Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (25 page)

“Coverdale was an impeccable dresser,
and also the impeccable gentlemen,” laughs Olsen. “And as it was put together,
it was all about David, because Whitesnake is really just David. David owns the
name and everything else. And so when he put together the touring band for the
Whitesnake
1987
tour — which was I think the Snake, Rattle And Roll tour
— he put together the band with people that looked great, that looked the
part, that knew how to move onstage and everything else. And that’s why Rudy
was brought in, and that’s why Viv was brought in — it was, wow! They were
really good.”

“We had a lot of problems as time went on
in terms of his attitude,” Coverdale had told me, summarizing the
shocking shuffling of the square-jawed Sykes out of the Whitesnake equation, to
be replaced by two guitarists, Viv Campbell and Adrian Vandenberg. “His
attitude I felt was very disrespectful to a lot of people I was working with
and I also found out it was going on behind my back. And it got worse and worse
and worse. There was a kind of resentment that he wasn’t as well-known as I was
at that particular time. Instead of having the patience to realize that he’s
going to get the keys to the treasury down the line, it was just intolerable to
work with him in that atmosphere. Actually, in the last two years I’ve been
receiving a lot of calls to bury the hatchet with John and I don’t have a
hatchet. That’s one of those opportunities, if you blow it, why go back? That’s
it, you know? And I don’t want to get into a situation; I have an incredible
private scenario. There’s no way I want to be calling my wife from the
road and say I’m so unhappy, this is not what I wanted, the old problems have
manifested themselves, you know? So who knows? As Sean Connery used to say,
‘Never say never again.’”

So John and David’s working relationship
had been deteriorating rapidly, although Olsen says that it wasn’t that David
was afraid of John, as had been intimated through period interviews, especially
from Sykes. “No, he was hurt, and he wasn’t listened to, by John. John hurt him
deeply, and so it was one of those things. John has reaped the
benefits of writing and co-publishing all those songs, on an album that sold 22
million copies. You know, it’s one of those things… the first thing I would do
is say, ‘Thank you, David, for allowing me to write with you. Want to do it
again?’ [
laughs
]. But egos were huge.”

“I never recorded an album with
Whitesnake; I just did the one tour,” says Vivian Campbell, briefly passing
through Whitesnake from Dio on his way to Def Leppard. “We did the
one very big tour and several videos for that
1987
album, the
big album. And you know, the only thing I actually ever recorded with Whitesnake
was I went into the studio with Keith Olsen and we did a solo on ‘Give Me All
Your Love’ which was a late single from the record and video. It was like
single number four or five or something. And that was it. And then
I basically got edged out of that situation, when we were in preproduction for the
next record.”

So summarizing, the tour in celebration
of the
Whitesnake
album featured as Coverdale’s essentially all-new
band, first, as its rhythm section, Rudy Sarzo on bass and Tommy Aldridge on drums.
Both players had storied histories, but as timing would have it, they
had arrived as a bit of a package, having recently joined forces as MacAlpine
Aldridge, Rock, Sarzo (or M.A.R.S.) for a shred record called
Project:
Driver
(they had previously played together as well, with Ozzy Osbourne).

“I met David years and years ago when I
was in Black Oak Arkansas and he was in Deep Purple,” Aldridge said back at the
time. “We played together over in England. I’d been talking to David off and on
for about two years. At the time, Rudy and I were working on an album called
Project: Driver, but after that came together, it was just a matter of
priorities and Whitesnake seemed the right thing to do.”

“How I joined Whitesnake,” says Sarzo,
“was because Whitesnake was the opening band for Quiet Riot in ‘84. We would
spend like three or four months on the road, hanging out, so yeah. Incredibly
talented composer and performer and guitar player and a singer too. He’s a hell
of a singer.”

“Having seen what was going on between
Sykes and Coverdale, the push and pull it… I was questioning it,” noted Sarzo
speaking to
Rock Beat
in ‘88. “I just left a situation which was not
ideal, and things were not as steady between those two as it should have been.
So Tommy and I decided to wait on it and see how things evolved. The turning
point was when we did the video ‘Still Of The Night.’ I went there
and saw Adrian and Vivian and how well everyone worked together
and I thought, this is great.”

O’er to guitar, no more Sykes and/or Mel Galley;
the new six-string team, to reiterate, was Vivian and Vandenberg.

“The first time I met David was quite a
few years ago,” notes Vandenberg in the same
Rock Beat
piece quoted
above. “I must have really impressed him because he would call me every other
year asking me to be in his band. He would say, ‘Have you made up your mind
yet?’ Each time he’d ask I’d say, ‘Yes, I’ve made my decision. I want to go on
with Vandenberg.’ When he last asked me, it was the best time to actually say
yes. Now I feel like I made the right decision. Working with someone else’s
band as opposed to my own has a lot of interesting sides to it. It’s given me
much more time to practice my guitar, which is nice. I’m supposed to be a
guitar player but I haven’t practiced since I formed Vandenberg. The lyrics and
the songs and the business and the interviews and everything took all my time,
so I couldn’t practice my guitar.”

“It’s good that all of us are different
nationalities because we can all tell stories and exaggerate them
and no one knows that we’re lying,” added Campbell. “We’re all very
professional about what we do in Whitesnake. It tends to be a creative
environment, much more enjoyable than Dio ever was. I like that I can speak my
mind about something. If David sings flat I can tell him. I don’t have to worry
about getting fired. Ronnie and I never got along from the start. There was a
huge personality difference. David had said he wanted a two-guitar band and he
specifically wanted Adrian and myself because he knew that we were both
available, but he first made contact with me through his record label. David’s
great to work with. Due to his attitude, there’s a great communication in the
band. Everyone is very open about what they are doing and what they
want to do. It’s not like Dio at all. The Dio thing was very closed shop. It
was worse than going to school.”

