Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

“‘Standing In The Shadow’ was creeping into my ‘Fool For Your Loving’” says David, on the thumping, dramatic, melodic Slide It In closer, Coverdale growing convincingly into his role as spokesman for those unlucky in love, the empathy in his voice winning over his charges and providing comfort, letting them know that relationships are a perilous terrain even for rock stars.

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  Whitesnake – “There Were 30 Something Tracks Of Guitars”

  “When I was no longer part of the band with Slide It In, that’s when, for me, it started to become a heavy rock outfit,” says Bernie Marsden, summarizing the scenario now from the outside; a scenario that was soon to spiral out of control. “And that’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with that. I think the 1987 album almost borders on a metal album, a melodic metal album, whatever you want to call it. I think it’s great. I can listen to that album like I would listen to Sabbath or to Journey — it’s the band I was in, only by name. So I can kind of divorce that and listen to it as an outsider, so to speak. And the biggest song on it is one of my songs, so I suppose it’s easy to understand. But it’s nothing to do with me really. I can just listen to it as a good album. And obviously it sold millions. The band was just becoming more and more successful.”

  Obviously, the drama that is Whitesnake began to intensify fully two records ago, but even after the success of Slide It In, David couldn’t hold a winning combination together. After the inaugural Rock In Rio, held over ten days in January of 1985, the metal-stamping machine at the back of the band, Cozy Powell, would leave, due to ego clashes with Coverdale, both being men who know what they want, but alas, one only the drummer and not exactly a writing one at that. Cozy’s last show with the band would be on January 19, 1985, the second of Whitesnake’s two slots after they had played with Queen and Iron Maiden on opening night, back on January 11th.

  And while all this was going on, always in the background was this idea of an “image upgrade.” Says Murray: “There was no pressure coming from anybody saying we’ve got to wear this or that, it was just more the reaction from Geffen because of the video, ‘Oh, the band looks much better like that. Without the keyboards, without guys with moustaches.’ Fairly superficial but that was the era, early ‘84. So we’d gone out with that line-up that summer in the States and Japan with extra keyboards on the side, but basically it was now a four-piece band. And, unfortunately, then you had almost a power struggle at the end of ‘84, beginning of ‘85 where certain members thought it should all be equal. Other members thought they deserved more than other members. There was definitely a move to try and make it more of a band in a business sense instead of just being David plus his hired hands. Which, even if somebody like Cozy or John had gotten a good deal for a weekly wage, it still wasn’t anything like what should be the case in terms of royalties and all that kind of thing. Whitesnake was still David plus sidemen, really. And in the early days of the band, by the time we started making money, it had been sort of like that anyway, except David was almost one of the sidemen as well. So yes, in early ‘85, because of disagreements about percentages and stuff, Cozy decided to leave. So then there’s three of us.”

  “Cozy was one of the great drummers of all time,” figures Kalodner, when asked about the exit of Powell from the ranks. “He was just hard to work with. He didn’t like that I changed around the band. He was a very independent soul. I think he thought he could do better. And I think he sort of quit. My memory is kind of fuzzy because it was a whirlwind right then. Cozy Powell and Jon Lord are the two people I knew the most.”

  “By the way, Cozy Powell did fit into it,” continues Kalodner, meaning the planned concept of a new band to conquer America. “I forget really, after all these years what happened. Whether he just quit because his bandmates got canned, or Coverdale was momentarily pissed at him, I actually don’t know the answer to that. But to me, the guy was a legend. Just like when he died, you know, at 150 miles an hour. That’s how he lived. He took me on the M4, or whatever, and he was driving at 120 miles an hour. It’s like, I witnessed it. He was living at the edge, about as much as you could.” Cozy Powell was killed as he was ejected through the windshield of his Saab 9000, April 5, 1998. He had been commandeering the M4 motorway in inclement weather at 104 mph. On the phone to his (married) girlfriend, Cozy was not wearing his seatbelt and his blood alcohol was over the legal limit. Due to that phone call, we know his last words were, “Oh shit.”

