Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (29 page)

With “Kittens Got Claws” — this is high
stakes rock ‘n’ roll; no time for apostrophes — we’re back to carousing hair
metal, although perhaps the hookiest moment of the whole record arrives with the
“Sweet, sweet child of the street” pre-chorus. There are two amusing references
in the lyrics, one being a comparison to an XJS (a Jaguar, i.e. as in the
iconic “Here I Go Again” video) and two, the image of a G-string tuned to “A,”
funny in light of Keith Olsen’s assessment of Adrian’s songwriting
methodologies.

Ex-Deep Purple buddy of David’s Glenn
Hughes contributed back-up vocals to “Kittens Got Claws,” along with “Slow Poke
Music” and “Fool For Your Loving,” although most of the backgrounds on the
album were done by Tommy Funderburk and Richard Page. Glenn, still battling the
drug addiction that saw him turfed from Black Sabbath and not singing up to
par, acknowledges that he was sent far back into the back of the
mixes.

“He was on the Whitesnake record,
Slip
Of The Tongue
,” confirms Olsen, less accurately adding, “all over it. He
was doing what he does best, singing. Yeah, he was singing backgrounds with
Coverdale. And see, the reason why is the guy who did all the
backgrounds on Whitesnake
1987
was John Sykes. And Sykes and him had
that sound together, and so when Sykes was now gone, and Vivian doesn’t sing
very well, and neither does Rudy, and so what do you have? Well, let’s bring in
Glenn. And so we got Glenn.”

As for David himself, “He still sings
great,” continues Olsen. “But I tell you, seeing David live a few times, it’s
tougher for him. You talk about natural singers, Glenn Hughes of course, but
also Ronnie James Dio, amazing singer. That’s all about diaphragm, diaphragm
support. When you have that thing, that’s how Lou Gramm sings too. But David,
you know, he was always at the very, very top of his range. And so… is he still
smoking, do you know? But it was always at the top of his range, and if you
aren’t physically 100%, it’s really hard to sing at the top of the
range like that. Tune the guitar down a whole tone, all of them.
So it’s going to get a little darker sounding, it’s okay! Instead of singing in
A, sing it all in G [
laughs
]. Please. There’s that, and there’s
also making sure that… you know, for years and years, he would always take a
nap just before going on stage, because David Coverdale sounds like Richard
Burton as soon as he’s been up for about three hours. ‘Oh darling, it’s been so
wonderful to have you here.’ And when he first gets up, it’s all that whiskey
and drawl and gravel in his throat, and he sounds great. And so we actually did
those vocals at 9am, on those albums. 9am vocals, and then he would go and lay
down, go take a nap, and then he would wake up at two or three, and we would
sing some more.”

“But no, Glenn is this master of vocal
parts. He is a master, and so Glenn and I are working on these parts, and we
put this really, really cool background part on, oh God, (sings it), but
anyway, Steve Vai comes in, and the first thing out of his mouth is, ‘Wow,
that’s really unique and cool.’ And he looks at me and Glenn and says, ‘You
know, Keith, that’s not in the mode’ [
laughs
]. I don’t care! It sounds
cool! Glenn looked at me, ‘Huh?!’ Steve is a very super-talented guy, and I got
to be a lot closer with him after that album, because he was a trustee, I was a
trustee for NARAS [
National Academy of Recording Arts
& Sciences'
] and we served on a bunch of the
same committees and we became very close.”

“Wings Of The Storm”, well, if “Now
You’re Gone” was a shameless power ballad, this one is a form of humourless
European-tinged heavy metal that neither David or Steve Vai had any business
patronizing.

“Well, heavy metal is a broad term,”
begins Vai, asked what his relationship to that musical monster is, even if he
takes the answer into... fashion. “In the ‘80s, when we were playing heavy
metal, my relationship to the clothes and the metal scene that I was doing is
very different than what it is now. Elements of what I do are metal, and
elements of the way I dress are metal. But conventional metal-type dressing, I
stay as far away from that as I possibly can. I do not ascribe to the
conventional metal attire. I really never did. I mean sure, I’ll wear a leather
coat or something like that. But I don’t think there’s ever any photos of me
wearing studs, that kind of leather and studs metal thing. Because it’s always
repulsed me. I go for more of a sleek look. I try to make my clothes
match the feel of the music. Because the way you look really has a lot to do
with how you feel when you’re performing.”

