Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  “It’s not my job to sit here and make excuses,” noted Jon Lord to Kerrang! a year later, “but the backing tracks were made at the end of 1981 under quite difficult circumstances in terms of the band itself and the producer. His bottle really went when confronted with what we wanted. Plus, we went through about nineteen different studios! It had to be released, though; unfortunately, it was a ‘contractual obligation’ album — shades of Monty Python! — otherwise we would have been sued from here to Christmas! To be honest, the sales of that album did show that it wasn’t as well-received as it could’ve been. There were some great moments on it, though, and I think that it ended up sounding as it did was a tribute to the band in that situation. It does sound a bit ‘down,’ though, if you put it against Ready An’ Willing, which I think is the best studio album.”

  Kerrang!’s Chas De Whalley, reviewing the record, wrote “And no matter how much effort David Coverdale put into it — and he obviously sweated blood — he can’t disguise the fact that this is not his finest album. But give him full marks for trying. And cross your fingers that with his new line-up, he’ll get it all sorted for next time.”

  Providing the apocalyptic theme for De Whalley’s assessment, no doubt, was the fact that David had indeed been verbose on the topic of the degradation of the band.

  Explained David, to Dante Bonutto in the same issue of Kerrang! that featured the above review: “Sometimes you just sit there and think, why the hell do I bother? Anyway, it all proved very expensive, but I’m pleased it’s sorted out at last because in the final analysis, the buck stops with me. It rests on my ass, and I’m sick of picking up the pieces of other people’s mistakes. I’m not perfect, but I’m going for as close as possible to that. Listen, I’ve always asked for everyone’s opinion. But towards the end, they started to get so high and mighty I thought, fuck it. And when I get angry, it’s not a pretty sight; definitely firecrackers up people’s asses time.”

  Unfounded rumours of Coverdale hooking up for a project with Jimmy Page circulated at the time. More substantive was the idea that David, as suggested by old friend Cozy Powell, would join himself and Michael Schenker in the Michael Schenker Group. Also admitted by Coverdale, while looking for new guitarists, a certain Adrian Vandenberg had met his gaze, although who he really wanted in Whitesnake next was Gary Moore.

  Plus, it was as good a time as any for the press to resume placing odds on a Purple reunion. “It didn’t really rear its head that much,” notes Murray, however, on the subject of reunion talk. “I think Deep Purple had to go away for a reasonable amount of years before there was a demand to have them back again reformed. I could imagine from time to time there must have been offers from Japan for things like that. And the dubious Purple reformation in, I think ‘81, with Rod Evans and a bunch of other people, that might have given them the thought that, ‘Oh, well, if those guys can put together whatever it was, a gig at the Forum or something in LA, even if it never happened, maybe there is a market out there, and maybe we should do that.’

  “Similar situation in Black Sabbath when I was with them. When you’re with a label that is stopping you from reaching the heights that you think the band should be reaching, you start to get itchy feet and you start to think, ‘Well, what can we do about this?’ You know, the following year, when David wanted to make changes in the band anyway... well, it was a very difficult transitional period. But I think the band changing from being very democratic to being David’s band, and very much under the influence of Geffen in America, who wanted young, good-looking guys in the band, I think that was also a big impetus for Deep Purple to get it together.”

  The fate of Rainbow was, of course, ensnared in the same sort of scenario. I asked Neil Murray if there had been much of a rivalry between these two acts going through very similar career struggles. “There was,” laughs Murray, “but it was mostly hearsay. I mean, there was rivalry between Whitesnake and Rainbow, but it was sort of in good humour. Myself and Bernie had played with Cozy Powell and he was a friend of ours, so that wouldn’t have been a serious rivalry. We heard secondhand about David and Ritchie having a bit of a set-to backstage at a show somewhere in Germany. But you’ll always get the viewpoint of the person who’s telling you the story. You’d never know what the actual truth of it is.”

  Further pushing the process to the Purple inevitable, David, adhering to the theme of dissatisfaction with his band, wished out loud that Ian Paice had performed as well on the new Whitesnake album as he did on Gary Moore’s last record. Reading between the lines there, David had been grousing that everyone in his band, almost to a man, had suddenly all been too busy to give Whitesnake their due.

