Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (31 page)

Slip Of The Tongue
reached No. 10 in the charts and quickly became known as one of them huge-selling bombs you see after a crazy-selling record outta nowhere. So David, knackered,
too proud, out of ideas... whatever the reason or combination thereof,
decided to knock it on its head. In essence, it very much felt that if America
didn’t want a Whitesnake as powerful as the White House, then David Coverdale
would be content with leaving office.

“With Aerosmith, there was
Permanent
Vacation
,
Pump
and then
Get A Grip
,” says the
man in the white suit, John Kalodner, when asked to provide a post-mortem of
this crazy trip across the ocean to the land of riches. “If Coverdale would
have had a succession of records like that, he’d still be playing indoor arenas
and sheds in the summer like Aerosmith does. And Coverdale did have it in him
to be a front man at this age. I mean, definitely, given his looks, his voice
and his presence. Just like Steven Tyler. But, he thought he was always right,
and once he had any kind of success, he just didn’t want to hear my criticisms.
They were not listening to me at all. It was like... it’s what you said.
Remember, bands make most of their money from touring. So it was driven then
by their managers, not by the record company. The record company — stupidly —
made no money from their touring. They never did. In that era.”

What John is referring to there
is a supposition on my part that given the massive scale of the
Slip Of The Tongue
tour, it might have been hard for the
band to ascertain that there was much dry-rot in the hull of the
good sailing ship Whitesnake. In essence, when it came to the money-making
machine that is touring, two things are happening here. One is that, to all
intents and purposes, the band was promoting and representing the
Whitesnake
album as much as they were
Slip Of The Tongue
. In fact, given the
blow-up success of the former and the vagaries of record-selling math, playing
live probably had a more positive effect on sales of the old album than the new
one. Two —and granted, tied up in the first point — there’s a twelve to
eighteen months lag in the death of these bands’ careers, where record sales
dry up, but no one has bothered to tell the concert ticket-buyer. In any event,
despite touring glory — it was a dead cat bounce, as it were — appetites all
round for this band to stay together and make another record had dissipated.

But John Kalodner was trying every trick
he could think up. “I approached him to do another record where I wanted him to
write with all these great writers that I had found with Aerosmith, all these
great rock writers. And to maybe change from Keith Olsen to Bruce Fairbairn or
Bob Rock or whatever — he didn’t want to fuckin’ hear about it. It’s just
exactly what you said. He’d just come off this gargantuan tour... he thought
what I said was irrelevant.”

So was that the expression of some sort
of British pride, as in, “Song doctors?! Are you kidding me? I was in Deep
Purple!”?

“Every artist has that.”

But you couldn’t break through his armour?

“No, but Steven Tyler still criticizes me
in articles for killing his babies, which means his and Joe Perry’s songs.
Bastardizing his music. So that’s not British, that’s musicians who are...
that’s extremely talented musicians. They’ll never feel okay about an outside
songwriter working with them.”

“I told you the mistakes,” summarizes
Kalodner, in any event. “You know, I wanted to say that even though I totally
put this whole thing together 100% myself, including the writing in the
band, I also wanted to tell you about the mistakes I later made. Because that’s
something you have to learn from. I went into the ‘90s having learned from the
Whitesnake experience. As I said, when I made the huge Aerosmith record, it was
having known that I fucked-up the follow-up Whitesnake record. I think in the
rock era, only Jon Bon Jovi and maybe Metallica have outsold
Get A Grip
.
Because it had five hit singles on it.”

And so Kalodner had ideas that would help
him overcome his self-admitted mistake, although he couldn’t apply them to
Whitesnake. Time hadn’t allowed him yet to have learned the
Get A Grip
paradigm of which he speaks, this idea of ensuring the hits are there
up into numbers equalling four, or in
Get A Grip
’s case five. But down a
similar road, he was trying to impart onto David the wisdoms gained from
A&Ring
Permanent Vacation
and
Pump
, namely the
idea of outside songwriters and the attendant magic one might conjure north of the
border in Super Natural British Columbia with the likes of Bruce Fairbairn or
Bob Rock.

