Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  As for who deserves credit for the writing of Whitesnake’s immortal epic, “David and John. Yeah, John wrote the riffs and David put all these top lines on it, all these melody lines, and the lyrics,” remembers Olsen. “And you know, he was pretty, shall we say, he was graceful in the way that he gave to his co-writers. John Kalodner, after he heard the vocal on it, and he heard the final mix, he said, ‘This is the lead single.’ And I said, ‘Get out! It’s not commercial. It’s...’ ‘I know, but it is the lead track. And if we come out with this first we will have a turntable hit on FM before we even go to contemporary hit radio.’ And that’s the way they promoted it too. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And so they had no play on CHR, but tons of play on AOR, and then they came with the first single, and it was ‘Here I Go Again.’ It was bang, soared up the charts, and they came with the ballad after that.”

  The derision as to the resemblance to Zeppelin was somewhat warranted, figures Keith. “Well yeah, just because there was that, ‘Ooh baby!’ But that’s why Coverdale and Jimmy Page got together later in life. I mean, he thought well, this guy is another Plant, let’s do it! Plus there’s the one on the next album that sounded just like ‘Kashmir’ — ’Judgment Day.’”

  Adds Murray: “Throughout ‘84, Kalodner would be saying, ‘Look, Slide It In, okay, but for the next album you’ve got to get heavier. It’s got to be much more guitar-based. Just a much more powerful, more American-sounding record.’ It was also about Zeppelin, ‘masters of the universe’-type guys who can really play but also look great and have got that kind of English arrogance or whatever it is. I think it was more that people could see David as a really charismatic star front man and that if he had a different band and changed the style of songs, then he could be massively huge around the world. And he probably took quite a bit of convincing himself, and I think Kalodner kind of chipped away at it. I think he kind of had to drag David into changing, but once he changed, that was it. Goodbye to the past.”

  In some ways, the legendary but overtly glossy video for “Still Of The Night” didn’t match the grind and heft of its musical soundtrack. Still, it was instrumental to the song’s success, in the feeding of such a thick steak to the masses — with David’s new girlfriend Tawny Kitaen more like head chef than waitress.

  Tawny and David first met at a restaurant on the strip, where David had asked her if she’d like to have a cup of tea after dinner. Tawny said yes, but then soon had to weigh the pluses of minus of this “intelligent” man with a predilection for Armani suits against the fact that he was $2M in debt to Geffen! In addition, Tawny had known little of David’s past with Purple or his present situation, being ten years younger than Coverdale. Tawny would go on to be accused of being the Yoko Ono of Whitesnake, given her participation in decisions on photo shoots, cover design, the picking of support bands, even managers. She also did David’s hair, making sure the Aquanet [hairspray] was in ample supply. Tawny even served as policewoman on the road enforcing a “No Groupies” policy, much to the relief of the rock wives.

  “It’s very strange because it had nothing to do with nepotism at all,” Coverdale had told Bob Garon in 1990, on bringing Kitaen into the frame. “Actually, we were just beginning our relationship at the time. In truth, it was Marty Callner [the famed video director] who first posed the idea. I went to his place to discuss the ‘Still Of The Night’ video, and Tawny was with me because we were going out to dinner. And Marty just said, ‘Wow! This is her! This is the one for the video!’ I said, ‘I’m not going to ask her to do it just because we’re friends,’ but she said she’d love to do it. It’s strange, though, because I’ve always been a very private person. And I like to keep my personal life that way. And the fact that it developed into a relationship. And now I live with this beautiful creature in Lake Tahoe with a son on the way. Because neither Tawny nor I were looking for a commitment at the time. It just worked that way. And to know that our relationship is now documented and that we were a celebrity couple… Well, it didn’t sit well with me. I embrace success, but I have a little discomfort with celebrity. However, it did help constitute nine million records, so that’s the trade-off. Not to take anything away from myself or my colleagues, but she was an important part of the whole vehicle. I also work with her because I only work with the best, so anyone who thinks there’s nepotism there, fuck them.”