As for the exit of John Sykes from the
band, well, here’s how the blonde bomber himself framed the breaking up of the
dream team back in 1989... “David sent me to London to do the
lead solos, which I thought was a bit strange, but I finished up the
guitar parts there. Then things got funny. Halfway through the
guitar parts, our producer, Mike Stone was fired. So I phoned up the
record company to find out what was going on and they were not very open about the
situation. So I carried on recording. I tried to phone David, and he wouldn’t
come to the phone or return my calls. Then I got a message from our management
that they wanted the tapes by that weekend. I tried to contact David and the
management again with no reply, so I phoned the record company to ask where I
stood, and they said it looked like I was fired, also. Apparently they
pleaded with David not to fire me, but he steadfastly refused. So basically, David
just waited until I finished all the parts and then he dumped me. I flew out to
LA when he was mixing it, but he wouldn’t talk to me and locked himself in his
car — I figured I’d frightened him a bit. That was the last time I saw him.

“With Whitesnake, it was the
first time I’d had the opportunity to write like that on such a large scale and
as a full co-writer — especially with David; it was a big thing for me. I was
pleased with the response to the album, because it was mostly my material, but
I’m still a bit pissed-off. When the royalty checks came in, it softened the
blow. I still only got a third of what I felt I should have, but you live and
learn. I can’t deny that I probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my
involvement with Whitesnake.”

Where “here” was for John was a
promotional tour in support of his new band Blue Murder, who had on their
hands a much hyped self-titled supergroup record, John being joined by veteran
bassist Tony Franklin and even more veteran drummer Carmine Appice.

“Honestly, I’ve been so sheltered in the
studio and out of the public eye that I thought that I was pretty much gone and
forgotten about,” mused Sykes. “I mean, I’ve met many people who thought that
Vivian and Adrian played on the
Whitesnake
album! I resigned myself to the
fact that I have to drag myself up from the bottom of the barrel. It’s really
nice to know some people know the true story — especially the
musicians. I don’t want to do all that work and not receive any acclaim for it.
So I’m just dying to get out and play!”

“I’d like to think that this is the
strongest material I’ve ever done,” continued John, bigging up Blue Murder,
“because, to me, this is the most I’ve achieved in music as far as writing,
arranging and everything. I’m pleased with this band — on a personal basis I’ve
achieved quite a goal.”

The back story of the
Blue Murder
record intersects with the story of Whitesnake at numerous points, so we offer
it here with considerable eye for detail.

“Basically John had this deal on Geffen,”
begins drummer Carmine Appice, “and we were supposed to go to Vancouver and
work with this new producer named Bob Rock, who was known for engineering a lot
of big records, but had never produced any, and this was like his first
production deal. And believe it or not, we got Bob Rock for like $30,000. And
we had this other guy named Mike Fraser who was same thing, big engineer, and
here he was working for $2500 a week. Making more than Bob actually. Tony
Martin from Black Sabbath was supposed to be the singer, but to cut a long
story short, based on John’s singing, they gave him the deal, because he was
fresh out of Whitesnake and I was on that Pink Floyd record, and we were
side-by-side with each other on the charts, at that point in December ‘87.

“It seems like yesterday. I remember when
I first heard about Blue Murder, Cozy Powell was going to play in it. And I
always said, Cozy gets all these big gigs and I would love to play with John
Sykes and Tony Franklin because I loved the way those guys played. Sykes on the
Whitesnake album,
Slide It In
, and the big one in ‘87, which I was
actually asked to do but I couldn’t, because I was in King Kobra. But I loved
Sykes’ playing, and Tony with The Firm; I just love the way he played so I
thought this was going to be a great band. So when I heard that Cozy Powell was
going to be in the band, I thought I’d take a trip over to England and try
locate where these guys were and let them know I was interested in checking it
out.

“So I went to England in December, 1987.
My brother, Vinny, was playing there with Dio and they were doing like three
nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, and I felt that anyone I wanted to talk to
about a new band or to locate Blue Murder is probably going to be at the
Dio show. So sure enough, Chris Welch, the writer, told me where to get hold of
John Sykes and where the band was. He gave me some phone numbers that I called
and basically I talk to John and Tony and said, ‘Look, I’m in England, and have
you got a drummer? I’d love to come down and check it out.’ And they
said, ‘Great, because we just had Aynsley Dunbar down here, and we don’t know
if he’s going to be the one, so we’re still looking.’ So I said alright, and I
had a rent-a-car and I drove up for about two hours to this place called
Blackpool, and that’s where John’s stepfather had his studio in his house. So I
went in there, and there was a Cozy Powell drum set in there and I knew me and these
guys were going to click, because as soon as we got in there we started smoking
hash [
laughs
]. I thought, these guys are cool, and we started jamming
and we just created magic.”

“We did three days of playing, and by the
time I left, I knew that was it — the three of us were a trio,” continues
Carmine. “So I remember, the day I was leaving for Vancouver, I got a call the
day I was leaving (actually I got it the night before), because it was a little
later in England. I got it like about midnight, a call from John’s stepfather,
who was part of the management team at the time, saying that Tony Martin didn’t
want to come over. He said, ‘Tony’s decided not to do it’ and I thought Tony...
I was thinking of Tony Franklin. And then he said no, Tony Martin. I was almost
freaked-out there for a minute because I really wanted to play with Tony. So I
was sort of freaked-out and I said, ‘Look, what are we going to do?’ And they
said, ‘Well, we’re going over anyway and we’ll go finish what we’ve got to do
and maybe by the time we finish the tracks, we’ll have a new singer.’