Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (26 page)

“So we went over anyway and we worked
with Bob Rock, and I remember, when the demos for the band were done, and John
got the deal, John took over the singing. So based on his singing, they
gave us the deal. Like I say, Whitesnake was still up there and I think Pink
Floyd was right next to them. And I remember John and I laughing how we were
side-by-side on the charts. So basically, we did all the tracks and then
we decided to take a break, because we didn’t have a singer. And it took us
about three months. I mean, it was an amazing experience. And I remember, we
did the drum tracks twice actually. Once we finished them, Bob and Mike came up
with a tremendously better drum sound, by moving some mics around and fooling
around a little bit. So they said, you know, we can either use what we’ve got
or do it again so we said, let’s do it again. We want to make this album
tremendous. And we did.”

“John Sykes is a brilliant guitar
player,” says Appice, asked for a psychological profile of the
troubled ex-Tygers twanger. “And I think a lot of the guitar players that are
happening now, like the guys in Avenged Sevenfold, all those kinds of bands,
with their heavy kind of guitar… I think a lot of it came from John. Even
Metallica, like when Metallica had their huge album with Bob Rock. Bob Rock had
all our sounds sampled, Blue Murder sounds. And we had a tremendous drum sound.
He never got a tremendous drum sound before like that, because it went from
analog to digital. But the analog drum sound on the 24 track is just
unbelievable! It was really amazing. And I think he took those and sampled them
and used them on all the albums after that, Mötley Crüe, all that stuff. That’s
my personal feeling. Me and John felt the same way. John had a certain big
giant sound that he could get, and I’m hearing that sound in a lot of bands.
Zakk Wylde has it, and you know, I found out on the Michael Schenker side, I
think he got some of that idea from Schenker, to be truthful. I heard some of
Michael’s old stuff that predates John Sykes — that sounded like Sykes to me. I
know Schenker was an influence on Sykes, without a doubt.

“But Sykes had a great songwriting style,
you know, riffs and songwriting. He was great at that. Melodies, lyrics, and
you know, when we were doing Blue Murder, like I say, we had a singer, Tony
Martin, who flaked on us. So we didn’t know what to do. So Bob said, ‘Look,
come over and let’s work on the songs; we’ll find a singer. Do the
tracks and we’ll find a singer.’ We never found a singer that we all liked,
Kalodner liked, Geffen liked, Bob liked, we liked, and John did some of the
demos that Kalodner liked and I said, ‘John look, let’s just do the
trio! We could be a cool trio like Cream.’ So we persuaded John to do it, gave
him his confidence to sing, and he did a tremendous job. But he’s a strange guy
— he’s a guitar player, very introverted, does everything his way.”

“We were supposed to get Blue Murder together
again over the past ten years, I can’t tell you how many times,” continues
Appice, “and it never happened. Something happens with John. Either
he can’t get a manager together, and he’s worked with a bunch of them,
stuff happens between them, I don’t know. It’s just always a problem. Wherever
I go, people love that band. People love it, and we never really gave it a
shot. Because by the time we did the album in ‘89, we were so sure that that it
was going. I would’ve bet my house on it, if somebody said this album was going
to fail. I mean, it failed because it sold 400,000 worldwide, but it was
supposed to sell like a couple million in America, because it was good enough
to do that, and we had no manager at the time. You have to have everything
running perfect. You have to have the manager, record company, PR, radio PR,
you know, the band, everything had to be in sync. If you had one thing missing,
you’re screwed. So we had the management part missing. Because John had a
management team that was bad. He had some guy that was a marketing guy from
Capitol, and he had his stepdad, and some lawyer. There wasn’t like really one
guy manager with a plan. And they listened to John too much. And they
didn’t have a plan. It’s like this is what you guys are going to do.”

What was John Kalodner’s input? What did
he want the band to be?

“There was no manager in charge... like
if we had a big manager like an Irving Azoff or a Rob Stone who was big at the
time, and they would say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to
go with Bon Jovi, we’re going to release this ‘Valley Of The Kings’ as the
first single, we’re not going to push too hard, we’re just going to get a buzz
going, then we’re going to hit the song at radio, and then we’re going to
release ‘Jelly Roll’ at radio and MTV at the same time, and have a big push and
go for it’... there was no one there who said that. It’s like, ‘We’re going to
go on tour, we need a tour, we need a tour. All right, Bon Jovi tour, twelve
days with Bon Jovi, fantastic.’”

“And what does John do? He fires the
manager,” says Appice. “Okay, so now we have no manager on tour. And instead of
pushing, doing the plan that Kalodner had, for letting ‘Valley Of The Kings’ go
on MTV at either medium rotation or light rotation, just to get the
band going, we wanted to see it more often because we spent $150,000 on the
thing at the time, which was big money. So we wanted it on MTV, and we sort of
pushed Kalodner to get it on heavy rotation, even though he knew it wasn’t
going to be the song. ‘Jelly Roll’ was going to be the song. And then
‘Jelly Roll’ went to radio, and it went top four, request, top four airplay,
and then MTV wouldn’t play it because the first one didn’t make it. Yeah, so it
was a mess. We had no manager, and then we got this guy Bruce Allen that
managed, you know him, up there, got him to manage it.

“But by the time he got in, it was all
too late. So we sort of blew it, and so the album didn’t do what it was
supposed to do, and we were so shocked. John was so shocked, because he was in
competition with Coverdale too. John thinks that Geffen pulled the
cord, pulled the button, because of Geffen, because of his wife, because of the
album that sold twenty million albums. And John was in a lawsuit with
Coverdale. It was a big mess. But in Japan we were huge. We went there
and it was amazing. Because we did like cover stories in
Burrn!
magazine, and we were the trio of the ‘90s. They said, ‘Other great trios, Jimi
Hendrix Experience, Cream, Beck, Bogert & Appice [
laughs
].’ I think
that was cool that I was in the new one and the old one.”