  “She’s my good luck charm and she’s my best friend,” David told Anne Leighton, now a legendary publicist in our industry. “The fortunate thing in our relationship, was Tawny and I were first pals, which was a great foundation for our relationship. The last thing either of us wanted was a commitment from anyone. I had so much more work and music to make; all I wanted to do was catalogue who my friends were. But somehow Tawny and I got to the point where we were only calling each other and nobody else. We were pals and then we became lovers. She’s a wonderful circumstance.”

  Basically, all the videos off the album were pretty much identical, poodle rock all around, Tawny and David as main characters, the rest of the band of indeterminate identification. Combined, they created a suite, a novella, that serves now as a window into the preposterousness of 1980s hair metal at its showiest.

  “I thought Marty Callner was a genius,” explains Kalodner, asked about the clips, done over a ten-day period but issued over time. In the below anecdote, he’s talking about “Still Of The Night” as the first video, even if Tawny Kitaen avows that “Is This Love” was the first clip actually shot (for his part, Rudy Sarzo also says that “Still Of The Night” was the first one). “I thought he was inventive and an amazing person. And I called him up, and I just said, can you do this video for me? I think I was working with Susan Silverman, maybe at Warner Brothers Records. I don’t even know if Geffen would even be involved; these people didn’t want to touch it. The only people who were excited about Whitesnake was the promotion department. Which is all I needed them to be.

  “So here’s the real truth. So I talked to Marty Callner and made sure he has the record. Tell him my, like, idea. You know, it needs to be something big. Because the song is big. Everything is big. Coverdale is big. In person, you know, he’s really regal. So I give him all my ideas. So I said, you know, Geffen gave me a budget of like 125 or something, and he’s already complaining about it, this and that. So now it’s March. And I’m busy starting Aerosmith Permanent Vacation in Vancouver with Bruce Fairbairn. So Marty Callner and Coverdale, and whoever else is involved, totally came up with that entire video themselves. And Marty Callner even paid for some of it because it went over budget. So many of the video ideas were mine, but this was Marty and David Coverdale, 100%. When I came back and I went to Marty’s — they used to edit on film — when I saw the rough editing of the video, I was stunned at how spectacular it was.”

  The bizarre part of the story, of course, has to do with the identities of David’s band mates — done with mirrors indeed as Kalodner explains: “Right. This really is interesting. So Marty Callner says to me, ‘Well, you want a band in a video. And David Coverdale says he has no band.’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s true.’ So, Marty Callner says, ‘Well, what about John Sykes? He’s the guitar player; he’s the co-writer of the record.’ I said, ‘Well, Coverdale won’t talk to him let alone be in a video with him.’ So I said, ‘Listen Marty, you know, I have kind of a fantasy band that I would have for David Coverdale. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’ll definitely represent the vibe of the music. So I just told him and his production coordinator, you know, the people I wanted, and I called each one of them and saying, would they do it? Marty Callner got it all together. I had called them, and you know, and I come back to this incredible video, with a band that never played together and was just a fantasy in my head. It was one of the weirdest things I ever had in my career.”

  And the fantasy band becomes the real band?

  “Right. The fantasy band was because they were great players, not because they were models. And Coverdale liked all of t
hem. So the video comes out, the record comes out, and the record is gigantic immediately. So, by this time, Coverdale is managed by Trudy Green and Howard Kaufman, so I guess they got it together to have these people to be his band. But I mean, I just was thinking as quick as I could. I was worried about Aerosmith’s record and getting ready for Cher’s record, and I just named off the fantasy band that I’d like to have David Coverdale working with. And it appeared in Marty Callner’s video.”

  It might have been a bit more collaborative than all that, given that we know Coverdale admired Adrian Vandenberg, and yet on another occasion that I spoke to John, he seemed unaware that David knew him. John acknowledges that David had already been aware of Tommy Aldridge’s percussive powers as well. As for Viv and Rudy Sarzo...