  Jon Lord would be gone for an entirely different reason to Cozy, and that’s the much-hyped reformation of Mk. II-era Deep Purple. “I loved Jon Lord. He was one of my personal favourites,” says Kalodner. “He was a cool, fine person. I thought he was irrelevant to the sound of Whitesnake. What I’m trying to do is separate my personal feelings from what I know I needed to do. Like I had no hard-on or issue with Bernie Marsden or any of those... the other guitar player, whatever his name was. I just didn’t think they were good. I had no animosity. It’s one of those things where I had to tell these people, and it was very hard on me to do that. Also, unlike American musicians, they were not taking care of themselves. And David Coverdale looked like the ultimate rock star. Every minute. Even when the guy had a dollar in his pocket. I think these guys were probably pissed at some asshole LA A&R guy. That’s my impression. Maybe except for Jon Lord and Cozy Powell. I really don’t know the answer to that.”

  Time for a next record, and Coverdale in fact once more wanted to knock the whole thing on its head. No drummer, really no keyboardist, and having his doubts about the megalomaniac locked inside of his new guitarist, Coverdale nonetheless was convinced to give it the ol’ college try, decamping in the ensuing spring months to a hamlet in the South of France called Le Rayol with John Sykes to try to pen some new anthems for the ages.

  “David admired the kind of cockiness and arrogance and self-confidence that John had,” reflects Murray, soon sent along to help with arrangements. “But of course he didn’t want it to go too far to the point where his leadership was threatened, and that’s eventually what happened. I think at a time when he was writing stuff, I think David found it pretty inspiring. John would come up with rhythm tracks and stuff, and then they worked on songs to some extent and then I went out and joined them. This is kind of May, June ‘85, and I’d made some contribution, but by that point David was fired up by what John was coming up with. It needed to be produced. It needed to be made to sound like a proper band.”

  So the three of them headed out to Los Angeles where they auditioned upwards of 60 drummers, winding up with storied UK journeyman Aynsley Dunbar, 39, an odd choice it would seem, given the growing mandate from above that the band needed an injection of youth.

  “We’d spent about nine months writing songs and searching for a drummer and finally getting into the studio, I suppose the end of September ‘85,” continues Murray. “Then we went up to Little Mountain in Vancouver and recorded all the basic tracks with Mike Stone producing, October, November ‘85. And from my point of view it was all done at that point. But then after that, David had all sorts of vocal problems and trouble with his voice, seeing doctors, and they all went to many different studios. John kind of got very excessive in terms of we’ve got to have 50 guitars on this, it’s got to be re-done and re-done and made better endlessly. Very much a big production where there’s a wall of guitars. Sometimes it sounds great and other times it’s just overkill, in my humble opinion. And I would love to have that album re-mixed, not just re-mastered. Just to hear some of the stuff that’s on there. But because I wasn’t there, John came over back to England and did some recording over here, which is when I was able to go in and use some of that time to redo some bass parts. But basically they were either together or separately recording most of that year, and I wasn’t part of it at all.”

  “The Whitesnake deal was more of a financial thing,” dismisses John Sykes, speaking with Drew Masters soon after his coming exit from the band. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse at that time. They
were just finishing off the Slide It In album when I joined and what I did was a few overdubs and got my name on the American version to establish me as ‘in.’ After we toured the album, Cozy Powell left and David and I went to France to write the Whitesnake 1987 album. We auditioned drummers and found Aynsley Dunbar, and from there we went to Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver, Canada, to begin recording and production. David had vocal troubles and it was frustrating, but I hung in there.”

  If there was any sense of mission or briefing for the new record, producer Keith Olsen says, “Well, actually, it started off with the amount of costs involved with doing the Slide It In record, and the amount of money that David spends on a daily basis. When they started working on that, when they started to do that record, David was ready to do just about anything to make sure he had continued success. So Kalodner definitely wanted that record to become Americanized, to a certain extent. But that’s not really a good way to put it. Mike Stone was brought in, because John Sykes wanted… I think it was because John felt he could control Mike Stone. Because when I worked on the Slide It In record, I think I gave him [Sykes] definitive direction what we needed to do to make sure we get a record that would at least go gold. What did I suggest? I think clean it up, make sure that there’s not as much garbage in it, simplify the parts, make sure it’s chunky, distinctive, that it had definition. But remember, back in the day, when music was an art form [laughs] — Okay, I said it, all right? — back then, there were three things that made hit records, and that was the song first, performance of that song second, and the sound, third.”

