Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  “On the other hand, David wanted me to be happy,” continues Aldridge. “When we finished the tracks, everyone sat down with everyone else and asked, ‘Are you happy with everything that you’ve done?’ And with a few exceptions, everyone said, ‘Yeah!’ Life is a compromise and when you get five people together to record an album that everyone’s going to be happy with — not only the musicians, but also the record company and the record buyers — there’s so many considerations you have to make when you’re in the studio. But a lot of times your individual desires get pushed back and your principles become rearranged. And that’s all for the sake of recording the best record you could possibly do.”

  Moving forward, “Cheap An’ Nasty” is hair metal all the way, right from Aldridge’s cowbell and stripper beat, to the typical Whitesnake lyric from Coverdale, down to the stacked party metal riffing. As was the tenor of the times, the band’s poor vocalist was sent in to sing high and hard, as he does elsewhere on the album, notably on the title track. It’s a favourite of Olsen’s on the album, Keith simply calling it “kick-butt,” and, as was evidenced on the Whitesnake album, the band distinguish themselves despite the ordinary writing here, by loading up the song with guitars, electricity, bottom end, everything, including a near hilarious over-the-top noise solo out of Vai, a parody of the out-of-control heavy metal guitarist as it were.

  “I mean, the demos of the Slip Of The Tongue album kick ass, the ones that I worked with Adrian on,” says Coverdale, realizing the 1980s excess of the song as well as the album at large. “And then of course, it just got over-decorated. The way Slip Of The Tongue was, it was Tommy Aldridge wanting to get all his licks in, Rudy Sarzo was trying to get all his licks in, Adrian Vandenberg was trying to get all his licks in, Steve Vai was... there was no foundation. Everyone was just being overtly flamboyant. And there’s a picture I have at home just to remind me to never go there again, where I’m standing in the middle of this utter chaos. And you know, I can hear what it was like. The look on my face was like, ‘Where the hell am I supposed to sing in here?!’ So not the fondest memories. Also, I was coming into a period of great fatigue after working nonstop for three years on that remarkable successful rollercoaster that we experienced and I just lost perspective. And my private life was just the distraction from hell. And of course normally, I would be able to seek solace within my professional life, but it was not to be this time! But like I say, I’m the Edith Piaf of rock so I have no regrets. Everything that’s ever happened to me has been necessary for learning this or learning that.”

  Notes Coverdale, “There are guitar songs on this album — ‘Cheap An’ Nasty’ and ‘Kittens Got Claws’ — that guitarists would die for, but they would have used it as a way to show off their technical expertise. Steve looked at the structure of the song, the lyrics, and painted pictures around them. He made them a signature.”

  Cheap ploy time, next up was a new version of “Fool For Your Loving,” which served as a microcosm for all that was overworked and bloated about Slip Of The Tongue. Last record back, the band played like a nuclear superpower when it came time to reinvigorate “Here I Go Again” and “Crying In The Rain,” both originally from Saints & Sinners. Now, however, the quiet class of the Ready An’ Willing version of “Fool For Your Loving” wins out over 1980s excess. The contemplative letter to love gone bitter in the hands of this band thumps and stumbles, with the solo licks from its flash guitarist not doing this regal yet sombre anthem any favours. There are a few nice new harmonies at the close of the piece, but all told, this was not an inspired undertaking.

  “I thought it was okay,” says Kalodner. “I like that version, but it’s not a hit song. I mean, it’s very interesting you ask that, because there’s a lot of things I forget about. Because by that time, the pressure on me, from everyone, was so extreme, between this now huge band and then the company, who was depending on the tens of millions of dollars in billing, but along with the pressure they would get from EMI or Sony Japan. And the pressure was like wilting, for me to finish this record.”

  And it’s not like Slip Of The Tongue was costing any less to birth than Whitesnake. “No, well, only because it was so lavishly lived, yeah. The previous record, all the money was in like sessions and various... I mean, I tried to record his vocal like ten times. Until Keith Olsen finally got it out of him.”

  Next up was “Now You’re Gone,” a shameless power ballad, but nonetheless an up-tempo one. It was issued as a single but only crept into the bottom of the charts, at No. 96, although it the UK it fared better, reaching No. 31. A Wayne Isham-directed video was shot for the track, anchored by the band playing live on the afternoon of a show at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

  “Yeah, they’re all the ones I was championing,” says Kalodner, concerning “Now You’re Gone” and the other ones chosen to be his cash cow babies mainly “The Deeper The Love,” and “Fool For Your Loving.” And none of them really developed that well, because they didn’t put that much time into them. And it’s the same thing as anything else. Like with Aerosmith, I made them go back and do Get A Grip. The entire record, I threw out. Well, I would’ve done that with the Whitesnake record, but at the time I didn’t have the option to do that. Either from the band, plus there was no manager that would back me up, such as Howard Kaufman or Trudy Green. And the label still was really growing to be a superpower, and they still needed that income. By the time I decided to throw out the first Get A Grip, I learned from the Whitesnake record to do that. This is why I wanted to talk you, because, you know, I think I’m the greatest A&R person that ever lived, in terms of rock music, but that shows a gigantic mistake in my career, that I let the Slip Of The Tongue record come out.”

