Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  So, Kalodner’s ass is on the line as he explains: “Costing so much, and also there’s nothing to play for anybody. Also it’s the only cold streak I ever had in my career. Usually I had hits, one hit a year. I only did Vision Quest, I think, in 1986. Aerosmith had a flop record with Done With Mirrors, and I had signed Cher against David Geffen’s wishes. So I was not in big favour at the time.

  “So Coverdale comes and he tries to sing. I think it was with Mike Stone. But he can’t sing. Now, I had encountered this problem with him when I needed to redo some things on Slide It In that Martin Birch had screwed up. So he tells me, ‘Well, this is why I use Martin Birch, because I can’t sing with any other producer. I can’t, I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Well I think you repaired some things with Keith Olsen.’ He said, ‘I think I need Martin Birch.’ I said, ‘Well, you’re not going to get Martin Birch, because Clive Calder, who managed Martin Birch, wanted to kill me. Let alone, he’s not gonna let you sing, because I just fired Martin Birch from a project that’s really important to him.’ So I said to him, ‘That’s not gonna happen. Clive Calder is powerful enough to make sure that doesn’t happen. Which he did.’ Because I would’ve tried that, even. But that was not an option. So we tried with Mike Stone.”

  “Then Coverdale is having trouble with his voice,” continues Kalodner. “So I take him to Joe Sugerman, the famous ear, nose and throat guy. So he has some sinusitis, various other things he has. Then he’s recovering, and I’m using all the famous LA voice teachers to work with him, even though David Coverdale pretty much has a perfect voice. So this is going on now, I’d say, between seven and nine months. Then he says he feels good enough to sing. So I get Ron Nevison. Trying to get his vocals — can’t sing with Ron Nevison. Now I’m not sure why he didn’t want to sing with Keith Olsen, but I remember that was one of my original ideas, and he didn’t want to do that originally. So, as it’s coming into the late summer, early fall, I say to Coverdale, ‘You know, I’m gonna get fired, you’re running out of money. We have to give Keith Olsen a try.’ So he goes out to Goodnight L.A., and they started working, he started singing the record, and he sings the record, you know, within like a month, perfectly. You know, all those great vocals were done with Keith Olsen in Los Angeles after a year of like going through that he couldn’t sing the record without Martin Birch.”

  “I didn’t know he had a house,” continues Kalodner, asked if stories about David having a house under construction at the time were complicating matters as well. “I mean, he might have bought a house right then, but when this all was happening, he was living at the Mondrian hotel, and I was paying for it. And it didn’t cost anything, because it was an old age home about to become the Mondrian hotel. So it’s not like it was some gigantic expense on me. And I think I got Geffen to give him an allowance so he could keep his beloved Jaguar, which is in the video. Which barely, by the way, ever ran. That was, you know British, of course.”

  So obviously David not being able to sing was a huge deal. As John has explained, his sinus infection led not only to surgery and rehab, but the insane notion from John Sykes that the band should carry on with another singer. Through this, John had aligned with Mike Stone, which made Stone persona non grata with Coverdale. This is where the switch happens toward Zeppelin/Bad Company/UFO legend Ron Nevison, before Keith Olsen saves the day.

  “I had some troubles with my voice,” Coverdale explained to Hit Parader’s Rob Andrews, at the time. “At first I believed there was something physically wrong with my voice, and I did have some serious sinus problems. But then, it got to the point where I began developing a mental block toward singing. All the backing tracks for the album were done quite a while ago, but when I went in to cut the vocal tracks, I wasn’t getting the results anyone expected. It was scary because it was in my head. There was nothing really wrong with me. My first reaction was to go back and work with someone I knew who could get the best out of me. That man was Martin Birch, who I’ve worked with, on and off, since my days with Deep Purple. But to be honest, Martin and I haven’t been getting along that well in recent years, so that part of my plan went awry. The next person I could think of was Ron Nevison, who’s had some incredible success in the last year with people like Heart and Ozzy Osbourne. I heard that he wasn’t the easiest man to work with, but while that may be true, I found him quite compatible with my own needs.”

