producers.

Then, as if on cue, the
blues and metal come together in a symphony for the ages with six-ton sledge
“Still Of The Night.” The track is no less than the one main thing for which
John Sykes will be remembered, for all of the rest of his life, and it is the
high creative point of Whitesnake 2.0’s super-sized canon, and possibly the
creative high watermark of the band’s career from start to finish.

Comments Kalodner: “‘Still Of The Night’
came about as a collaboration of Sykes and Coverdale, the best of their
energies, songwriting. The track which Mike Stone did with John Sykes and those
musicians was spectacular. And Coverdale’s vocal is one of the
greatest vocals ever, and Keith Olsen’s mix is as good as it gets. Obviously I
was at the mixes, and I would reject certain mixes, but when I heard the
final mix that Keith Olsen sent me over, I said, this is the perfect mix. So I
mean, I, when I heard a lot of these songs that I had laboured on so much, I
just was ecstatic. I couldn’t even believe how good they were.”

“‘Still Of The Night,’ a quick scenario,”
reflects Coverdale. “Many, many years ago I was going through my mother’s
attic in the north of England, and I was going through all these
old work tapes from the Purple days. So I grabbed them and threw them
in my bag and listened to them. A lot of it was crap, but it was very funny for
me to hear the journey from the seeds of songs that became ultimate Purple
staples. And I found a demo that Ritchie Blackmore had given me and I thought,
well, that’s an interesting riff. So I took that and changed it around
completely to the point where it had absolutely nothing to do with the
initial inspiration, but credit where credit is due.

“Then I presented my take on this riff to
John Sykes, who put a great attitude on it and took it further
as only he could. There is lot of Led Zeppelin comparison there,
which I don’t have a problem with, because Zeppelin was fucking marvellous and
continues to resonate. But the huge influence on that is one of my favourite
songs from my childhood, ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ Elvis Presley, and another
huge influence was the Jeff Beck Group, when Rod Stewart was singing with them.
And part of the atmospheric thing was an inspiration from a track of his called
‘Rice Pudding.’ I tell you, I’ve played that song all over the
world and nobody had a problem with it other than Robert Plant [
laughs
].
And of course a couple of years later I have Page playing it, going, ‘This is
fucking hard!’”

What David is referring to is his later
collaboration with Jimmy Page, Coverdale Page. Still, it’s hard to believe he’d
have the audacity to force Jimmy to recreate this song in a live setting. “Yes,
of course. It was really hard, because people want you to play this song, that
song. And of course with Page, it was very exciting for me to do ‘In My Time Of
Dying,’ ‘Black Dog’ and he did some Whitesnake stuff. We would have just preferred
to do Coverdale Page, although that would lead to a great disappointment for a
lot of the fans. But that’s what he said, although he played it great. But it
was interesting watching him go, ‘What are these fucking chords?!’”

Indeed David found himself answering to a
new name because of this song’s evocations of both “Whole Lotta Love” and
“Black Dog,” and that name was David Coverversion. As it turns out, this was
also yet another dimension to John Kalodner’s multi-pronged plan for the
band.

“That was definitely a kind of commission
by John Kalodner and Geffen Records to write something that was going to be
very Zeppelin-like,” explains Murray. “And it’s certainly obvious from how that
came out. But the annoying thing was then we got criticized for being a kind of
Zeppelin sound-alike, which wasn’t the case at all. There wasn’t much else on the
record that sounded like Zeppelin. The whole album took an awful long time to
record but certainly we could tell that that was going to be an important
track. The whole center section of it at first was kind of going in the
direction of ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ the whole freak-out psychedelic part. And it
became slightly more structured in a sense. I came up with the
very simple chord structure for that middle section which builds up and builds
up. The whole thing had so many guitar tracks and keyboard tracks and re-done
vocal parts, it changed quite a bit from the original state until it actually
got released.”

“I want to continue adding heart and soul
into the context of hard rock rather than blood and makeup,” Coverdale told
journalist Lee Sherman back in 1988, answering the charges. “I want to keep
flying the flag of the best of The Who, Purple, Zeppelin and stuff like that,
which utilized the blues within hard rock. I’m not talking about blues as the
twelve bar, but the expression that’s within the piece of music, the
emotional content. I am not a heavy metal act.”

“I guess it’s quite a compliment to be
placed in a class like that,” Coverdale had said the previous year. “But I
don’t know how accurate the comparison is. People shouldn’t forget that I
worked in Deep Purple for a number of years, so my pedigree in hard rock is
quite strong. I understand that bands like Whitesnake, Purple and Led Zeppelin
all play a solid powerful brand of rock, but I don’t think we’re coming from the
same place musically. I don’t mean that literally, because I do believe there
is something to being a British rock ‘n’ roll musician. There is a special
quality that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world.”

“Both ‘Crying In The Rain’ and ‘Still Of
The Night’ were strong live numbers, but there’s a slight bone of contention
with ‘Still Of The Night,’” continues Murray. “I came up with this sequence in the
middle where it sort of goes into double time and builds up and goes around
that whole different thing, that long, long guitar solo part. So we did that
for the touring in 1984, when Cozy Powell was still in the band, so that was the
arrangement we re-did for the
1987
album. It’s the sort of thing that
works really well live because it’s heavy and it’s bluesy and builds up to a
peak of excitement and you kind of take people somewhere through the
course of the song. It’s certainly a great song to play live.”

Coverdale most definitely channels Robert
Plant for the “Black Dog” solo singing passages, but all told, he turns in a
bodice-ripper of a vocal. Says Olsen, “Coverdale?! How good was he? Fabulous!
Are you kidding? The first vocal we did, I said ‘Let’s start off with the
hardest one,’ and he said, ‘Oh, Keith, really?’ ‘Yeah, we’re going to do “Still
Of The Night.”’ And we did ‘Still Of The Night’ first take and he nailed it! He
nailed it in three takes. That vocal on the record is combined from three
different takes, and was mostly second and third take. Don Airey’s keyboard
parts were great [sings it]. Really cool.”

As for who deserves credit for the
writing of Whitesnake’s immortal epic, “David and John. Yeah, John wrote the
riffs and David put all these top lines on it, all these melody lines, and the
lyrics,” remembers Olsen. “And you know, he was pretty, shall we say, he was
graceful in the way that he gave to his co-writers. John Kalodner, after he
heard the vocal on it, and he heard the final mix, he said, ‘This is the
lead single.’ And I said, ‘Get out! It’s not commercial. It’s...’ ‘I know, but
it is the lead track. And if we come out with this first we will have a
turntable hit on FM before we even go to contemporary hit radio.’ And that’s the
way they promoted it too. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And so they
had no play on CHR, but
tons
of play on AOR, and then they
came with the first single, and it was ‘Here I Go Again.’ It was bang, soared
up the charts, and they came with the ballad after that.”

The derision as to the resemblance to
Zeppelin was somewhat warranted, figures Keith. “Well yeah, just because there
was that, ‘Ooh baby!’ But that’s why Coverdale and Jimmy Page got together
later in life. I mean, he thought well, this guy is another Plant, let’s do it!
Plus there’s the one on the next album that sounded just like ‘Kashmir’ —
’Judgment Day.’”