  And hence, even during the promotion of Saints & Sinners, lo and behold, Cozy Powell was already Whitesnake’s new drummer and Colin “Bomber” Hodgkinson, a Jan Hammer jazzer, was the band’s new bassist. Cozy, had, in many ways, been a classic case of the inevitable. Colin, on the other hand, had been involved in a project called Olympic Rock & Blues Circus with Chris Farlowe, Pete York, a horn section... and Jon Lord.

  “I didn’t know Jon before that,” Colin told journalist Pete Bell, “but I got to know him pretty well, and he said to me, ‘How would you feel about playing for Whitesnake?’ I knew David Coverdale and Micky Moody of course; they were all mates from the times of the Starlight. They used to come and play in there and sing in there. In a way, because of what I’d been doing with Hammer and the other genre, that kind of rock thing, I thought, well, why not? And they still had that thing where they played quite a bit of R&B-type stuff as well. It was nice; Micky Moody, Cozy Powell played, so I said Okay.”

  “I went and did Cozy’s album for him,” continues Colin, “and that was my audition — I didn’t know that at the time. So I just went to meet them and said Okay, and that’s how I got involved with that. I completely didn’t know. Amazing really. I lasted a year with them, but I knew it wasn’t for me. We did a lot of things in Europe and then a month in Japan. I enjoyed part of it, but at the same time it was playing the same thing every night.

  “My aims weren’t really the same. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do, to be honest. I realized it was totally different. So that’s what it came to. Micky was certainly a wonderfully funny bloke, and there were quite a lot of laughs. I remember we played at the Budokan at Tokyo, which is really the Martial Arts Academy, but it’s a 15,000 seater, and it was absolutely sold-out. And we were doing one of the heaviest rock things we played, and Micky Moody comes over to me and looks me in the eye and says, ‘The blues!’ I absolutely cracked up. But that was the end of that. After that I more or less started to work in Germany all the time.”

  “He was thinking he wanted the band back together with Mel Galley and Cozy Powell, and Colin Hodgkinson, and would I like to come back in,” says Micky, about this period, in which he had been back for the album, but then the band fell apart once again. “So I went back in in ‘83, but really, it wasn’t the same band. The vibe wasn’t the same, and I didn’t really enjoy it, to be quite honest, that much. It was veering more toward moving to the States, and then involvement with Geffen Records. I could see I wasn’t really the right guitar player to go into that kind of thing. And of course, it became very successful after that, in ‘86/‘87, with a different kind of music, different kind of line-up. But there was no way that I would fit into that kind of bracket anyway. I realized in ‘83, that for me, it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

  More clear-cut is the fact that Bernie Marsden was now gone. “No, I didn’t do any of those sessions,” he says, when asked about Colin and Cozy. “That was completely after me, after David had decided that he wanted to re-form the band with different people. And yeah, that’s a kind of crossover. So I know nothing about Slide It In at all.” But he acknowledges Micky’s problems with David. “Yes, and ongoing. Yeah, to this day. To this day. Yeah, classic... I guess, you have to talk to him, really. But he’s difficult. Yeah, we haven’t spoken to each other in seven or
eight years now. So, there you go.”

  “We just never cracked America in those days,” sighs Marsden, on what could have been. “If we would’ve cracked America, the whole thing would’ve been different. We signed to Atlantic, but then we were kind of downgraded to a label within Atlantic. I think, when I say downgraded, I don’t mean that against the guys. I’m sure they were very keen. But there wasn’t the money involved to get it to America to tour. And you know, even when we did tour there, we’d be out with Iron Maiden and with Judas Priest — we called it the heavy metal sandwich. It was Judas Priest, Whitesnake and Iron Maiden opening. I mean, great guys, you know — it was a load of Englishmen on the road — but we should never have been there. And then we got a Jethro Tull tour. You know, wasn’t the most ideal billing, although it went very well. But I think because of that, the record company over there said, ‘Oh, we can’t do much with these guys, you know.’ And then bless him, John Kalodner, when he signed David, he heard ‘Here I Go Again’ from the album, and said if you re-record this, we go out and we’ll have a No. 1. And bless him, he was right.”

