As for what the philosophy was behind the concept of a “remix,” Murray figures, “They thought the sound wasn’t suitable for radio. Martin Birch had come in after Eddie Kramer and produced the European/Japanese version of Slide It In, and it’s big… big drum sound but not very in-your-face. In a sense, not quite punchy enough, so Keith Olsen remixed the album. Mostly, there’s not a huge difference between the sounds of the instruments. I mean, I don’t play anything particularly different from what Colin had played on the record; not vastly different at all. The guitar sounds are a little bit more American metal than they had been before, but you’re still talking about the basic songs being the same. It’s just the overall… I don’t know what you would call it, really. There was a more radio-friendly mix, and Cozy and David hated it when they first heard it, but came around to liking it later, particularly as it started getting promoted and played in the States.”
It’s interesting that on the eve of Donington, Jon Lord had been under the impression that the record was impending and that Eddie Kramer had in fact produced in totality what was going to be issued, as Lord related at the time: “We’ve just come back from Munich where we did the album, which took about seven weeks, I think — I think the longest we’ve ever spent on a Whitesnake album. And the backing tracks are produced by a guy called Eddie Kramer. He goes right back to Hendrix, did all the Hendrix albums since the first one, I think. And it’s good to work with someone [new]... like we’ve always worked with Martin Birch before. He’s having great success with Iron Maiden. And it was quite a change to work with someone who we didn’t really know. And I’m really chuffed with the album. Very, very chuffed indeed. David’s got two or three more vocals to put on it, and then there’s the mixing. But I think it’s out in about the beginning of October. The songs, I think, are the best that David’s written for some time.
“I’ve helped insofar as I’ve always helped him, to try and realize the sound he wants to hear. I always find it difficult to write things for Whitesnake. I find that my role seems to be much more as, well, the best keyboard support he’s going to get, if I can blow my own trumpet. Or blow my own organ or whatever, I don’t know. But Mel has turned out to be a very useful songwriter as well, and he and David have come up with some stunners. I think you’ll be very chuffed. To me, this is what Whitesnake has always been aiming at. It’s not so much your bog standard rock ‘n’ roll band, or a hard rock band, but a modern R&B band, which I’m glad to see is happening. But the songs on the new album, I think will set the style for Whitesnake for the next couple of years. It’s not that we’ve moved away from what we’ve been, it’s just that we’ve added to it.”
Adding colour to the Eddie Kramer dimension in conversation with Kerrang!’s Neil Jeffries, Lord said that, “Martin Birch has always done the job in the past and I’ve known him from the third Deep Purple album, way back when! He’d virtually become a seventh member of the band. I suppose there might have been a lack of discipline in a few areas as a result of that. But with Eddie, it was a different kettle of fish, because he didn’t know us too well and we didn’t know him too well either. So he was able to say things that Martin perhaps wouldn’t have said, like, ‘For fuck’s sake, let’s work!’ Or his favourite, ‘What is in that drink? Is it just mineral water and orange juice?!’ He was right in the end though, when he said that if we were going to produce something that’s going to be important to the band and important to the people that are going to buy it, then we should at least be together!”
“The band sounds much bigger now,” continued Lord. “People always used to say we had a huge sound on stage, but, even with a six-piece band, on albums, it tended to sound a little constricted. The new sound Eddie’s got for us, although not violently different, is that old sound ‘blown up’ a bit. We used to have, with Bernie and Micky, two guitarists playing the same part at the same time, and then I had to get in somewhere! So we were getting this enormous amount of sound squashed into a small space. With Eddie, we went for the one guitarist, the bass player and the drummer. And with Cozy’s sound, which is huge anyway, it tended to make the backing tracks much more live. He plays so hard that he can only do three or four tracks before he’s had it for a few hours! He wants the commitment to be on the tape rather than just the sound. So if we didn’t get it in three or four takes, we had to stop for a while. The chances of getting it with six people initially would be far less, of course. With just three, there were less distractions for him.”