His other exhortation to Coverdale was,
of course, to put the team back together. “The thing is, Adrian Vandenberg was
great in Whitesnake, but as an addition to their music, he was nothing. I begged
David Coverdale in every way I could to just please write the
next record with John Sykes. I did everything that I knew how to do, from all the
years I had been making records and what I learned from Ahmet Ertegun and David
Geffen. These British people are so stubborn, he diminished John Sykes and
wouldn’t even consider it.”

“Nobody is as good-looking as John Sykes
except maybe Jon Bon Jovi,” laughs Kalodner, reminded of quips directly from
David where he says that John even made him want to look as good as he could,
let along write and perform as good as his guitarist. “I mean, I never saw
anyone who looked like that, a guy who looked like that. You have to see him to
believe it. I mean, in his day, what was he, 6’ 1” or whatever, and with the
long natural blonde hair. It just was beyond belief. And the guy was a big
manly guy, not some kind of pussy-looking guy. It was fascinating. That’s what
my whole envisionment was, Coverdale and Sykes — you know, being together
at the front of the stage.”

But at least for Kalodner, the
ending has been a happy story, with the king of Fantasy Island in the
white suit very much enjoying retirement. “Well I am,”
laughs
Kalodner.
“The one thing I’m enjoying the most is not having to deal with the
craziness that happened every day. And believe me, it was crazy. That’s the
one thing I can tell you for sure [
laughs
].”

Over the page:
Bringing things right up to date, David playing Madrid
in 2013. With four platinum albums, he's not done badly for a lad from
Saltburn-by-the-Sea. (
Dr_Zoidberg
)

Epilogue

“We Looked Like
Christmas Trees”

Married to Tawny Kitaen in February
1989, David Coverdale, by 1991, was working on the divorce. Professionally,
somehow
Slip Of The Tongue
felt like a failure, and if we ascribe to
David’s artistic integrity, it was more of a sting that it was a critical
failure than anything commercially drooped.

If it was ironic that Coverdale’s label,
Geffen, had signed a dirty hair metal circus called Guns N’ Roses (pretty much
the anti-Whitesnake of the Strip, yet still very much of the Strip), the
irony became richer when another Geffen record called
Nevermind
, issued
on September 24, 1991 killed the likes of Whitesnake dead with alarming
efficiency. Compare the dusty “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video with the
likes of the high gloss “Here I Go Again” and David looked very much like
yesterday’s news, representative of an era of conspicuous consumption overblown
and now outgrown.

Fortunately, Coverdale knew it. At the
close of the exhausting
Slip Of The Tongue
tour, September 26, 1990, he
came to the realization that he was living a life of illusion, punctuating the
occasion by having his wardrobe girl burn all his embarrassing stage clothes.
He soon meets Cindy, the woman who would become his wife, and he would do for a
bit what he kept sayin’, that is relax and become a homebody (apropos that
Cindy and David would meet for the first time at a hair salon, in Reno Nevada,
on... Rock Blvd).

“David has been working hard for quite a
long time now,” said Steve Vai back in the midst of touring
Slip Of The
Tongue
, at which time there were already rumours of the band being shelved.
“I think there’s going to be a break after this tour for some time before we
start working again. When the time comes to get together, we’ll reassess the
situation and see what’s going on. We talk about writing together — we throw
around ideas and they sound good, so we’ll see how it develops.”

Already though, it seemed as if Vai’s eye
had wandered to other things, namely his high-profile new solo album,
Passion
And Warfare
, which would become his only gold record. The album was issued
amidst Whitesnake tour dates, July of 1990. “It’s perfect, it’s timed exactly the
way I wanted it to be. With the Whitesnake thing, it gave me the
opportunity to make a great rock album and go out on tour which is what I
really like to do.
Passion And Warfare
is being exposed to an audience
now that may not have picked up on it if I wasn’t in Whitesnake. So Whitesnake
is a real plus for me. I feel that if the music is good, the kids will pick up
on it. Look at Kenny G — he plays clarinet and sells out arenas!”

“I didn’t want to have vocals on the
record because then it would have been a statement of a rock band. I’d be
taking on a career move, and I didn’t want to compete with Whitesnake in that
regard. I’m looking forward to having my own band someday. I can sing, but I’m
not that good. Ultimately, I want to find a singer because I like playing with
singers. I’ve been now with Coverdale and Roth who are extremely colourful,
vibrant, enigmatic, and can control an audience. I need to be in a band with
people who are as powerful as I am.”

