Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  I’ve heard fourteen million worldwide.

  “Okay, so between fourteen and eighteen million. At one point that’s a lot of money. Yeah, so no, I never got one dime, but that’s not why I did it.”

  -11-

  Slip Of The Tongue – “We Made More Money Than God On The Last Record! “

  Sitting on top of the world, David Coverdale was living proof of the very best case scenario — the gold standard — of an act long in the tooth, navigating the waters of an era one generation past his band’s proposed and supposed peak. In other words, fantastic voyage across the Atlantic completed, David did not merely set up a homestead from which he fended off bears and cougars with a sharp stick. Rather, he built a gleaming palace on the hill and filled it with trophies hunted and mounted for him by a staff of hair metal minions mesmerized by his millions (of records sold, at least).

  Much of it was about music, yes, but again, much of it was about looks. David himself had — with gusto – taken to the uniform of the day, the shaggy, tinted, feathered hair, his face lining with age in a regal manner, amusingly, very much like the mug on the front of his larger and looming shadow, Robert Plant.

  And then there was his band. Previously, David was the prettiest, most youthfully vigorous thing on the stage. But now, Coverdale and Kalodner had colluded to make sure that his back cast, through the ruthless magic of math, would wrench down the average age and, more in the abstract, prop the pin-up quotient. And the hair was beautiful everywhere, even the manes on top of Tommy and Rudy, sufficiently impressive to hide the lines of experience written into their storied journeyman faces.

  To hammer the point home, the band had enlisted for their media selves a female version of the golden god at the mic, namely one Tawny Kitaen, who became the pin-up of the band’s celebrated video presence, the feminine symbol of all hair metal, the eye candy to accompany us through the 1980s.

  The follow-up to Whitesnake would, come hell or high water, have to be delivered in a reasonably timely fashion, given the gargantuan success of its predecessor, a hair metal album, to be sure, but one with some meat on the bones and some pedigree to its players. The Whitesnake album had gone gold pretty much immediately upon release, no surprise, given that Slide It In had laid the groundwork for future numbers by achieving gold a year earlier, although in fact a long two years after its 1984 release.

  And then, almost comically, the Whitesnake album would go platinum a month later, double platinum a month after that, and five times platinum by the end of 1987, at which time Slide It In would go platinum as well. By 1995, Whitesnake would sit at an astounding eight times platinum, with Slide It In dragged further along to an impressive double platinum standing.

  The all-important next step in the band’s suddenly divine career arc would be named and blamed Slip Of The Tongue. Issued November 18, 1989, the record would take a place in history as a collection trying too hard, standing in the shadow of its robust older brother, off to college and on the football team. It’s not a surprising result, given yet another chemistry-killing shuffling of roster at the hands of the puppet-master, Sir David.

  “The problems came later, in a sense,” says Neil Murray, now watching in bemusement from the sidelines. “Whitesnake was being tarred with this glam metal, hair metal brush, because of the videos. And then when the next album, Slip Of The Tongue, was done, the band at that time really kept that hairspray blonde highlights glamorous image far too long, when they should have been looking out and seeing that Guns N’ Roses are coming out and it’s time to dress down. Stop wearing all the glittery stuff, guys. But there again, that’s a good example of David becoming used to a certain way of doing things and being not very good at changing with the times.”

  And then at the guts of why all this is supposed to be done in the first place — the music, the records, the songs — out goes Vivian Campbell, replaced by another journeyman, one with a much stronger personality and sonic identity, in fact, too much of both for the Whitesnake brand to support, one Steve Vai.

  “When it came time to write the record,” says Campbell, “David and Adrian had a good relationship, onstage and off, and they wrote a bunch of tunes. Then, again, Coverdale came to me and said, ‘Look, I’m happy working with Adrian and we’re going to write the record and that’s the way it is so thanks but no thanks.’ And I thought, all in all, what future is there going to be in a band where you’re not allowed to participate? And when the singer’s wife is omnipresent and I’ve been told not to bring mine on the road. When the other guitar player doesn’t want me to be in the band. It was all those things, and we talked about it and I talked with the management and I talked to David about it and I talked to Adrian about it and we all just decided it was time for me to move on. It was nothing dramatic or heavy. We just sort of reasoned through and said, the situation is a little uncomfortable. I don’t really see a future in it, if I’m not allowed to write.”