As for Mel Galley’s role... “Mel did most of the initial recording because he was involved in writing most of the songs,” said Micky Moody. “So therefore he knew them quite a lot better than me. He went in with Colin and Cozy. This way is more natural. Mel’s rhythm parts are very big chord things, which he’s incredibly good at doing. My role now — and I’m very pleased with it — is similar to what Jon is doing: putting colours on top. Whereas before with Bernie, there was a little bit of a battle going on!”
Added Lord: “The way it seemed to work out to me, was that Mel took over more the traditional role of the rhythm guitarist with Micky putting the sparkle on the edge of it all. Even though that sparkle might be another rhythm pattern against Mel. Rather than as before, which was often a case of, ‘Let’s overdub some more guitars!’”
“Yeah, definitely,” answers Murray, when asked if the guys had been cognizant of the metal revolution taking place in LA, thanks very much to people like Brian Slagel [founder of Metal Blade Records] putting out independent metal compilations. Personally, I had wanted the band to change and certainly I guess LA was where things seemed to be happening with Van Halen and all those bands coming out at that time. It just seemed to be more current, really, image-wise and musically. And so I was perfectly happy for the band to change.
“We’d kind of done the previous style as much as we could, I think. And to me, it was getting repetitive. Great stuff that we did and I still play it now. I still have a band with Micky and we’re going out fairly soon. And also the songs and the style of the earlier Whitesnake are more suitable to my style of playing. But I could certainly see the band needed to move with the times a bit. And so, by chance, Mel had a bad accident where he couldn’t play, basically, and therefore he was out of the band. So just for a short time it was kind of a five-piece band. Then Deep Purple reformed and we became a four-piece band. We did a video for the track ‘Slow An’ Easy,’ even though it’s really Micky’s song and he plays on the recording. But the video features me, John Sykes, Cozy and David. And suddenly it’s like, oh, look at this! It looks more like a kind of… up-to-date look.”
So, summarizing and sprinkling in a few more specifics, Murray explains that, “Martin Birch mixed the album for Britain in Europe, and Kalodner didn’t like it, so it coincided with me and John Sykes coming into the band. So it happened that we were able to go to Keith Olsen’s studio, in the beginning of ‘84, and I overdubbed all the bass. John did some of the guitars, and so there’s still some of Micky on there. There’s also a ton of Mel Galley on there, but the remix is much more to Geffen’s taste, and it took quite a long time for some of the other guys to come around to it. So yeah, it kind of slowly changed, ‘82, ‘83, ‘84, etc., and, you know, the band became much more David’s band, and David and John Kalodner’s band, in a sense.”
Offering more on the specific changes done to come up with the US version, Neil adds, “I can point to different tracks and say, well, this is Micky’s slide guitar playing, this is Micky’s solo, and so even if it’s not mentioned on the credits, he’s still on some of the American remix tracks. I mean, John was going to probably record as many solos as he could, but in fact, Keith Olsen got ill, so we had to finish. By which time, I had re-done all the bass parts, but they’re pretty much following what Colin Hodgkinson did anyway. The songs kind of dictated that in most cases. But John mostly did rhythm guitars, and only a couple of solos.”
As for the original version, the UK version? “It’s a much
bigger, much more reverb-y drum sound, and that makes it kind of... whenever Cozy comes into a band, he puts his stamp on it sound-wise. He wants it to be that kind of sound, and Geffen didn’t want that kind of sound. So, when Keith Olsen stripped that back and made it much less reverberant and punchier, in a way, Cozy really hated that. David wasn’t happy with it either. But like I say, they got used to it [laughs].”
Was there anything else about Martin Birch and his production characteristics that made his sound not suitable for the American market?
