Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (23 page)

Adds Murray: “Throughout ‘84, Kalodner
would be saying, ‘Look,
Slide It In
, okay, but for the
next album you’ve got to get heavier. It’s got to be much more guitar-based.
Just a much more powerful, more American-sounding record.’ It was also about
Zeppelin, ‘masters of the universe’-type guys who can really play but also look
great and have got that kind of English arrogance or whatever it is. I think it
was more that people could see David as a really charismatic star front man and
that if he had a different band and changed the style of songs, then
he could be massively huge around the world. And he probably took quite a bit
of convincing himself, and I think Kalodner kind of chipped away at it. I think
he kind of had to drag David into changing, but once he changed, that was it.
Goodbye to the past.”

In some ways, the legendary but overtly
glossy video for “Still Of The Night” didn’t match the grind and heft of its
musical soundtrack. Still, it was instrumental to the song’s success, in the
feeding of such a thick steak to the masses — with David’s new girlfriend Tawny
Kitaen more like head chef than waitress.

Tawny and David first met at a restaurant
on the strip, where David had asked her if she’d like to have a cup of tea
after dinner. Tawny said yes, but then soon had to weigh the pluses of minus of
this “intelligent” man with a predilection for Armani suits against the
fact that he was $2M in debt to Geffen! In addition, Tawny had known little of
David’s past with Purple or his present situation, being ten years younger than
Coverdale. Tawny would go on to be accused of being the Yoko Ono of Whitesnake,
given her participation in decisions on photo shoots, cover design, the
picking of support bands, even managers. She also did David’s hair, making sure
the Aquanet [hairspray] was in ample supply. Tawny even served as policewoman
on the road enforcing a “No Groupies” policy, much to the relief of the
rock wives.

“It’s very strange because it had nothing
to do with nepotism at all,” Coverdale had told Bob Garon in 1990, on bringing
Kitaen into the frame. “Actually, we were just beginning our relationship at the
time. In truth, it was Marty Callner [the famed video director] who first posed
the idea. I went to his place to discuss the ‘Still Of The Night’ video, and
Tawny was with me because we were going out to dinner. And Marty just said,
‘Wow! This is her! This is the one for the video!’ I said, ‘I’m not going to
ask her to do it just because we’re friends,’ but she said she’d love to do it.
It’s strange, though, because I’ve always been a very private person. And I
like to keep my personal life that way. And the fact that it developed into a relationship.
And now I live with this beautiful creature in Lake Tahoe with a son on the
way. Because neither Tawny nor I were looking for a commitment at the
time. It just worked that way. And to know that our relationship is now
documented and that we were a celebrity couple… Well, it didn’t sit well with
me. I embrace success, but I have a little discomfort with celebrity. However,
it did help constitute nine million records, so that’s the trade-off. Not to
take anything away from myself or my colleagues, but she was an important part
of the whole vehicle. I also work with her because I only work with the
best, so anyone who thinks there’s nepotism there, fuck them.”

“She’s my good luck charm and she’s my
best friend,” David told Anne Leighton, now a legendary publicist in our
industry. “The fortunate thing in our relationship, was Tawny and I were first
pals, which was a great foundation for our relationship. The last thing either
of us wanted was a commitment from anyone. I had so much more work and music to
make; all I wanted to do was catalogue who my friends were. But somehow Tawny
and I got to the point where we were only calling each other and nobody else.
We were pals and then we became lovers. She’s a wonderful circumstance.”

Basically, all the videos off the
album were pretty much identical, poodle rock all around, Tawny and David as
main characters, the rest of the band of indeterminate identification.
Combined, they created a suite, a novella, that serves now as a window into the preposterousness of 1980s hair metal at its showiest.

“I thought Marty Callner was a genius,”
explains Kalodner, asked about the clips, done over a ten-day period but issued
over time. In the below anecdote, he’s talking about “Still Of The Night” as the
first video, even if Tawny Kitaen avows that “Is This Love” was the
first clip actually shot (for his part, Rudy Sarzo also says that “Still Of The
Night” was the first one). “I thought he was inventive and an amazing person.
And I called him up, and I just said, can you do this video for me? I think I
was working with Susan Silverman, maybe at Warner Brothers Records. I don’t
even know if Geffen would even be involved; these people didn’t want to touch
it. The only people who were excited about Whitesnake was the
promotion department. Which is all I needed them to be.

“So here’s the real truth. So I talked to
Marty Callner and made sure he has the record. Tell him my, like, idea. You
know, it needs to be something big. Because the song is big. Everything is big.
Coverdale is big. In person, you know, he’s really regal. So I give him all my
ideas. So I said, you know, Geffen gave me a budget of like 125 or something,
and he’s already complaining about it, this and that. So now it’s March. And
I’m busy starting Aerosmith
Permanent Vacation
in Vancouver with Bruce
Fairbairn. So Marty Callner and Coverdale, and whoever else is involved,
totally came up with that entire video themselves. And Marty Callner even paid
for some of it because it went over budget. So many of the video ideas were
mine, but this was Marty and David Coverdale, 100%. When I came back and I went
to Marty’s — they used to edit on film — when I saw the rough editing of the
video, I was stunned at how spectacular it was.”