  A three-ring circus of eccentrics this band was turning out to be… “Right, I mean, they all were,” reflects Kalodner. “Mike Stone was, Coverdale was. You know, Coverdale had no money at the time. Keith, he’s hilarious. He was high, but talented, and Coverdale was just crazy and talented. And he eventually did get along with Keith Olsen. I mean, Keith Olsen and I completely redid ‘Here I Go Again’ after the entire record was done and in production. Because I thought it was going to be a big single, but I didn’t think it was right. Changed things with Coverdale, and it’s an amazing story. And that was done, like in January of 1987, when the record was already in production —complicated.”

  “David was just a diva at that point,” continues Kalodner. “He was, an incredibly talented diva who always got whatever he wanted his whole life. I just wouldn’t give up about this record. I wouldn’t do it his way. His colloquial British way, that was not going to happen. Especially with those songs.”

  Offering more insight to what the mysterious Mr. Kalodner was bringing to the situation, Neil Murray says that, “Certainly after Slide It In and after the remix of Slide It In and a sort of image upgrade, as it were, whether deliberate or inadvertent, he’s saying ‘Look, there’s a huge gap in the market for a band like Zeppelin in the States.’ That sort of rock god sex idol-type guy front man with a guitar hero. And that prompted a couple of songs on the next record looking for Zeppelin as influence, such as ‘Still Of The Night,’ which is rather reminiscent of ‘Black Dog.’ But a lot of other songs are nothing like that at all. And then of course Kalodner was saying you’ve got to remake a couple of songs, in particular ‘Here I Go Again,’ which was on Saints & Sinners. It had done quite well as a single, certainly in the UK, but America didn’t know it at all. So we recorded it for the album, the one we called 1987 over here, but it’s just called Whitesnake in the States, and even then that wasn’t quite right. I mean I re-did the bass on it a year after I’d first done it, and then even those changes that Kalodner was asking for then, it still wasn’t commercial enough.”

  But along with this, Murray was slowly being cast adrift. “Yes, so they re-recorded it completely in early ‘87. The whole of ‘86 was spent recording the album. Like I say, all the backing tracks had been done in October and November ‘85, and the next year was spent with David and John doing guitars and vocals. And in the meantime, Aynsley Dunbar and myself stopped being paid. Even though I wasn’t earning anything from Whitesnake at that point, I was still being treated as though I was a member of the band, except that I was in London, impoverished, working with Bernie and Mel, another little band, which possibly wasn’t seen as being the best thing to do by David, but that was all that was going on, really, for me. Whereas he and John were in LA and still getting paid lots of money and all their expenses covered and that kind of thing.”

  Indeed, John Sykes was making sure he was getting paid. “He certainly struck a hard bargain,” continues Murray. “He was a pretty good negotiator and knew his own value. He was very anti-redoing the old Whitesnake songs, so he was wrong in that sense, but he co-wrote and came up with all the musically new ideas for the 1987 record. Musically, it was quite a different thing from the Marsden/Moody era, and the Galley era. So he was an important part of it in many ways, but he wanted to be as equal as David was, and David didn’t want to allow him to be that. Particularly financially. It was going to be David’s band, whereas John wanted just a bit too much power, and the showdown came when David didn’t want John to come to the mix, which, once again, we’d gone back to using Keith Olsen, having done most of the album with the producer Mike
Stone. So they had a big row at Olsen’s studio and John left the band. So in a sense, you’ve really only got David and me left, and I’m in London. Depending on how you look at I’m not really in the band any more, or I am. It just depends on what point of view you want to take.

  “So therefore, when they need a video for ‘Still Of The Night,’ they put together a band in LA where, basically, if you look at it, you can’t really tell who’s in the band. Because that was just for the video. That could be John Sykes with the long blond hair, but actually it’s Adrian Vandenberg, who had been pestering David for years to collaborate with him and be a member of Whitesnake or whatever else. So whether or not it was going to be a good writing partnership, I don’t know, but he was the next guy that David wanted to work with.”