Next up on
Slip Of The Tongue
is a
second more successful power ballad from the album, “The Deeper The Love”
reaching No. 28 on Billboard and No. 35 in the UK. “‘The Deeper The Love’ is
something that you can look at like an Otis song,” comments Coverdale, “you
know, if you strip away all the, once again, musical embellishment. It’s a good
love song. Did you ever hear my
Starkers In Tokyo
CD? It’s just Adrian
and I playing the songs. Starkers means naked, and it was for 60, 70 people, an
especially invited crowd. And I love the version on there which is just Adrian
playing the simple chords and me singing it.”

David ascribes the chord sequence of the
verses to himself and the chorus chords to Adrian, adding also that he finished
writing the song on vacation in Tahiti. The single was issued in three formats,
a 7” backed with “Judgment Day,” a 12” backed with “Judgment Day” and “Sweet
Lady Luck” and a CD that includes all of the above plus the “Vai Voltage Mix”
of “Fool For Your Loving.” “Sweet Lady Luck” is the gem here, a finished non-LP
track that is as strong of a middle metal rocker as anything that made the
record, despite keyboards that are too high in the mix.

“It was the ballad that sold records,”
notes Keith Olsen. “A power ballad is really good because it’s a way of having
a rock ‘n’ roll band be accessible, because radio was not going to play
anything other than the ballad. So gee, okay, what do we have to do to get
exposure, to get people to actually want to go out and buy it? Because
remember, the media is the message. The power ballad was the big thing that
year, and so they went out and they toured that album, and everybody was
saying, ‘Oh, such terribly disappointing sales.’ Well, okay, we only did four
million copies. I’m serious! We did four million copies of that album in
sixteen months, where the other one did twelve. Okay, so our business is really
down. Well, no, they called it a stiff and the beginning of the
end, because it only sold four million copies! [
laughs
]. It was hideous,
what the market did, and what the record company deemed as hits or misses, or
successes or failures, and they called an album a failure, because it only did
four million copies. And only had one big hit on it.”

Of course the video was a big budget
affair, starring as female foil, a pre-off-the-rails Tawny Kitaen. “The biggest
expenses at that time was something that everybody, not just Whitesnake, was
suffering with, and it was the videos,” reflects Rudy Sarzo. “The videos got
out of hand. We’d spend more money on the videos than we did on the
actual recording. Yeah, and we did three videos on
Slip Of The Tongue
.
And, oh my God, they were each about $350,000. And that’s all non-recoupable — the
band paid for that. Yeah, but then again, actually, in those days, the
record company, the management, would have a meeting with MTV, and MTV, by the
end of the ‘80s, they would basically tell you what they wanted included in the
video. And if those certain things did not meet the criteria, they
would just decide not to play it, which means you just wasted $300,000.”

“‘Judgment Day’ is a corker, though,
isn’t it?” chuckles David, on the album’s late-in-sequence homage to “Kashmir”
and “No Quarter” and “Still Of The Night.” Again, like the awkward handling of
“Fool For Your Loving,” here’s the Whitesnake board of directors along with
upper management failing to turn the band into the Zeppelin of the
1980s. Which was a fool’s game anyway — just ask Kingdom Come, who at this
point had acquired a gold record but also widespread ridicule for their
efforts at the same transparent ruse.

Continues Coverdale, thickening the
plot, “‘Judgment Day,’ I wrote that song peeved at my old friend — and believe
me, at one time we were friends — Robert Plant. He had started on a witch hunt
for me and I decided to really stick it up his bottom and do a...  you know,
I’m a huge fan of Middle Eastern music, and whenever I’m in Portugal, I tune to
the Moroccan or Algerian radio or whatever, and everything sounds like
‘Kashmir’ [
laughs
]. And I mean, no disrespect, because as you know, I
worked with Pagey, whom I love dearly. But quite honestly, I had all of these
elements of the song. Adrian came in and wrote that beautiful bridge, the
music for the bridge. ‘We walk toward desire’ and the rest of the
stuff is pretty much mine. I had back surgery after herniating a disk and I was
completely compromised on Percodan and I wrote what I call the
Percodan riff. Are you a guitarist? (sings it) — that’s the ‘Judgment Day’
riff. I call that the Percodan riff. I was like Lemmy.”