“It’s tricky, because for me, I benefitted greatly from Martin’s style of sound or mixing,” admits Murray. “The bass is very prominent on the earlier Whitesnake records, and it’s sometimes virtually inaudible on the 1987 album, for example. The whole fashion changed during the ‘80s where you started to get a huge great kick drum sound — the drums became all-important, and forget about the bass. But even though it was benefitting me on records such as Ready An’ Willing and Come An’ Get It, I always thought the guitars should be louder and I thought it lacked power because of that. They’re good records, but I could see that maybe they weren’t aggressive enough for what kids wanted. When Martin started working with Iron Maiden, the bass is still loud but the guitar is more in-your-face, whereas Bernie and Micky are not as aggressive and not as harsh or metal sounding. So it’s just a combination of things.”
I wondered if the gesture of having Neil change the bass parts... did the new treatment to Cozy’s drum tracks necessitate that? “No, not really. It was more just, I was back in the band, and you know, I was probably sent over there to look after John Sykes in order to keep him out of trouble as much as anything [laughs]. I don’t think the expectation was for me to do anything particularly different. It was more that they would rather it featured the people who were going to be in the band from then on. Of course, in a few months’ time, Mel Galley is out, because he’d had this bad accident and couldn’t play anymore. Jon Lord is out because he’s rejoined Deep Purple, and so it becomes yet again, different than what’s on the album. And then the same thing happened again in ‘87.”
As for the songs on Slide It In, great stuff all ‘round. American sounding? Maybe subtly so. For when one makes an utterance like that, it’s usually in the presence of something more poppy, melodic, AOR. Slide It In isn’t exactly that. If anything, the main difference is that it’s more metal and hard rock, mostly more hard rock, and a lot less blues. And a lot less variety stylistically. Of note, one other difference between the UK and US versions of Slide It In is track sequence, so, having to pick, we’re going to run through this crunchy, solid, happening record using the US version, given its wider distribution and impact.
The album opens with the joyous yet squarely hard rocking title track. A sullen acceptance seemed to have set in that David’s sexual double entendres knew no bounds, and resigned to that fact, folks just snickered along with Dave and his dic... tionary. Whatever he’s talking about here, the musical backtrack was a canny mix of stacked US metal power chords with a slightly Stonesy twist. “‘Slide It In’ literally was just a bit of tongue-in-cheek,” explains Coverdale. “One of the things that I had developed with Whitesnake, Okay, long story short. I’d worked with Deep Purple which were a deadly serious rock band, you know, and that’s how they were perceived. And you know, I like a good laugh. And I would write songs, once I got Whitesnake up and running, I would write songs like ‘Wine, Women An’ Song,’ ‘Would I Lie To You’ (just to get in your pants), ‘Slide It In.’ These were all tongue firmly in cheek, end of Saturday night, knees-up, sing-along songs. And it was only the narrow-minded female, militant female feminists [laughs], who couldn’t see the joke. But you know, when I was in concert, the loudest voices I would hear singing the Slide It In songs were women. It’s basically a bit of fun. I’ve got my deadly serious tunes as you can testify, but a lot of them are just definite rock ‘n’ roll a-wop-bop-a-lula Little Richard knees-up songs.”
Next up was “Slow An’ Easy,” precursor to and blueprint for “Still Of The Night,” the band’s most overt stab at something Zeppelin-esque in the catalogue. Again, what we have here is top notch radio grade metal, with the added bonus of a history lesson concerning slide guitar, nod of the hat to Micky Moody. Notes David, “‘Slow an’ Easy,’ I had written basically to replace ‘Lovehunter’ because I was bored sick singing it. And it was going to be a vehicle for my then slide player Micky Moody.” David has also said that it was recorded virtually in drunken jam mode in the middle of the night in Munich, with most of the lyrics being ad-libbed on the spot, and then cleaned up later for the final version.
Strength to strength, “Love Ain’t No Stranger” would offer a third variant of style and flair within the album’s first three tracks. It starts as a serious power ballad (apparently the signature keyboard parts were originally written for guitar) and then rocks out, on the way to No. 44 in the UK chart and ten slots higher in the US. In effect, the song is one of the more serious and heartfelt love songs from David’s bag of mostly one trick ponies so far. “Love Ain’t No Stranger” is arguably the song with which David succeeds in seducing America, and Cozy Powell had said to David that it was the best track he’d ever played on. A production video was cooked up for this spot of AOR genius, as was the case with “Slow An’ Easy,” both doing much to ease the band into the MTV era, a strategy that would pay off in spades come the next record.