  “Well, it was called Whitesnake,” announces John Kalodner, concerning the game-changer that would hit the shelves April 7th of 1987, after a mountain of cash had been burned in its birthing, “because I had no energy left to figure out what the record should be called. I mean, that’s not the case with almost every other record. But in this case it was. I just considered it a miracle that I had a finished record, and then a mastered record by George Marino, who was a genius as well. Everything about it was great, in the end. And when it went to the plants in November or early December of 1986, I considered it, you know, the greatest record I had ever done, even surpassing Double Vision.”

  “I like every single thing about it,” defends Kalodner of the album’s clean and corporate cover image. “It was totally Hugh Syme and David Coverdale’s idea together. And, you know, I really thought it should be simple and just say what it was, and I just think it’s brilliant.”

  Trying to be classy? “Well, David Coverdale is a classy British guy, and so that’s what he wanted.”

  Past the wrapper and right out the gates, one of the big ideas from the mind of Kalodner had been set in motion. The album’s opening track was a bulky, powered-up re-recording of “Crying In The Rain,” rescued from Saints & Sinners infamy, given pole position on a record that would storm the charts.

  “That was Kalodner,” says Olsen, asked about the two tracks that were hand-picked for the record, this one and “Here I Go Again.” “John said, ‘You have to redo this.’ And I said, ‘Oh, there are songs that are better [laughs]. David’s written a bunch of better songs, you know.’ ‘No, Keith, I bought the rights to those other albums just so I could get this.’ So no, he was very involved and very much a part of it.”

  “‘Here I Go Again’ and ‘Crying In The Rain’ I heard on previous records,” says Kalodner. “I thought the songs were incredible and poorly arranged and incredibly poorly produced. That’s how they came about.”

  But why then, weren’t they redone for the first Geffen record, Slide It In? “The ‘84 record? That’s because Coverdale wouldn’t do ‘em.” Had he needed more convincing? “I think so. And I didn’t have enough power over him. He still had the backing of EMI, with Rupert Perry, who’s a great guy. But I was fighting everyone, including whatever manager he had at the time.”

  Structurally, the track wasn’t radically altered vis-à-vis the original, it was more that it was flooded with guitars, and then hawkishly and mawkishly over-played by everybody, point pounded home (the point being the blues never sounded so metal-mad.)

  If the hard-as-nails hijacking of “Crying In The Rain” wasn’t enough, then it was into a straight shred metal rocker called “Bad Boys,” on which David abandons all reservations about big an’ bold US stadium rock and just turns over the reins to John Sykes and the producers.

  Then, as if on cue, the blues and metal come together in a symphony for the ages with six-ton sledge “Still Of The Night.” The track is no less than the one main thing for which John Sykes will be remembered, for all of the rest of his life, and it is the high creative point of Whitesnake 2.0’s super-sized canon, and possibly the creative high watermark of the band’s career from start to finish.

  Comments Kalodner: “‘Still Of The Night’ came about as a collaboration of Sykes and Coverdale, the best of their energies, songwriting. The track which Mike Stone did with John Sykes and those musicians was spectacular. And Coverdale’s vocal is one of the greatest vocals ever, and Keith Olsen’s mix is as good as it gets. Obviously I was at the mixes, and I would reject certain mixes, but when I heard the final mix that Keith Olsen sent me over, I said, this is the perfect mix. So I mean, I, when I heard a lot of these songs that I had laboured on so much, I just was ecstatic. I couldn’t even believe how good they were.”

  “‘Still Of The Night,’ a quick scenario,” reflects Coverdale. “Many, many years ago I was going through my mother’s attic in the north of England, and I was going through all these old work tapes from the Purple days. So I grabbed them and threw them in my bag and listened to them. A lot of it was crap, but it was very funny for me to hear the journey from the seeds of songs that became ultimate Purple staples. And I found a demo that Ritchie Blackmore had given me and I thought, well, that’s an interesting riff. So I took that and changed it around completely to the point where it had absolutely nothing to do with the initial inspiration, but credit where credit is due.