  And yet, as alluded to, things were not too bad on his side of the Atlantic. “Oh, we did sell out European and Japanese tours. We’d do gigs where The Police were opening, Dire Straits were opening. You know, we were a big band, in Europe, doing well. We did festivals. Billy Squier opened for us. Billy Squier opened for us all across Europe and he was massive in America at the time. I’m still in contact with Billy. He’s a good guy. I went to Japan three times, and we came to the States, but we never cracked it. Japan we cracked within one tour.

  “And we all presumed as well, America’s next. But it never happened. But again, because of the management, we were not really making any money. And you know, that’s a whole different story. That’s the technical side. And I tend not to do too much about that because fans are fans and they don’t want to know about bad management, percentages and stuff like that. But the States... I remember Lovehunter time, we did, what would you call it, almost a showcase, at Los Angeles University. Joni Mitchell came to that gig [laughs]. But that was a one-off. We were out there for like a long weekend, stayed at the Sunset Marquis. Abba were there, Phil Collins was there. So I remember, standing in the pool in the shallow end, while the two girls from Abba were swimming. And Phil Collins and I, standing next to him, I remember saying to him, ‘Tough old life, isn’t it?’”

  Above and next page: Backstage passes from 1984 and 1987/88. During this period, Whitesnake were at their combined creative and commercial peak. (Martin Popoff Collection)

  Above: Map of Donington. The band played the place so often, surely they didn't need one? (Martin Popoff Collection)

  Over the page: David and ex-wife Tawny Kitaen, who starred in several Whitesnake videos: she wasn't always popular with band members. (George Rose/Contributor)

  Above: The hair metal version of Whitesnake. L-R: Adrian Vandenberg, Steve Vai, David Coverdale, Tommy Aldridge, Rudy Sarzo. (Pictorial Press Ltd)

  Over the page: Adrian Vandenberg in 1990. "Here I go again." (Cathy Griffiths)

  Above: Mathematically speaking, as Whitesnake is to Purple, Company Of Snakes is to Whitesnake. Three Purple to Whitesnake, three Whitesnakers to Company Of Snakes. (Martin Popoff Collection)

  Previous page: White suit, beard, hit songs running through his head, it could only be John Kalodner, Geffen Records A&R genius who took Whitesnake to another level. (Jeff Kravitz/Contributor)

  Over the page: Geffen pulled out all the promotional stops to make Coverdale Page a success. John Kalodner wrote a letter of apology to Robert Plant, who felt slighted at the pairing. (Martin Popoff Collection)

  Above and next page: Whitesnake have traditionally had two guitarists. For much of this century the honours went to Doug Aldrich (above) and Reb Beach (next page), though Doug has now left. (Bill Baran)

  Above: You'd have to say that the Whitesnake stage set is pretty impressive. (Greg Olma)

  Above and next page: The rhythm section for the middle years of the century: Chris Frazier (above) on skins and Uriah Duffy (next page) on bass. (Bill Baran)

  -9-

  Slide It In – “You’ve Got To Get Rid Of The Old Guys”

  It gets tricky, but fear not.

  At the end of this process, fans are left with a fetching album called Slide It In... in fact, two of them, two Slide It Ins: one presented to the home team back in the UK, and a newly polished and invigorated one to sate the appetite of American audiences, throngs of a new sort of metalhead drawn to a West Coast music soon to be known as hair metal, but for now, consisting of the likes of yer Ratts, Dokkens, Mötley Crües and Quiet Riots.

  First it would take a new record deal, with rising US label Geffen, named after its mercurial leader David Geffen. David had heard the other David was switching management and soon had A&R maven John Kalodner flying to the UK, where he and Cozy Powell had taken Coverdale out for dinner. Just in case things didn’t work out, Coverdale had a telegram in hand from Ahmet Ertegun and Doug Morris, saying that he had a home at Atlantic if he needed it.