  “As far as lay people in America are concerned,” said Tommy Aldridge, with his back up, back in 1990, to Karen Bliss, “there’s been three records out, and only one personnel change and that was Vivian. And that doesn’t have anything to do with us or the music; it was more personal problems — his wife, in a word. The situation became intolerable, but it was mutual on both sides that he left. As far as the history of those personnel changes, David was the only one present during that time. It doesn’t affect us. And no disrespect to Steve Vai, he’s a great guitar player, but it wouldn’t matter who was playing guitar, or who was playing drums, or who was playing bass. As long as David was up there, people would still come to see Whitesnake. The press are the only ones who keep dwelling and dwelling on the fact that David is the only original member.”

  “A lot of people thought we took a lot of time between the last album and this album, which is not the case,” continues Aldridge. “We had a few weeks off; then we started rehearsing and went in to record it. Very few people know, but I finished all my parts on the album in two weeks. There was a long delay because of Adrian’s hand problems. And then there’s another ten months trying to get the guitar parts recorded. It took almost a year for the album to be recorded. I didn’t know I was going to have a break, otherwise I would’ve done some other things. I got my break in one month instalments instead of one ten-month chunk. Everyone said, we’ll know this month. Then that month would come by and they’d say, we’ll know in three weeks. Basically what I did was blow six to eight months of my life, waiting for these people to get through their parts. No one knew what was going on, including management.”

  “Well, let’s see, we sold twelve million copies of the one before, in fifteen months. Wow!” laughs Keith Olsen, picking up the tale. “Then we go in to start work on Slip Of The Tongue, and Kalodner says, ‘I want to do it a similar way that we did the other one. That means Keith, I want you and Clink — because Mike is a good buddy — kind of do it together, the way you did the last record with Mike Stone.’ And I said, ‘Okay, but you do realize it costs twice as much and it takes twice as long.’ And, Kalodner says, ‘I don’t care. We made more money than God on the last record!’ Well yeah, if you’re looking at it that way, if you’re looking at CDs, and albums at the time, what were they, $14 albums? $13.98, and CDs were $18.98? Wow. Cassettes were like $13.98 for a cassette, and they’re whipping this stuff out as fast as all these things could go. I mean, it was amazing numbers.”

  “So they went up to Granny’s House, up into Nevada, to a rehearsal place, and they rehearsed everything, and they’re writing as they were rehearsing, and I had other projects to do and Clink had other projects to do, so we kind of left them up there to write. Well, Adrian and David wrote twelve songs, or ten songs, all in the key of A [laughs]. And so then Clink goes up to cut the tracks, and he cuts all these things and then I come up to check all these things before going into overdub mode, and I’m listening to things, and I’m going, ‘So, Mike, you do know that all these songs are the same key, right?’ And he go
es, ‘What?! Oh no!’ ‘So which ones are we gonna do? Which ones are we gonna change?!’ And so then, we’re trying to do the guitar parts, the first guitar overdubs, and all the guitars were going to be hard to do.”

  “So I’m working with Adrian,” continues Keith, “and it’s weeks and weeks, and Mike and I, we’re staying at the Pepper Mill Casino Hotel there in Reno, and it’s not cheap. This thing is cha-chinging away, per diems and all this, food, because they took us away from home to put us in a studio that’s ka-chinging away. And it just got to the point when all of a sudden David, you know, he was so in love with Tawny at the time, spending all this time in Incline just drooling over Tawny, in Incline Village, and it’s just one of those things that after about three weeks he came down to listen to the stuff, and it just wasn’t good enough. And we told him. We said, ‘David, you’ve got to listen to this. It’s not good enough.’ And that’s when Adrian had his awful carpal tunnel episode, in both wrists, at that same instance! Oh, did I let the cat out of the bag? Did I let the cat out of the bag? [laughs]. Adrian, why he was sent home, was because the parts just weren’t good enough. Not carpal tunnel syndrome, as it was said in the rock press. Diagnosed with carpal tunnel in both wrists.”