  “Now Coverdale and Sykes wrote some really amazing songs for the Whitesnake white album, I guess you would call it, Whitesnake 1987,” continues Olsen. “They wrote some great songs. The arrangements were great, the drums were really great — the guitars were totally out of tune. Sykes was going through a period of time where he wanted to have a harmonizer, wanted all the effects, and the harmonizer going up and down so everything was really wide. And Coverdale found out he couldn’t sing to it.”

  Did you say out of tune?

  “Oh yeah, really out of tune. Well, there were 35 tracks... you know, when Mike Stone took the record and did the first onslaught of guitars, there were 30 something tracks of guitars, and almost, maybe, there were one or two of the guitar tracks that were in tune? And you know on every track. And so I would pull, extract those two guitar tracks, and then John played a few others, and then later on when John became a little more impossible, Dann Huff played some more. You know Dann Huff? Super good guitar player; he played some.

  “David had an awful, awfully hard time singing it, and Mike Stone, he couldn’t… I don’t like to say anything bad about the departed, you know, Mike was really good at what he did, but working with Coverdale and Sykes was really hard on him. And it got to be more about things other than the music. And so Kalodner pulled the album from Mike Stone and told me, ‘Keith, fix this record.’ So I jumped in and, six weeks later, delivered the record. But we redid all the vocals, cleaned up all the guitars so everything was in tune, got rid of all the effects that were out of tune, re-did the bass on a lot of it, because the bass was all out of tune. It was because the guitars had the effects on it, while they were cutting tracks, and everybody was playing really wide. The pitch center was not centered. It was very wide. You understand what I mean? If you had a bass that was five cents sharp on every note, and you had a guitar that had a harmonizer printed on it three cents sharp, and three cents flat, to widen it, Okay, now you’re the singer, where do you pitch this? Yeah, exactly.”

  Had it all gotten just too complicated then?

  “No, in the studio it sounded really big,” laughs Olsen. “And it was like, guys, hello, there’s a time when you have to think forward and think more big picture.”

  So as to who is playing guitar on Whitesnake, “That album, it’s John, and it’s Dann Huff,” states Olsen. “Adrian Vandenberg came in at the very end on ‘Here I Go Again,’ on version three. And he tried to play a solo on a couple of things, but it was just the ‘Here I Go Again’ solo, on the radio version. I think that’s the only thing he’s on. Adrian was around. When David asked him to be in the band, he was brought in at the same time that he brought in Vivian Campbell. I was thinking: wrong guitar player. I mean, Vivian was a dedicated player that when he woke up, he picked up a guitar; when he went to sleep, he put down the guitar, and everything in between. He was practicing, playing; he was one of those guys who drives you crazy.

  “Lindsey Buckingham, same way. He never ever put the guitar down. He always has something, usually an electric guitar — not plugged in, thank God — but it’s always… you’re hearing this tinkle tinkle tinkle all the time. And that was the way it was. And so Adrian was okay, he looked good, for the time. As for backup vocals, when it came to backgrounds and things like that, I brought in Richard Page. He’s Mr. Mister! (sings the band’s hit). You know him; look them up — Mr. Mister. He had two big hits around the same time, and he was a stunningly good singer. The other singer that looked like Sting. So yeah, he did some backups along with John Sykes.”

  It’s a story for another book, but Dutchman Adrian Vandenberg came well pedigreed, through three high quality records with his band Vandenberg, as Olsen remembers: “Yeah, some really good songs. I want you to note what key they’re in [laughs]. You listen, this guy plays every riff in the key of A. You know, I could be wrong, but it’s A, F sharp minor, A minor, or C, which are all A, the key of A. But he was brought in just at the very end, and why he was brought in was because we were doing this one version of ‘Here I Go Again,’ and I really wanted eighth notes in the verse, (sings it). So I called up John, Dave and I got John on the phone and I said, ‘John, could you just grab the guitar and come by? You can plug into the studio amps. I just need eighth notes. On two verses.’ And he said, he says to me, ‘No Keith, I can’t do that. I would need my entire backline, or I would have to fly to England.’ And Coverdale looks at me and I’m going, ‘It’s just eighth notes! It’s just jung, to give it a little more push forward.’”