Soon back in the saddle after the
likes of Vai and the rest of his not-so-much family had dispersed, David
Coverdale would enter a new marriage of sorts, with one Jimmy Page, for an
overwrought record called
Coverdale Page
, issued March 15th of 1993.

Bloated, excessive, a record of the
1980s plunked in the 1990s? “It kind of was,” says bassist on much of it, Ricky
Phillips. “And to be honest — and I don’t mind being quoted on this—I really
think, as good as that record was, and I think it’s a great record, I would’ve
loved to know what it would’ve sounded like if we all went in and cut the
whole thing in three weeks the way we rehearsed it. I’ve never played them,
and they are safeguarded now, but our rehearsals of those songs, same songs, they’re
so live and huge and Zeppelin-y sort of sounding tracks, and not as
overproduced. Everybody at that period in time just got so overproduced, and
that’s what that record ended up sounding like. The Led Zeppelin approach
would’ve been fantastic, more to my taste.”

“His work ethic is so on the
money,” says Phillips of Page. “He doesn’t really flounder or search for too
much. I remember us jamming on an idea for maybe a couple of hours, trying to
get to someplace, and it was there. But the way he did it was very productive.
Not a lot of lost time, and he would move on if something was just not
happening. Maybe come back to it later and maybe not. But I wrote most of the
keyboard parts, actually. It’s funny and, as it turned out, I thought all my
stuff would be replaced because they got other guys who came into it who were
better keyboard players than me. I started out playing keyboards, but I would
never hire myself to be a keyboardist, put it that way. But I did have a knack
in a sense of what works with rock, and I have great appreciation for guys who
do that well.”

“So I would knock these things out, and
Jimmy would stand over my shoulder and go, ‘Can you...’ and he would hum me a
note or he would point to the keyboard, or say something over my shoulder,
‘Make this a dominant over my guitar chord’ or whatever. So he had really cool
ideas like that. We would — Denny Carmassi and I —we’d get up early. We would
probably meet by eight, nine o’clock in the morning, in his condo — we were
both staying in the same condo complex — and we would work on whatever we would
work on with Jimmy the night before, the day before. We would go to the
studio by... or actually it was a chalet in Tahoe that we had rented and set
up, and we would be there by 10. We would work with Jimmy from 10 ‘til noon,
maybe have some lunch, maybe work ‘til two, ‘til three, and then
David would come in to see what we have been working on and start singing.”

“We did this for a number of weeks, and then
over I guess the four or five month period, we finally found ourselves at
Little Mountain,” continues Phillips, referring to the Vancouver hit factory
that might have helped Whitesnake live past
Slip Of The Tongue
. “And I
was actually never supposed to be the bass player on that project, which most
people don’t know. They asked me if I would come up and help them
woodshed all this material. They needed somebody that had a songwriting background,
but it was clearly their songs, the two of them, and only their
songs. But somebody that had a good song sense; that was to be my job. And all
of a sudden they were handing me tickets to fly to Little Mountain. It did go
really well, and we did have really good chemistry between the
four of us. I remember phone calls from John Entwistle, who was a hero to me,
and other guys, that they were trying to decide whether they’re gonna put a
supergroup together or whatever. But that never came to happen, lucky for me,
and so I was able to go up and start basic tracks.”

“I think about half of it,” continues
Phillips, on how much of the bass on the thing was him. “I played everything,
but because we were only going for drum tracks, I thought we were going for
basic tracks, so I was giving it my all. But Jimmy was kind of there
half the time and half not, while I’m doing the bass tracks, and he had planned
on doing all of his stuff as an overdub. But the beauty with him is that
natural swagger that he has. And although we copped it and we really, really
had it nailed, if we didn’t record with each other, I’m going to be tight with the
drums of course, I’m going to follow the kick drum. But where he moves in some
of the riffs and some things like that that need kind of a single voice, as he
went in the studio, anything that he couldn’t do or play with me, or it didn’t
feel pocketed, they had a guy that was playing on the Miami Sound Machine — they
were recording at Criteria at that point in Florida. They moved the
project. Better weather, and I think Jimmy just bought a house down there. But
it was cool as far as being able to write all these parts, and be around to
kind of put that together, and be way more a part of it than I thought I was
going to be in the beginning.”

