Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Still part of the US version of the record, Mel would be accompanied on that version (but not the UK version) by a brash new guitarist by the name of John Sykes. Flashy, good-looking, heavy metal all the way, but a somewhat American sensibility too, John was actually British, having first cut his teeth with Tygers Of Pan Tang and then Thin Lizzy. Sykes was one choice, but not necessarily the first. Coverdale had thought about Michael Schenker and more seriously Adrian Vandenberg, who had turned David down, given the success he had been having with his own band Vandenberg, most notably through the self-titled debut and its minor hit “Burning Heart,” which David found to be a fine song.

  “I knew David Coverdale could sing a hit,” muses Kalodner. “So it was a very hard decision, because the only way it was going to happen is that I was going to have to replace the guitar player with, you know, a guitar player who is young, vibrant and a great writer, and that was John Sykes. I had followed Thin Lizzy, I had followed his career. He was pretty young. He was pretty arrogant, but I had a meeting with him and I had heard some of the stuff he’d written himself, and I just decided this was the guy to try.”

  Kalodner’s vague about Mel Galley’s future, but figured that the guitarist was going to be on the chopping block, hand injury or not. When asked whether Galley would have stayed with the band had he not injured his hand, Kalodner says: “Not to my knowledge, I mean, he was going, yes. Maybe to Coverdale he wasn’t, but to me he was. John Sykes was a guitar player in the league with Jeff Beck, Clapton; he was in the league of the greats. And he was a really great writer and a great singer, which most people don’t know. He obviously isn’t David Coverdale, but he was just an okay lead singer as a guitar player. He definitely could sing. But I saw Thin Lizzy once, and he just stood out so much to me. You have to understand; remember it’s the ‘80s. This guy was, you know, in the top ten best-looking rock musicians. He looks like Jon Bon Jovi. I mean, the guy was big, he was tall, blonde, perfect face, great body, and the guy was a great musician.”

  And, it appeared to Kalodner, no drug problems, despite Sykes having dabbled with heroin back in the waning days of Lizzy. “No, not then. He had plenty of personal problems. I mean, there are so many funny stories of like, his wife and wives, I don’t even know, his girlfriends or whatever. Anyway, they would always come to Geffen and dump his clothes in the lobby. That happened like two or three times over the years.”

  “Slide It In was the first album I did under my own steam, the first one after getting rid of the ex-manager and revamping the band,” explains Coverdale, taking us through the paces. “There are actually two albums: one the US copy, one the European copy. John Sykes came in to audition after we recorded the album. He actually came in to audition while we were recording it and Cozy Powell didn’t like him at all [laughs] and it didn’t work out very well. But I kept the flame going for him and ultimately, obviously I call the shots because it’s my band and I said ‘I have to override you. I feel very strongly that he can take us to another level. He’s a very powerful guitarist, a very talented young man, no question at all.’”

  As for the shift in the band’s musical direction, Coverdale says, “At that time I still wasn’t embracing the idea of a guitar hero. I’ve worked with very competent, proficient musicians, but they weren’t real rock... what one would determine to be rock guitar people. Kalodner sat down with me one night and said, ‘David, there’s nobody who comes near to what you do. But you will never reach, your full potential unless you have a guitarist that complements your power,’ and he quoted Jagger/Richards, Page/Plant, Daltrey/Townshend, and it resonated very well. And what it was, subconsciously, was the backlash of seeing the abuse of power that Ritchie manifested. So, without even being consciously aware of it I was nervous to go that route, even though that was the style of guitarist that was really inspiring to me. So, eternal gratitude to John Kalodner for bringing Sykes in, because there was definitely an electricity between us. And it could have been an unbeatable scenario.”

  Speaking with Hit Parader’s Winston Cummings back in the day, Coverdale pretty much framed his new reality alongside John Sykes the same way. Responding to the loss of Mel Galley, Coverdale figured, “John proved he could handle everything all by himself. In fact, he even gave the older material an urgency that made it more exciting than ever. His background is heavy metal, not blues, and that gives our songs a stronger focus. When my mother first saw pictures of John, she said to me, ‘David, are you crazy? Now you’ll never get any of the girls.’ Up until then, I really hadn’t thought about that, but he convinced me to get in the best shape of my life. Getting John in the band not only revitalized us musically — he is an absolutely brilliant guitarist — but it gave us more motivation to make our stage show hot. Together, those elements have made us a top band to tangle with in any situation.”