  “Then Kalodner said, ‘Well, there’s just three possible guitar players you could use. He gave me this list, and Coverdale went, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, this guy looks better, he plays pretty good’ [laughs], talking about Steve Vai, and Vai is just… he’s stunning, he took those songs and twisted them around until it was pretty good, and yet, the songs didn’t have the class of Whitesnake 1987. But it had two really good songs on it.”

  So yes, Dutchman Adrian Vandenberg is also ushered out, replaced by Steve Vai. Explains Adrian’s predecessor, Viv Campbell, our first character to tow the party line on Vandenberg’s disability, “I left right after the tour for 1987, and Adrian, yeah, well, what happened was he injured his hand. Something happened between after I left... you see, the real irony is, Adrian didn’t want to work with another guitar player. So they ended up getting rid of me but they still got another guitar player, and they got Steve Vai. It’s like... so after Steve Vai joins the band Adrian was sort of relegated in many ways, because Steve Vai is such a showman and technician.”

  “So the old saying, the devil you know [laughs]... he should’ve stuck with this devil,” continues Viv, meaning that not only did Adrian get a second guitar player, he wound up with a friggin’ force of nature in Steve Vai, a shred technician with a trademark sound, and one that yelled for attention through the use of near comedic melody lines. “And he also had, I don’t remember the details, but he had some sort of condition, tendonitis or something, and he actually couldn’t play a lot. And that coupled with the fact that it was Steve Vai, and Steve wanted to play all over everything. So Adrian was on the record but I’m not sure he played a lot of guitar on it. I don’t know, it’s so water under the bridge, it’s so long ago.”

  It is of note that Keith Olsen is the only one who refutes the assertion that Adrian, in fact, had injured his hand and/or hands. Our other characters seem quite sincere in their statements that Adrian did, in fact, injure himself, one more detailed explanation being circulated suggested isometric exercise for piano playing gone wrong. In any event, it seems clear Vandenberg wasn’t proving to be a fit for the situation, and a change was imminent. Clearly, his playing or technical ability cannot be called into question.

  Steve indeed has said that central to his process is a building of the guitar parts up from scratch, note for note. With that mindset, he had to be allowed to remove all of Vandenberg’s work and create all his own riffing and soloing, as a meshed totality. Vai had no animosity toward Vandenberg and had never even met him by the time he was laying down his tracks with Mike Clink, in fact, at Steve’s home studio. The first time Vai was to meet Adrian was during the publicity photo sessions to introduce the new band. Vai had actually turned down overtures initially to join Whitesnake due to not wanting to work with another guitarist, along with a desire to relax after ten crazy months on the road with David Lee Roth. It was only after being charmed by David over the course of three days — plus hearing Adrian’s songs but with no guitar on them — that he relented.

  As for John Kalodner’s assessment... “I like the record, but you know, when a band has sold that many records... first of all, David Coverdale obviously became very full of himself, which I can understand. There were two gigantic problems. Tawny Kitaen was whispering in his ear, who, by the way, I always got along with. So it’s not like I had some outward problem with her. Anyway, the two gigantic problems were her and no John Sykes. And David wouldn’t work with a lot of the writers that I used with Aerosmith. So it’s mostly him and I guess the other guys in the band. So what it boils down to, you had this great now road-seasoned band, and he had Keith Olsen, who was stronger than ever. And the same thing that happens to all great bands — no great songs. Just good songs. And the pressure on me was so intense, in the fall of ‘89 to get that record out, that I let... you know, it’s something that I would redo, and I wouldn’t have let it out without a single.”

  Opening Slip Of The Tongue, this third Frankenstein of a record in a row for Whitesnake, is the album’s title track, a brisk heavy metal rocker with Zeppelin-esque vocal phrasing, occasional double bass, John Paul Jones-esque keyboards and the howling high histrionics one expects from Steve Vai.

  Agreeing, but not agreeing, with me that Steve Vai just never sounded right on a heavy metal album, Olsen says, “Steve’s strange but very cool. What is really best is when he just walks up on stage all by himself and he picks up the guitar and he plugs in with a couple of pedals and starts playing. And then you see Steve Vai for what Steve Vai really is — he’s a soloist. He’s just a talented guy, but he’s best when he’s by himself doing Steve Vai.”