“It took Jimmy a year to do his parts,”
continues Ricky, concluding a tale that sounds very much like the making of
Slip
Of The Tongue
. “So if they would have put me up in an apartment, they
would’ve had to put me in an apartment for a year. I know that John Kalodner
was not going to do that [
laughs
]. But I had great talks with John, and
he told me what was going on too. He was a great guy in my corner, and wanted
me to do things with him beyond that, which was the first time I ever met John.
We got on well; it was a good time. Made some really good friends on all sides
of that camp, guys that he had in the studio, engineers, Mike Fraser. Mike
Fraser and I had worked together in Bad English, so I was familiar with how
good he was.”

“The Coverdale Page situation was
fascinating,” reflects John Kalodner, who, as Ricky has alluded to, had his
hands in this one as well. “First of all, personally, I really wanted, you
know, Whitesnake to be Whitesnake and I really wanted Led Zeppelin to be back
together. So at the time, it was the best I could do, to put a great singer
with a great guitar player. But they did not do very much work on the
record, especially Jimmy Page. When I was down at the sessions at Criteria,
Florida, his great moments were great, but he did not invest much time into it.
You know, he’s maybe the greatest guitar player, well, first the
greatest rock producer of all time and maybe the first or second greatest
guitar player besides Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. But he did kind of minimal, and
Coverdale kind of got in that groove in doing minimal. And so they
gave it a shot, but I don’t feel either of them gave it a 100% shot; it was
kind of half-hearted. That’s just my opinion.”

After asking me my opinion of the record,
to which I replied that besides the hugely under-rated
Walking Into
Clarksdale
album, I haven’t liked much of what Jimmy’s done since
In
Through The Out Door
(which was mostly a John Paul Jones triumph), Kalodner
theorizes that, “Except for Jeff Beck, I’ve never really seen anyone play like
Jimmy Page. And for some reason... I don’t know if it was by not having Robert
Plant with him, he just was never that inspired since then. So I did everything
I could to promote the final Led Zeppelin, whatever it was gonna be, which
didn’t happen. Because I wanted to see if my theory was correct or not.”

And the forced marriage didn’t sit well
with the vocal patriarch of the entanglement, one Robert Plant. “There was a
bit of a feud,” notes Kalodner, “and in the end, I had to write an apology
letter to Robert Plant, which I did voluntarily. I hand-wrote an apology letter
to him when I was in Argentina with Aerosmith in 1994. Page and Plant were there
for some reason. Because Jimmy told me Robert was really pissed-off at me, and
I wanted to tell him that there was no disrespect at all to him. He was
offended that I would put David Coverdale with Jimmy Page. I guess he felt that
David Coverdale was second rate, maybe, I don’t know. But he didn’t like it.
And he’s one of the few people who I actually wrote a letter to, because he’s
such an important person in rock history, a whole letter about how it happened
and how I felt bad about it. You know, if it offended him, I did nothing to
offend him. But he felt that way. But that’s another thing that nobody knows,
except Jimmy Page — he knows I wrote the letter.”

All told the
Coverdale Page
album
went platinum, but that was after an uncommonly big push by the
label. The band played seven Japanese dates, but the thing didn’t feel like a
celebration to anybody and any further live work was scotched. Five singles
were issued from the album, but only “Pride And Joy” made much of an
impression, maybe “Shake My Tree” as well.

Four more years would transpire before
David would return for an album, unreleased in the US, called
Restless Heart
,
billed to David Coverdale & Whitesnake and tellingly self-produced. Lest
anyone be further confused, it is a variously poppy, bluesy, rootsy, but still
often heavy rockin’ affair and very much the solo album it was intended to be.
What’s most surprising is the element of continuity represented by the
fact that David’s co-writer on almost all of the songs was Adrian Vandenberg,
writing pal for much of
Slip Of The Tongue
. David tries a number of
things on this commendable record, but what he tries across all songs is a
repudiation of all the
clichéd
excesses he’d come to represent as the
kicking boy of hair metal.