  “Remember, I was in the thick of things — like there is no music business like this today,” says Kalodner, “but right then I was like the No. 1 A&R guy, I loved all these bands, and I knew who I would want, and David Coverdale or Marty Callner or somebody pulled it together. A lot of the other stuff, I was responsible for. Not the music or the singing or whatever. But pulling it together was all me. The video, that was just... I gave him an idea and somebody made it happen.”

  Closing side one of the original vinyl was a second successful hit re-heat, “Here I Go Again.” “Once again Kalodner definitely decided that this was going to be a mega-smash if you re-recorded it,” says Murray. “So we re-recorded it for the album and he still wasn’t really happy with it, so they re-recorded it again in what is more of a remix version, but it was in reality a total re-recording with various session guys. And this was after myself and John Sykes had parted company with David. So the version that everybody knows is a very slick production and it certainly sounded great at that time. If you listen back to the original version, it sounds possibly raw and unfinished. But it’s always been a really good song, and that’s the most important thing you’ve always got to have. The production is always just the icing on the cake. The version that’s on the album, the 1987 album, I’m on that, but not on the single version, so I’m on both album versions.”

  The single version, or US remix as it’s sometimes called, in fact features Denny Carmassi (Montrose, Heart) on drums, Dann Huff on guitars, Mark Andes (Heart) on bass and a keyboardist by the name of Alan Pasqua adding those textures we barely acknowledge. Carmassi, who at the time shared management with Whitesnake as part of Heart, would both record and tour with David in the 1990s. As for the single version, David wasn’t a big fan of the end result and was quietly pleased that it worked out to a form of bait and switch or switch and bait, given that the version that lives on in radio land is in fact the robust album version. Heard slightly more often, however, is the radio edit of “Still Of The Night,” less a travesty all round.

  “So what happened?” begins Kalodner, offering more detail on “Here I Go Again” (and again and again). “So the album gets done. Now, it’s taken me two fucking years to get this record done. I’m for real about to get fired from, you know, the guy who’s the most important executive in my life, to me. He was so pissed. So I get the record done, everyone loves the record. And I got Hugh Syme to do that incredible cover. You know, I spent all this money on it. It’s like, I definitely would have been a kind of semi, like a secondary A&R person, who signed Foreigner and whatever, Asia, Wang Chung, but this record, I could tell it was going to be something special. And remember the Bon Jovi record had just come out. So it was kind of getting to be the era of this kind of music.”

  “So, anyway, we’re sitting around, listening to it, promotion people — that means the promotion people and myself — and I think to myself, I can do a better single than this. So Eddie Rosenblatt, president of Geffen Records, says, ‘Are you insane? Haven’t you spent enough money?’ But Al Coury, who was the head of promotions said, ‘You know, let Kalodner give it a try. Let’s record another version of it, and see how it comes out.’ So, I tell Keith Olsen, who had mixed both records. I said, I want you to re-record ‘Here I Go Again.’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, Coverdale doesn’t speak to John Sykes. Most of the other band won’t speak to him.’ I said, ‘Well, use your session guys.’ Use all the guys that I think are the greatest, I use on all my sessions, you know, the guys that did Rick Springfield. Just get them. Just get them in. Let them, you and them, and Coverdale, arrange, do a new arrangement. I went in and I made sure the arrangement was, you know, very standard, like rock records were then. So they go in the studio. I mean, you’ve got to imagine these famous musicians now. I mean, Dann Huff, what is he? The biggest producer in Nashville? Anyway, they go in, they do a take, and the whole take is like a one-day take or two-day take.”

  And they’re all together in LA at this point?