  Adds Kalodner, “I love Steve Vai. I thought he was a great person, I thought he was a stupendous musician. And you know, I put him in, but I thought he was totally wrong for Whitesnake. But it was something I had to do.”

  And indeed, come solo time, there he is: Steve and his unmistakable sound, all sing-songy, periodically into the hammer-ons, a bit of shred, but yes, also somewhat... silly?

  “It’s very dynamic,” defends Vai, not that he needs to defend being one of a hallowed dozen or so metal guitarists with a pointedly and pronounced signature sound. “I try to use the dynamics of the instrument. You know, it’s funny. David Lee Roth put it very well. He said ‘Steve’s guitar playing is sort of like, if you see a guy sitting on a tree branch, and he’s cutting the branch. You know what I mean? It’s like whoa!’ Roth was really good at those kinds of analogies.”

  “Obviously you hit a wall with the speed and the technique thing,” continues Vai. “I can sit and focus on trying to play faster and faster but it’s boring. The thing that is really pushing my buttons these days is phrasing. Phrasing is the most important thing you do with an instrument, because it’s what makes the instrument speak. It’s like the inflections in our voice when we’re discussing something. It’s the periods and commas, the things that make what you’re saying, make sense. The dynamics and articulation and phrasing are really the most important thing. If you ever watch Jeff Beck play, he’s a master craftsman of phrasing; he’s the best. Because he’ll take three notes and do things with those three notes in a period of five seconds, you couldn’t even... you see, most guitar players don’t even get what he does because he’s so absolutely amazing, the nuances of what he does. But the thing you hear in his playing also, is not just all those amazing phrasing techniques. What you hear is something that is speaking to you. So that’s what I focus on. Not the way Beck is doing it; I wouldn’t do that, for the same reason I wouldn’t do Yngwie Malmsteen’s solos. It’s like Jimi Hendrix doing Jimmy Page riffs. You know, you don’t want to hear that. You want to hear guys that are capable of doing unique things, doing unique things. So I try to imagine within myself, how I can exp
and upon and evolve the way that I approach the guitar, in the way of phrasing.”

  And what of the concept of shred? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Vai was right in there inventing the concept, along, perhaps with Eddie, Randy and Joe Satriani.

  “No, I think what happened is that it’s like an onomatopoeia. It just works. I mean, Yngwie shreds. I had some students that shredded, when I used to teach. One time I was in Mexico, doing a big guitar class type thing, and there was this little Mexican kid that shredded! Do I shred? Not really. I mean, occasionally I’ve been known to shred, but not like the people that I know that can really shred. But you know, it’s a style of playing that if it doesn’t have all the elements, it’s just boring for most people.”

  But these Whitesnake songs are not exactly stuffed with Steve’s riffs. “No, when I joined Whitesnake, all the songs were recorded and they basically had guide guitars on them, ya know? My job was to kinda go in there and be respectful to what the song was and to what the band was, but kinda add my slant to it. And that’s basically what I did. But Adrian... you know, he was a formidable talent — he’s really a wonderful player.”

  In terms of percussion performance, “Slip Of The Tongue” is one of the flashier tracks, amidst a collection of songs for which Aldridge plays it relatively straight.

  “Mike Clink probably had the most overall input on things, as far as the parts that were played, than anyone else in the band,” says Aldridge. “A lot of times, he would think that I was over-playing quite a bit. That’s one reason the drums are so straightforward on this record. He thought I should play things much simpler. I have to be able to look at the big picture. I could go in there with a very self-indulgent attitude and tell them to put it where the sun don’t shine, and play it exactly how I wanted to play it. But, first off, I wouldn’t be very successful in this business, and I certainly wouldn’t have been here as long as I’ve been in the business, or in Whitesnake. I don’t think the songs would’ve been that good as far as the big picture. I think that’s the healthiest attitude I can have. It wasn’t an instrumental album, and I don’t always know what’s too busy and what’s not too busy. That’s what producers are for — to add a little objectivity.”