  “Then I presented my take on this riff to John Sykes, who put a great attitude on it and took it further as only he could. There is lot of Led Zeppelin comparison there, which I don’t have a problem with, because Zeppelin was fucking marvellous and continues to resonate. But the huge influence on that is one of my favourite songs from my childhood, ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ Elvis Presley, and another huge influence was the Jeff Beck Group, when Rod Stewart was singing with them. And part of the atmospheric thing was an inspiration from a track of his called ‘Rice Pudding.’ I tell you, I’ve played that song all over the world and nobody had a problem with it other than Robert Plant [laughs]. And of course a couple of years later I have Page playing it, going, ‘This is fucking hard!’”

  What David is referring to is his later collaboration with Jimmy Page, Coverdale Page. Still, it’s hard to believe he’d have the audacity to force Jimmy to recreate this song in a live setting. “Yes, of course. It was really hard, because people want you to play this song, that song. And of course with Page, it was very exciting for me to do ‘In My Time Of Dying,’ ‘Black Dog’ and he did some Whitesnake stuff. We would have just preferred to do Coverdale Page, although that would lead to a great disappointment for a lot of the fans. But that’s what he said, although he played it great. But it was interesting watching him go, ‘What are these fucking chords?!’”

  Indeed David found himself answering to a new name because of this song’s evocations of both “Whole Lotta Love” and “Black Dog,” and that name was David Coverversion. As it turns out, this was also yet another dimension to John Kalodner’s multi-pronged plan for the band.

  “That was definitely a kind of commission by John Kalodner and Geffen Records to write something that was going to be very Zeppelin-like,” explains Murray. “And it’s certainly obvious from how that came out. But the annoying thing was then we got criticized for being a kind of Zeppelin sound-alike, which wasn’t the case at all. There wasn’t much else on the record that sounded like Zeppelin. The whole album took an awful long time to record but certainly we could tell that that was going to be an important track. The whole center section of it at first was kind of going in the direction of ‘Whole Lotta Love,’ the whole freak-out psychedelic part. And it became slightly more structured in a sense. I came up with the very simple chord structure for that middle section which builds up and builds up. The whole thing had so many guitar tracks and keyboard tracks and re-done vocal parts, it changed quite a bit from the original state until it actually got released.”

  “I want to continue adding heart and soul into the context of hard rock rather than blood and makeup,” Coverdale told journalist Lee Sherman back in 1988, answering the charges. “I want to keep flying the flag of the best of The Who, Purple, Zeppelin and stuff like that, which u
tilized the blues within hard rock. I’m not talking about blues as the twelve bar, but the expression that’s within the piece of music, the emotional content. I am not a heavy metal act.”

  “I guess it’s quite a compliment to be placed in a class like that,” Coverdale had said the previous year. “But I don’t know how accurate the comparison is. People shouldn’t forget that I worked in Deep Purple for a number of years, so my pedigree in hard rock is quite strong. I understand that bands like Whitesnake, Purple and Led Zeppelin all play a solid powerful brand of rock, but I don’t think we’re coming from the same place musically. I don’t mean that literally, because I do believe there is something to being a British rock ‘n’ roll musician. There is a special quality that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world.”

  “Both ‘Crying In The Rain’ and ‘Still Of The Night’ were strong live numbers, but there’s a slight bone of contention with ‘Still Of The Night,’” continues Murray. “I came up with this sequence in the middle where it sort of goes into double time and builds up and goes around that whole different thing, that long, long guitar solo part. So we did that for the touring in 1984, when Cozy Powell was still in the band, so that was the arrangement we re-did for the 1987 album. It’s the sort of thing that works really well live because it’s heavy and it’s bluesy and builds up to a peak of excitement and you kind of take people somewhere through the course of the song. It’s certainly a great song to play live.”

  Coverdale most definitely channels Robert Plant for the “Black Dog” solo singing passages, but all told, he turns in a bodice-ripper of a vocal. Says Olsen, “Coverdale?! How good was he? Fabulous! Are you kidding? The first vocal we did, I said ‘Let’s start off with the hardest one,’ and he said, ‘Oh, Keith, really?’ ‘Yeah, we’re going to do “Still Of The Night.”’ And we did ‘Still Of The Night’ first take and he nailed it! He nailed it in three takes. That vocal on the record is combined from three different takes, and was mostly second and third take. Don Airey’s keyboard parts were great [sings it]. Really cool.”