  “They’re all together; they do some separate overdubs, but they did track it pretty much; kind of a dream band to me. Because I had used all those guys in different sessions. But to have them all together, they were available right after Christmas. And we got Richard Page. There’s even another singer that sang with Coverdale, Tommy Funderburk. Because they all wanted to sing with or work with David Coverdale too. We go in, and within a week, it’s recorded, Coverdale sings an incredible vocal, which was the hold-up with the whole album, which is what almost cost me my career. They finish the track and I play it for people at Geffen and like people are just stunned, at what it sounds like. So they say, well, the record’s already in production, and we’re already two years late, so what will we do with it? So anyway, that’s a whole other marketing discussion. It came out as a single, but the single was not on the album. The single was a single, which sold a fuck load, obviously, because it was that version, and then I put it on the Whitesnake’s Greatest Hits.”

  “When we started planning the album, the people at our record label said that it would be crazy for us not to update those two songs,” Coverdale had told Hit Parader, back on the press trail at the time. “Whitesnake has had a long and quite successful career outside America, and none of us saw any reason not to draw on that success this time around. The plan from the beginning was to let people know what kind of music this band can make through the release of ‘Still Of The Night.’ Then, once everyone knew that we’re a hard rocking band, we can come back with ‘Here I Go Again,’ which is a little more of a pop/rock song. I think that’s a very healthy approach because it also shows some of our diversity.”

  The video for the song was pretty much just like the other ones, namely a mix of David and Tawny and the mystery band looking impossibly the product of all things 1980s. One distinguishing feature was that Tawny was seen doing an improvised combination of dance, gymnastics and stripper moves on top of two Jaguars, the black one being Callner’s, the white one being David’s. The flaunting of wealth in the videos, says Tawny, mirrored perfectly her lifestyle with David as the record started taking off, including private jets, penthouse suites, the best of everything.

  Prima donna behaviour real and imagined, it was threatening to bring the hammer down on the whole escapade. But keeping the illusion alive was the tiny asterisk that the band already had under their belt a gold record with Slide It In.

  “Yeah, they had a gold record, and he knew that,” says Kalodner, the “he” in the equation being bigshot David Geffen. “Yeah, they had a gold record. And you know, Rupert Perry, once the record went gold here, he switched to the American mix for worldwide as well. And then Clive Calder was even madder at me. But you know, compared with the stress of no product… Also EMI was pressuring me, and Sony Japan. David Geffen, before and after that, only encouraged everything I did. This is the only time I think he ever criticized what I was doing.”

  “A lot of these things, until you ask me, I’ve forgotten. Because, for real, I have nightmares about all this stuff. I mean, I had to go to a psychologist today in order that I could do this interview. Do you know David Coverdale? I mean he is a huge awesome presence. And then you have to realize, that I’m working for the smartes
t, most powerful guy in the world in the record business, David Geffen. So, he’s not very happy with me that I’m taking all this time with some artist he barely gives a shit about.”

  It’s not his style of music, I offer, as partial justification. “He’s not a metal guy. He said that’s your thing, and Tom Zutaut’s thing when he signed Guns N’ Roses. So he just stayed out of it, and Eddie Rosenblatt usually had to deliver the news to me, like what the hell is taking so long? This is the time, you know, right at the end of this, I had started struggling. I finally told Aerosmith, either they were gonna use Bruce Fairbairn... and Tim Collins at the time was cleaning them up in the fall of 1986, off of drugs. So anyway there was a lot going on in my life. And David Coverdale had no money, you know, and there’s a lot of insanity surrounding him. Tawny Kitaen, who was O.J. Simpson’s girlfriend... believe me, there was enough drama for like ten books.”

  Back to the Whitesnake track list, “Give Me All Your Love” was the first selection thus far on the record to hit that middle sweet spot, the band turning in a sort of stadium rock shuffle o’er which is strung a hair metal melody. Then we’re into the band’s shockingly cliché hair metal ballad, which simply added to a record chock full of firepower of a more creative sort, even if two of the compositions were re-tries. “Is This Love” had been originally written for Tina Turner, and the deflating thing is, it’s a song that could have made as much sense on a Tina Turner record as it did here, or with Heart or Cheap Trick or with Aerosmith. Sure, it’s a Coverdale/Sykes composition, but it could just as easily have come from the pens of a Diane Warren or a Jim Vallance.