And to raise the drama, future production
superstar Bob Rock was part of the high-powered team. “Yes, and Bob’s input was
all in the production area. You know, we had all that stuff going, before Bob
Rock. I mean, Bob was just brilliant at bringing out performances in everybody,
getting this great, tremendous sound and mixing it. I remember when we did the
transfer from analog to digital, it didn’t sound as good. So me and John were
going to go into the mix and tell Bob that we insist on doing it on analog; we
don’t want to do this digital thing. Bob looked at us and said, ‘Look, get the
fuck out of here or I’m not going to mix it.’ And that was the
end of that [
laughs
]. Me and John were pulling the power play.”

So did John really feel that he wanted to
get revenge upon David for what went down with Whitesnake?

“Well, he just wanted to show Coverdale
that he – because John wrote all the songs, ‘Still Of The Night’ – he wrote all
the riffs, all of the music, and he wrote some of the lyrics, sang on it. He
really had a lot to do with that. Difficult to get along with, but you know, he’s
no more difficult than Jeff Beck, Michael Schenker or Ted Nugent or any of the
other great guitar players. But we got to be close friends. He knew nothing
about the business, and when we joined together, he was the captain, I was the
co-captain, because I knew a lot about the business and royalties, and how
things worked. He didn’t really know. He’s always just been an artist, you
know? He’s always had a manager person taking care of the stuff. But now he’s
changed. Now he’s more into it. He got out of Thin Lizzy last year and I
thought we were going to do Blue Murder again, but it never happened — again.
He called up a few months ago, and I hadn’t talked to him in three or four
months. But before that we were trying to talk every couple of weeks to try get
a manager, but we just couldn’t get anybody on board. For no reason.”

“Yeah, Coverdale was pretty mad at me,”
says John Kalodner, asked to comment on what one would think was a conflict, a
point of aggravation. “But I said to him, you know, if you want me to be the
A&R guy that I was to you, I will put Blue Murder on hold until anything’s
done with you. I said that straight to him.”

But the big stipulation was that David
had to write with John Sykes again? “Yes, that was the big problem. I really
forced that as much as I could. And he wouldn’t consider it at all, never, in
any time that I would see him in subsequent years. I might see him at a show. I
might go see him and see how he was. He never would consider it. But even
though John felt he was disrespected by Coverdale, he absolutely said he would
have done it. He really wanted to work with Coverdale again.”

Asked what the flaw was in the
Blue Murder game plan, Kalodner says, “That he’s not a star lead singer. He’s a
star guitar player, he’s a star songwriter — he’s not a star lead singer. And
he also needed a songwriting partner like most people do. Steve Perry and Neal
Schon, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Johnny Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. I mean,
it usually takes a pair of these people — John Sykes and David Coverdale. You
know, there’s a magic, if you’re an A&R guy, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, to how these
songs were written. They were written under a model that Lennon and McCartney
set up. There’s just enough input from the other person to regulate the
writing.”

“It’s of no interest to me,” Coverdale
told Bob Garon, asked about Blue Murder. “Last week, a journalist called me to
read what one of them said, and it was impossible for the hairs not to stand up
on the back of my neck. It was incredible, the bitterness. It was hard to
believe that anyone could exist with such bitterness and still be a millionaire
at the same time. I have the choice of who I want to work with; it’s as simple
as that. Out of professional courtesy, yes, I listen to what former colleagues
are doing, but it would sound petty and I’d be in their corner if I started
giving my musical critique of what they’re doing now. But everything’s for the
best. The last chapter of Whitesnake — and the one before that — would never
have been able to handle the success we’ve now achieved. There’s no way! No
way! But it’s a pleasure, now. Simply a pleasure. It’s great to be working with
a band that’s secure as musicians and as people.”

Back on the big stage, it was time for
this week’s version of Whitesnake to cash in on the success of their
gleaming new smash hit album, bookended by a couple of hotshot replacements for
the anchor that was Sykes. And to put it in some sort of context, outside of
Whitesnake, who is doing brisk business at this time? Well, that would be the
likes of Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Mötley and Cinderella, and then
from the old guard, AC/DC, Ozzy, Alice Cooper and, most resoundingly,
Aerosmith.

“For twelve years I have not played
anyone else’s songs,” mused Adrian Vandenberg in
Hit Parader
, talking
guitar solos with bandmate Viv Campbell and journalist Elianne Halbersberg.
“But the solo should take people along with me, make them enjoy every note I
play. With my band, Vandenberg, I sometimes played complex classical chord
progressions. In Whitesnake, the music is rhythm and blues/heavy rock. Right
now, I’m working on alien ground and it gives another dimension to my playing —
more inspiration and a little rowdier style. I think the next album will show a
serious difference, once we are working as a band on the arrangements. On
stage, my playing is a combination of my mind and hands. During a solo, I’m
conscious of what I do because I want to play interesting melodies. I try to be
a melodic player, and I hope people agree. I don’t want to play just an off-the-cuff
flurry of notes. A solo should creep into the listener’s mind. It should be a
memorable part of the song, something you can sing, not just notes going on and
on. The mind starts the fingers, so there is concentration involved. At the
same time, I’m careful not to be overly conscious of the hands alone. David is
very open to giving everybody the creative room they deserve. Had this not been
the case, he would not have been able to keep the group together.
As we get more familiar with the material, we reach a freedom to experiment.
David has encouraged everyone to bring in ideas.”