Asked about this instant Whitesnake classic of an adult nature, Coverdale opines, “It was very interesting when I looked back on my earlier songs, they give me an indication of where I was emotionally, like a kind of diary. And it’s interesting, with my first marriage, it blessed us with a beautiful daughter. But my God, most of the songs I had from that were blues songs! You know, don’t break my heart again like you did before, otherwise I’m out of here. And, of course, it was obviously destined to crumble. ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger’ was one of those kinds of songs. And of course I had this awful aspect of me, where I was totally committed to my partner and also totally committed to being a rogue on the road. ‘I was alone, I needed love, so much I sacrificed all I was dreaming of.’ That’s just messing around on your relationship, and it’s a toughie. Not now, but then it was. There are still temptations, although now I know that if I lose what I have, it will be the biggest mistake I ever made in my life.”
Then with “All Or Nothing” it’s back to the snarling metal, simple metal, but no simpler than the bluesy hard rock that was the band’s trade from say Ready An’ Willing through Saints & Sinners. Things lighten up for the chorus, but all told, this could fit on a Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister album. And, come to think of it, the raw quality of David’s voice... it’s not far off Kevin, Dee, or Dio, or even Stephen Pearcy — these are all some metal men with roughness.
“Gambler” is another regal and thumping hard rocker from the band, its moody and mystical melody lending it gravitas, David’s lyrics and vocal delivery underscoring the dark clouds of this fine and measured modern metal track. And its keyboard solo? That’s more Colin Towns, crazy circus master from the Gillan band, than typical Jon Lord. As with nearly everything on the record, the song’s relationship to the blues is in the abstract only, and possibly in the way Coverdale phrases.
“Slide It In... a lot of those songs I wrote in a place called St. Lucia in the Caribbean, and having a very good time,” notes David. “Actually that was one of my least blues albums, least blues in the ‘My missus has disappointed me and broken my heart yet again’ lyric. My wife and I at that time were getting on very, very well and we were very physically active [laughs], which was certainly promoting a lot of those tunes.”
“Guilty Of Love” offers high relief to the balance of the record, its melodic twin leads and its joie de vivre in general evoking memories of Thin Lizzy’s “Get Out Of Here” from the Black Rose album. “Guilty Of Love” was issued as a picture sleeve single (backed with “Gambler”) in the UK back on August 13th of 1983,
four months prior to the release of the album, and was played at the high profile Monsters Of Rock gig of 1983. Of note, the versions of these two tracks represent the only released material from the very first of the Slide It In sessions, namely the ill-fated work the band had done with Eddie Kramer, before scotching the idea for a return to Martin Birch as producer. The track hit No. 31 on the UK charts but was never one of the high profile songs stateside.
“Hungry For Love” takes us back to old school Whitesnake, so old, in fact, it sounds like a Gene Simmons-penned Kiss song, with its honky tonk premise, its funky post-blues boom bass line. “Give Me More Time,” well, that one’s Kiss-happy as well, sort of a “Dr. Love” thing although like “Hungry For Love”, John and David and the stakes involved make sure there’s a “lift and separate” come chorus time, that the song moves from ‘70s party rock into something at least modestly anthemic. And as a bonus, there’s another Lizzy-esque guitar solo.
“Spit It Out”... more stacked chords dependably delivered by the likes of Kiss and Twisted Sister, with David getting away with another X-rated lyric. Again, there’s all manner of exclamation marking between riff and Cozy, pregnant pauses, vampy breaks, and another party rock classic is born, each time David taking the band brightly away from its more academic past. It is the last of fully five music writing credits on the album for Mel Galley, and one wonders what would have happened had he retained his place in the band, although standing shoulder to shoulder next to the mercurial Sykes, one doubts if it could have lasted.
Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage Page 14