  “I never felt particularly enamoured with keyboards,” continued Coverdale, addressing another end of the personnel spectrum. “Jon Lord’s role in the band was minimal over the last few years. I love Jon like a brother — after all we go back to the Purple days — so when the call came that he was going to rejoin Purple, I understood completely. I just decided that any keyboards we kept from now on would only be to round out our sound.”

  Referring to Slide It In Coverdale recalls: “This was my first Geffen record, so John Kalodner recommended Eddie Kramer as producer, whose name I was totally familiar with through Jimi Hendrix. And I was very, very excited on that premise, and, in my modest opinion, I felt he was an imposter. I didn’t feel there was any producer overview. The other musicians didn’t like him at all. It was very disappointing. It was running very, very late and I was headlining a huge festival, Donington, Monsters Of Rock, and the album wasn’t ready for it. So I was like, well, let’s put an EP out in England, like three or four songs. At least there was enough material for that. And while we were mixing this, he had to fly back to New York, and I was going, this is just ridiculous.”

  Remarked Sykes to writer Paul Hunter, when asked about Whitesnake versus Lizzy and Tygers, “I try not to compare bands. I love this group, so there’s no point in making comparisons. The one thing I will say, is that I enjoy being given the freedom that Snake allows me on stage. I don’t have to worry about getting in another guitarist’s way, and that’s a nice feeling. David pushes everyone hard, but no harder than he pushes himself. We know we have a good opportunity to become a major band in America, and we want to take advantage of that. David’s not domineering. This is very much a band. No one has to take a backseat to anyone else.”

  “John’s [Kalodner] skill was basically taking existing bands and reconfiguring them,” explains Geffen A&R Tom Zutaut, who is no slouch himself. “So he would get this guy from this band and put him in this band and it would be like a supergroup, like Asia. Aerosmith was a mess because Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hated each other, and John was involved in getting those guys back together and getting them re-energized and re-inventing Aerosmith. And ultimately, he turned them into a pop band.

  “John had a great ear for rock music that could cross over into pop formats and sell millions of records. And he would introduce Diane Warren to Aerosmith and they would have a huge song that was in a movie [‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.’] And he resurrected Cher’s career, even though she’s not metal. He had this real knack for taking people who are washed-up and over with and reinventing them. Whitesnake, for instance, was a band who had a couple of obscure records in England and nothing was happening. John was able to make them one of the biggest bands in the ‘80s by re-inventing them and working with them to find better songs and co-writers; make better records with better producers; not letting them record until they had enough good songs, and basically helping mold them into a more commercial sound from their more rootsy blues sound.”

  “I’ve always been proud of my voice. And I think it’s been given a good forum in Whitesnake,” says Coverdale. “Unfortunately, the type of music we were playing was ve
ry bluesy, and a lot of Americans thought it was outdated. They saw blues rock as something from the early ‘70s, not the 1980s. Well, the music we’re making now is still bluesy, but it’s been updated.”

  And so it was engineered that David would need a new band. Of Bernie and Micky, Kalodner reiterates, “Those people are so great; it’s just they were never good enough for Coverdale. They were such great guys. It was one of the hardest things for me to do, and even Jon Lord, another amazing person. He went of his own will, but the other two guys, they wanted to be in Whitesnake. I mean, they had always been in Whitesnake with Coverdale.”

  The UK version of the Slide It In album would meet with mixed reviews, and it was never going to pass muster as Kalodner’s first US “product” with the band. Martin Birch’s version — production, mix, arrangement, whatever you want to call it — was said to feature too many keyboards and too much articulated bass. Debatable all round, nor is it easy to assert that it’s less “punchy” than the US version — it’s the songs that were punchy, literally riddled with punctuation, and nothing short of rewriting could take that away from them.