  Er, sorry, he said he would need his entire backline?

  “He would need his entire backline or he would have to fly to London to do it. And so I said, ‘It’s eighth notes!’. Anyway, I could see this call wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I say ‘Goodbye.’ And I looked at David and said, ‘You want to try some eighth notes?’ So I called Dann Huff. David had never met Dann Huff and he was the No. 1 session player at the time in LA, and he was probably doing three or four sessions a day, commercials and stuff like that. I mean, making really good money as a session player. And so I call him, and he stops by at 9am on his way to a 10 o’clock session, with a guitar, not even in a guitar case. And he plugs it into my amp that is sitting there in the control room, with the speaker in another room, and he hears the song once he goes, ‘Okay, jung, jung, jung,’ and I said thanks very much. Unplugs it, and he says, ‘You know, I’ll just send you a bill.’ And all of a sudden, it was oh. David, oh, that kind of special… you know. And so I started introducing him to extra people here and there, and then Bill Cuomo re-did all the bass on a Prophet DX, and on a DX7 Yamaha, yeah, almost all the bass is electronic bass. Go listen to it again, and you’ll figure out how cool that really is. About 50% of the stuff on it is keyboard bass.”

  So Dann Huff does the eighth notes, and Adrian does the solo on the radio version of “Here I Go Again?”

  “No, Adrian did the rhythm part of that one too. This was another version. But I can’t remember exactly who played on what. Vivian didn’t play on anything. He was brought in when Sykes was fired. He was brought in that next day, and he really showed everybody how much he could really play. And to hear him now, with Def Leppard...”

  Recalls John Kalodner on the crazy circus that was this record, “I was the A&R person; I decided about all of these things. Decided about producers, about everything. David was a great artist, and they allowed me to A&R him, e
specially for the 1987 record; which I almost got fired over. I mean, the story is so interesting and so complicated because so many things happened, with the different phases of it. It’s the most complicated story ever in my career, just because the writing was a problem. Then he hated John Sykes, he hated Mike Stone, he couldn’t sing the record for eighteen months. And you know, like I said, he was one of the greatest artists ever to work with, but that record was one of the toughest ones of my career ever.”

  “So this is the whole complication,” continues Kalodner, ready to expand on a few of these points. “The people that they recorded the record with, because they recorded the tracks, the tracks were spectacular. Mike Stone was at his peak. He’s done all those big Journey records, he had done Asia. And the guy was a real problem; he had a real drinking problem, he was really difficult, but the guy was just a master. He was one of the most talented rock recordists that ever lived. So when I heard the tracks, I was stunned at what they sounded like. That’s what I thought Whitesnake should sound like. They were big, they just were everything that I had hoped for.

  “So Coverdale hears them, and already, somehow he’s fighting with John Sykes. I don’t know if it’s about publishing or credit, but it’s already getting into like a situation where Coverdale doesn’t want to know John Sykes. In fact, John Sykes wanted to do some overdubs with Mike Stone in Toronto in order to beef up some of the tracks, and I said ‘Okay,’ I ordered it, I wrote the PO, and did the sessions, and Coverdale was even more pissed. This is Toronto, not Vancouver. People want to remember, most of the stuff I always did was in Vancouver with Bruce Fairbairn or Bob Rock, any of those people. But Mike Stone recorded somewhere, some hellhole in Toronto. He did not record in Vancouver. I mean, at least not the guitar overdubs.

  “So the tracks come back; it’s ready for the vocals. I mean, there’s even some guide vocals John Sykes had done, and there’s various things on there, and Coverdale had written all the words. I mean, we’re all poised to go. Now, you gotta remember, this is like early 1986. This is a year before I actually could get the record done.”