The bizarre part of the
story, of course, has to do with the identities of David’s band mates — done
with mirrors indeed as Kalodner explains: “Right. This really is interesting.
So Marty Callner says to me, ‘Well, you want a band in a video. And David
Coverdale says he has no band.’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s true.’ So, Marty
Callner says, ‘Well, what about John Sykes? He’s the guitar player; he’s the
co-writer of the record.’ I said, ‘Well, Coverdale won’t talk to him let alone
be in a video with him.’ So I said, ‘Listen Marty, you know, I have kind of a
fantasy band that I would have for David Coverdale. Maybe it’s not perfect, but
it’ll definitely represent the vibe of the music. So I just told him and his
production coordinator, you know, the people I wanted, and I called each one of
them and saying, would they do it? Marty Callner got it all together.
I had called them, and you know, and I come back to this incredible video, with
a band that never played together and was just a fantasy in my head. It was one
of the weirdest things I ever had in my career.”

And the fantasy band becomes the
real band?

“Right. The fantasy band was because they
were great players, not because they were models. And Coverdale liked all of them.
So the video comes out, the record comes out, and the record is gigantic
immediately. So, by this time, Coverdale is managed by Trudy Green and Howard
Kaufman, so I guess they got it together to have these people to be his band.
But I mean, I just was thinking as quick as I could. I was worried about
Aerosmith’s record and getting ready for Cher’s record, and I just named off the
fantasy band that I’d like to have David Coverdale working with. And it
appeared in Marty Callner’s video.”

It might have been a bit more
collaborative than all that, given that we know Coverdale admired Adrian
Vandenberg, and yet on another occasion that I spoke to John, he seemed unaware
that David knew him. John acknowledges that David had already been aware of
Tommy Aldridge’s percussive powers as well. As for Viv and Rudy Sarzo...

“Remember, I was in the
thick of things — like there is no music business like this today,” says
Kalodner, “but right then I was like the No. 1 A&R guy, I loved all these
bands, and I knew who I would want, and David Coverdale or Marty Callner or
somebody pulled it together. A lot of the other stuff, I was responsible for.
Not the music or the singing or whatever. But pulling it together
was all me. The video, that was just... I gave him an idea and somebody made it
happen.”

Closing side one of the
original vinyl was a second successful hit re-heat, “Here I Go Again.” “Once
again Kalodner definitely decided that this was going to be a mega-smash if you
re-recorded it,” says Murray. “So we re-recorded it for the album and he still
wasn’t really happy with it, so they re-recorded it again in what is more of a
remix version, but it was in reality a total re-recording with various session
guys. And this was after myself and John Sykes had parted company with David.
So the version that everybody knows is a very slick production and it certainly
sounded great at that time. If you listen back to the original version, it
sounds possibly raw and unfinished. But it’s always been a really good song,
and that’s the most important thing you’ve always got to have. The production
is always just the icing on the cake. The version that’s on the
album, the
1987
album, I’m on that, but not on the single version, so
I’m on both album versions.”

The single version, or US remix as it’s
sometimes called, in fact features Denny Carmassi (Montrose, Heart) on drums,
Dann Huff on guitars, Mark Andes (Heart) on bass and a keyboardist by the
name of Alan Pasqua adding those textures we barely acknowledge. Carmassi, who
at the time shared management with Whitesnake as part of Heart, would both
record and tour with David in the 1990s. As for the single version, David
wasn’t a big fan of the end result and was quietly pleased that it worked out
to a form of bait and switch or switch and bait, given that the
version that lives on in radio land is in fact the robust album version. Heard
slightly more often, however, is the radio edit of “Still Of The Night,” less a
travesty all round.

“So what happened?” begins Kalodner,
offering more detail on “Here I Go Again” (and again and again). “So the
album gets done. Now, it’s taken me two fucking years to get this record done.
I’m for real about to get fired from, you know, the guy who’s the
most important executive in my life, to me. He was so pissed. So I get the
record done, everyone loves the record. And I got Hugh Syme to do that
incredible cover. You know, I spent all this money on it. It’s like, I
definitely would have been a kind of semi, like a secondary A&R person, who
signed Foreigner and whatever, Asia, Wang Chung, but this record, I could tell
it was going to be something special. And remember the Bon Jovi record had just
come out. So it was kind of getting to be the era of this kind of music.”

“So, anyway, we’re sitting around,
listening to it, promotion people — that means the promotion people and myself
— and I think to myself, I can do a better single than this. So Eddie
Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, says, ‘Are you insane? Haven’t you
spent enough money?’ But Al Coury, who was the head of promotions said, ‘You
know, let Kalodner give it a try. Let’s record another version of it, and see
how it comes out.’ So, I tell Keith Olsen, who had mixed both records. I said,
I want you to re-record ‘Here I Go Again.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know,
Coverdale doesn’t speak to John Sykes. Most of the other band won’t speak to
him.’ I said, ‘Well, use your session guys.’ Use all the guys that I think are the
greatest, I use on all my sessions, you know, the guys that did Rick
Springfield. Just get them. Just get them in. Let them, you and them,
and Coverdale, arrange, do a new arrangement. I went in and I made sure the
arrangement was, you know, very standard, like rock records were then.
So they go in the studio. I mean, you’ve got to imagine these famous musicians
now. I mean, Dann Huff, what is he? The biggest producer in Nashville? Anyway, they
go in, they do a take, and the whole take is like a one-day take or two-day
take.”