  Perhaps, if anything, the guitar solos are more melodic and Lizzy-esque on the UK version. Odd, given that the ex-Thin Lizzy member is on the US version exclusively. But let’s grant that they are different, in many details, along the way. It’s just that those details don’t add up to any specific philosophical thrust, so to speak. And if the party line is that the Martin Birch record is somehow more “old school,” that doesn’t ring true either. Very much so, even his version of Slide It In is worlds ahead in detailing and fidelity and punchiness over his five records with the band so far, all of which indeed were old school in various ways, save, perhaps for Come An’ Get It, which was no school.

  If that sounds like a big mess of opinion, including even a few contradictory ones, such is the abstract nature of art. Let’s just say that the versions sound different from each other. But let’s also venture to say that one didn’t sound any more or less British than the other. I mean, of something like 25 significant deliberate changes made for the US edition, an astute listener would likely call a mere third of them particularly appealing to Americans, maybe another third actually more British, and another third of them worthy of debate long into the night.

  Says Kalodner in summary, “There was a big fight between me and David because I demanded... you know, he finally started to trust me that Martin Birch was not the appropriate person to mix the record. So you know, the Slide It In that was released in Europe was mixed by Martin Birch, but the one that was released in Canada, US and Japan was mixed by Keith Olsen.”

  “Basically, if he was going to stay with me and succeed,” continues Kalodner, “past the first record in ‘84, he was going to have to remix it — the only thing I had to do with it is the remix. So I took that record and had it remixed by Keith Olsen. And it’s funny, because I did it for the United States, Canada and Japan, but eventually Rupert Perry, who was head of EMI International, eventually went to use that mix in pressings of the ‘84 record. But it was mixed terribly; it just sounded terrible. Martin Birch’s mixes always had a lot of high end, a lot of mid frequency and not much bass. They were imbalanced. His style was just to mix it very un-American; you know, it was very narrow spectrum-sounding. It sounded little and thin. Overall though, I thought it was a really fine record, a really good American AOR rock record. I just felt that it didn’t have any hits, for American rock radio and pop rock radio at the time.”

  “Gee, impressions of John Kalodner,” laughs the perpetually amused Mr. Olsen. “He had a firm grasp on how he wanted this presented. He spent a lot of time with us until it came time for his annual Kalodner trip to… Asia someplace. He says they treat him like a God, because he walks around in that white suit and has that long beard. Someplace in the archives I have a drawing that David did, and I copied it. He did a drawing as a bon voyage card, and it was his annual trip to Asia or some place. And as John Kalodner would say [nasal voice], ‘It’s not what’s going on; it’s the concept.’ I really can’t do him anymore. I used to be really good. I could mimic him perfectly. But I haven’t talked to John since I ran into him at an airport when he was with Sanctuary.”

  Asked what Kalodner’s “function” was, Olsen goes with, “A&R guy. A&R guy! But he was also one of the best A&R guys in the business. When people were on other labels, that weren’t even on Geffen, or Atlantic, they would call him and say, ‘Please, listen to all our songs and tell us which ones to do on our album. Please, John, listen to this, and tell us which song to lead with,’ and he would do this. So he became friends to every major rock artist. I mean, every major rock artist! There’s a ‘Thanks to John Kalodner’ on everything because he’s the one who put it together. I’d first met John because he brought me in to produce this band of his with Lou Gramm and Mick Jones called Foreigner. And that’s when I first got to work with John.”

  “There were some things that were done in England, and then they wanted to change it,” says Olsen. “John Kalodner got involved and signed me up, signed the artist, and then when he got involved he said, ‘Keith, I’d like you to meet David Coverdale, and you guys should talk.’ So we started talking, and he brought in this new guitar player, John Sykes, and we started talking and talking and working on that record, and finished this record. And as far as Slide It In, as far as I knew, I thought that was the definitive version that was released around the world by Geffen. Kalodner wanted it to be a lot more intense, with the new guitar player, who was a much more intense guy. He brought him in, and we also did a whole bunch of new guitar parts, a couple of keyboard parts. I think Bill Cuomo came in to do some of it, and then I mixed it. And you know, it was one of those things where I worked on it for maybe three weeks? So it wasn’t a long time. But that led to the next Whitesnake record.”