“Slow Poke Music” is of a type of funky
hair metal with pregnant pauses one could see on a late 1980s record by
Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe, Extreme or even Warrant. The riff rises to the
challenge, however, as one wonders with intrigue how this song might have come
off at the hands of John Sykes and the rest of the band-on-a-mission that made the
Whitesnake
album. Nonetheless, Adrian recalls that this one as well as
“Cheap An’ Nasty” were built from riffs that he’d had since the
waning days of the fine, fine Vandenberg band — and he was indeed coming up
with more through the touring cycle, having taken a four-track recorder on the
road with him.

Slip Of The Tongue
closes with what is perhaps its most ambitious track, a dark and
near epic ballad called “Sailing Ships.” With evocations of Bad Company, the
classic English version of Whitesnake, this is demonstrative of how one rises
to anything one might call Zeppelin-esque, not by scavenging, but by writing in
a zone of magic.

“‘Sailing Ships,’ that’s about challenges
we face in life in general,” Coverdale told Anne Leighton. “The open palette of
your life is up to you. You can take the song as if you left home for the
first time. It’s any new adventure that you embark on — it’s up to you. Of
course, people are instrumental. But in the final analysis, everything else is
a catalyst, a galvanizing force to be recognized.”

The track lived, and lives, on. It was the
opener to the acoustic
Starkers In Tokyo
live album David and Adrian put
together in 1997 and it was also reprised for Adrian’s return to rock, the
Vandenberg’s
MoonKings
record from 2014. And on that version, the
vocalist is none other than David Coverdale.

“David and I are very, very in touch, as
many people know,” explains Adrian. “We’re good friends and we remained good
friends after the Whitesnake period. And David was telling me all the
time, ‘Come on, you’ve got to record an album.’ And this was the
time I wanted to see my daughter grow up. She lives with her mother,
and her mom and I separated twelve, thirteen years ago, so I don’t see her as
much as I’d like. And I didn’t want to be one of those dads who popped his head
around the door once a year and goes, ‘Hey, I’m dad,’ you know. It was such an
important thing for me, because she doesn’t live with me, so I wanted to see
her grow up a little bit.

“And I wanted to catch up with my
painting. I was an artist, painter, before I became a professional musician,
actually. And all those things together delayed my being in the
music business again. So David was pushing me all the time, and a year and a
half ago I told him, ‘David, you’re getting your way; I’ve finally started to
work towards an album again.’ So he said, ‘Oh, great, it would be an honour for
me if I could sing a track on the album.’ I said, ‘Well, the honour would be
completely mutual, you know. I would love it.’ So since David was on the
road last year, all the time, I realized there was not going to be any time to
record or write a new song together.”

“But I always wanted to do another
version of ‘Sailing Ships,’” continues Vandenberg, “and as a lot of people may
know, due to a problem with my wrist at the time, during the
Slip Of The
Tongue
record, I couldn’t record the guitars on the album, and we got Steve
Vai in to finish that album. And obviously, since our styles are quite
different, it didn’t really turn out the way that I was having in mind when I
wrote the music for that album. Which doesn’t say that it isn’t, you know, good
or something. Because Steve is an amazing player. But it’s just like, I had
more of a blues rock vibe in mind. And ‘Sailing Ships’ has remained one of my
favourite tracks, so I thought I would love to do another version of it.

“And David was very excited about that
idea, so I recorded all the stuff in Holland and I wrote a new arrangement for
it and brought in real strings, including my niece playing violin, daughter of
my sister — she’s been a classical violin player since she was 5. And I wrote a
little instrumental bit in the middle that I thought could enhance the
more melancholic, kind of introspective or reflective type of vibe that I had
in mind. And it worked out really great, and David, fortunately did some of his
great signature Coverdale soulful vocals on it, you know? So it really moved me
a lot.”