  “The story is very intricate and complicated,” begins Kalodner, “and it involves the survival of Geffen Records, and me being fired and going bankrupt, according to David Coverdale. So it’s not exactly a lightweight story. It’s been sanitized quite a bit by him. I’d always loved Whitesnake. It started with me following him for a long time in Whitesnake; I always loved David Coverdale’s singing. I thought he was one of the best singers in the world, and, when I was at Geffen, I did everything to try to sign him. When his contract somehow lapsed with Jerry Greenberg [Mirage Music] — I’m not sure why — but then he was available for United States, Canada and Japan. So I signed them, in late ‘83, for the United States and Canada, because Geffen didn’t want to pay, you know, for all of it, because he didn’t really know about them. So Jack Matsamura at Sony Japan signed them.”

  “I thought they were a great commercial rock band,” continues Kalodner. “The problem is, that I told Coverdale, even though I really loved the other guys in the band, they weren’t as good as him. He was a superstar, and we were entering the age of Bon Jovi, you know, all of the big superstars, and I thought Coverdale’s voice and songs were better than anything.”

  The band that would begin the long, circuitous process of swinging its way through the making of two Slide It Ins – plus the subsequent landmark tour cycle –consisted, first of all, of three guys featured on the last record, Saints & Sinners: namely Jon Lord, Micky Moody and David Coverdale. Next on the grey scale was guitarist Mel Galley, credited with backing vocals on the last record, but to all intents and purposes new to the band. Well, not all that new, for Mel, bassist Colin Hodgkinson and drummer Cozy Powell had been added as part of the new Whitesnake as Saints & Sinners was virtually hitting the shelves (with a thud and not a bounce), participating in the touring.

  Explains Micky Moody, soon to be an ex-‘snake, “We recorded Slide It In in Munich and it was kind of clinical to me and it was not the same sort of band that Whitesnake had been. At the end of the year, I left the band, after the end of a European tour in the fall of ‘83. I really didn’t have a particularly good time. You would have to ask David the rest of it. Geffen was interested in bringing him to the States and creating a new Whitesnake. They ended up taking a lot of Mel Galley and me off it and putting on John Sykes. I was gone by then, so I really can’t tell you anything further. You’d have to ask David on that point. It wasn’t the same, let’s put it that way. That band in 1983 was not the Whitesnake that I knew and loved.”

  Stylistically, given the shift to American-influenced music, had there been a parallel shift in absorbing influences from commercial, melodic American hard rock bands?

  “Not really,” says Moody. “You know, we talked about other bands, but I don’t think we ever sat down and said we should go in this direction, or that. But I could just see what was happening, the kind of people who were coming over from the States an
d listening to the band, looking at the band, and talking business with David. And I thought, ‘I’m not part of this anymore. I’m in the wrong band here.’ So you know, musically, it was more what David was writing with Mel Galley, really; I wasn’t involved with any songs apart from ‘Slow An’ Easy,’ which was a slide guitar epic. So to be quite honest, I could see that I was really there as a session man, at that particular time, and it wasn’t a happy period for me, to be perfectly honest.”

  The band’s other guitarist, Mel Galley (who isn’t with us anymore, having died – gracefully and with good humour — from oesophagus cancer on February 7, 2008) soon wouldn’t be part of the equation either, although not through any sort of firing. But Mel’s lyricist/producer brother Tom has a wrinkle to add to the tale. It seems the two had worked up a new Trapeze album, and, “Basically, when Mel went to Whitesnake, we had just done six demo tracks that were presented to Warner Bros. Then David Coverdale heard it, he offered Mel the job, replacing Bernie. He then wanted two of the tracks off the demo, which ended up on Slide It In, one which he re-titled ‘Gambler,’ and the other one was ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time,’ and those showed up on Slide It In. But we had the option to go with Trapeze with Warner Bros., and Mel chose to join Whitesnake.”

  Mel would badly injure his arm in a fairground accident, the attendant nerve damage causing him to lose the ability to play guitar. He later regained some of his abilities through the use of a mechanical aid called “The Claw.”