  So, John Sykes was a big part of the US version, as was a returning Neil Murray, who provided a welcome spot of continuity to a crazy situation.

  “I guess Geffen Records, with John Kalodner, were after signing David,” begins Murray. “And I think he had to pay a fair sized sum of money to John Coletta to get out of his deal, but then once he was free he decided to change the line-up, and the next line-up was sort of a bridge between the more blues era and the straight rock era. So, the line-up was with Cozy and Mel and still Micky, though he left at the beginning of ‘82 and returned about six or eight months later. So, Jon and Micky were still in the band, but myself and Ian were kind of dropped. Particularly because David wanted to work with Cozy and Mel, and for some reason didn’t think that I was necessarily quite right to work with Cozy. But also he wanted a different sound from the bass, a much more twangy aggressive sound like Glenn Hughes had in Purple.

  “My feeling was David did want to change, but he didn’t like to be told. In many cases my impression is that he digs his heels in and is kind of holding onto what he knows, but then once he makes the change he sort of very quickly leaves that behind. It’s quite hard to get him to change, but once he has, it’s almost like the past doesn’t exist and what he’s doing now is the thing. So it took him from let’s say from ‘82 to I guess ‘84 to really make quite a massive change in the band. That sort of interim line-up was getting there. People like John Kalodner were saying ‘Look, you’ve got to get rid of the old guys, image-wise and musically. It’s not what’s happening in America.’ If you hang on to Micky and Jon, that’s not really right, and my replacement, Colin, didn’t really fit in, it turned out. Though he’d been one of David’s favourite bass players from the jazz fusion band Back Door, and he did have that kind of twangy pick-type playing, which I don’t have at all.”

  “So they’d made the album Slide It In, which was much more melodic rock rather than blues rock, because of Mel’s songwriting style,” remembers Murray. “Then Micky left and I guess they fired Colin, and so Mel pressed for me to be brought back into the band, which was very nice of him, and John Sykes had been recruited a
fter Thin Lizzy split up. They took him on. And his look and attitude and style of guitar playing, that was in a way as much a catalyst as anything else because he wanted the band to be more American style and didn’t have any reverence for the old Whitesnake songs or the way we used to be. He was totally into the Ozzy Osbourne line-up, Randy Rhoads, etc.; that was his kind of direction that he wanted the band to go in. And then Cozy was much more of a power, straight, heavy rock drummer than Ian Paice. He didn’t have Ian’s jazz and funky influences. So there were various little things, plus a fair amount of pressure from Geffen, I would imagine.

  “I wasn’t around, because what had happened also when David left John Coletta, David really became his own manager for a couple years until they signed with Howard Kaufman/Frontline Management who were quite big. They had Heart and various other big bands in LA. So he would be dealing as almost the sole major person with Whitesnake. He was the person that Geffen would deal with and the members of the band would not really be consulted very much. That’s the way it seemed to me, but certainly Kalodner would think that John Sykes was a very good addition and Micky leaving was also something that was good.”

  “At every point, David would be really proud of what he was doing in that particular moment,” says Murray, when asked if he and David ever discussed the new direction, “Americanized,” for wont of a better term. “The guys who are in the band at this point — let’s say in late ’82 — that band with Cozy and Colin is much better than the previous band, and then when that line-up changed, ‘Oh no, this line-up is much better than the previous band.’ That kind of thing. Great in terms of PR and being interviewed because he had massive confidence, and knew what journalists wanted to hear. But you had a situation where various things happened in sort of early to mid ‘84. So I’d come into the band late ‘83 after John Sykes had joined. Geffen wanted to remix the Slide It In album and so because of that we — myself and John — got the chance to overdub and replace the bass and some of the guitars. More of the guitars should have been done — it was only one or two solos that John did — but mostly just rhythm guitar stuff.”