  Sounds like there were extenuating circumstances though, including roadblocks up and down the command chain as well as the pressures of dealing with this band out of control...

  “There was, there was. That’s why I had to start to see a psychologist from working with him, David Coverdale and Steven Tyler at the same time. And Cher. And then the stress of the job. But I don’t consider that an excuse for what I should’ve done. Because I knew the record. You see, most lead singers don’t know a hit song — any of them. So, you have to kind of work with them and tell them that’s the hit song. In fact, most great musicians don’t know. When they write a hit, it’s usually not one of their favourite songs. But anyway, I worked with Coverdale a lot on the songwriting, but I just ran into a wall and I didn’t have enough energy to fight. I didn’t have anyone helping me to, you know, fight him.”

  And yet technically, you’d have to call both “Now You’re Gone” and “The Deeper The Love” hit songs. “Yeah, they were successful because they were well played and well sung, and the band was well loved, but they’re not hit songs, no. There was no hit song on that record. And you know, that is my fault.”

  With “Kittens Got Claws” — this is high stakes rock ‘n’ roll; no time for apostrophes — we’re back to carousing hair metal, although perhaps the hookiest moment of the whole record arrives with the “Sweet, sweet child of the street” pre-chorus. There are two amusing references in the lyrics, one being a comparison to an XJS (a Jaguar, i.e. as in the iconic “Here I Go Again” video) and two, the image of a G-string tuned to “A,” funny in light of Keith Olsen’s assessment of Adrian’s songwriting methodologies.

  Ex-Deep Purple buddy of David’s Glenn Hughes contributed back-up vocals to “Kittens Got Claws,” along with “Slow Poke Music” and “Fool For Your Loving,” although most of the backgrounds on the album were done by Tommy Funderburk and Richard Page. Glenn, still battling the drug addiction that saw him turfed from Black Sabbath and not singing up to par, acknowledges that he was sent far back into the back of the mixes.

  “He was on the Whitesnake record, Slip Of The Tongue,” confirms Olsen, less accurately adding, “all over it. He was doing what he does best, singing. Yeah, he was singing backgrounds with Coverdale. And see, the reason why is the gu
y who did all the backgrounds on Whitesnake 1987 was John Sykes. And Sykes and him had that sound together, and so when Sykes was now gone, and Vivian doesn’t sing very well, and neither does Rudy, and so what do you have? Well, let’s bring in Glenn. And so we got Glenn.”

  As for David himself, “He still sings great,” continues Olsen. “But I tell you, seeing David live a few times, it’s tougher for him. You talk about natural singers, Glenn Hughes of course, but also Ronnie James Dio, amazing singer. That’s all about diaphragm, diaphragm support. When you have that thing, that’s how Lou Gramm sings too. But David, you know, he was always at the very, very top of his range. And so… is he still smoking, do you know? But it was always at the top of his range, and if you aren’t physically 100%, it’s really hard to sing at the top of the range like that. Tune the guitar down a whole tone, all of them. So it’s going to get a little darker sounding, it’s okay! Instead of singing in A, sing it all in G [laughs]. Please. There’s that, and there’s also making sure that… you know, for years and years, he would always take a nap just before going on stage, because David Coverdale sounds like Richard Burton as soon as he’s been up for about three hours. ‘Oh darling, it’s been so wonderful to have you here.’ And when he first gets up, it’s all that whiskey and drawl and gravel in his throat, and he sounds great. And so we actually did those vocals at 9am, on those albums. 9am vocals, and then he would go and lay down, go take a nap, and then he would wake up at two or three, and we would sing some more.”

  “But no, Glenn is this master of vocal parts. He is a master, and so Glenn and I are working on these parts, and we put this really, really cool background part on, oh God, (sings it), but anyway, Steve Vai comes in, and the first thing out of his mouth is, ‘Wow, that’s really unique and cool.’ And he looks at me and Glenn and says, ‘You know, Keith, that’s not in the mode’ [laughs]. I don’t care! It sounds cool! Glenn looked at me, ‘Huh?!’ Steve is a very super-talented guy, and I got to be a lot closer with him after that album, because he was a trustee, I was a trustee for NARAS [National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences'] and we served on a bunch of the same committees and we became very close.”

  “Wings Of The Storm”, well, if “Now You’re Gone” was a shameless power ballad, this one is a form of humourless European-tinged heavy metal that neither David or Steve Vai had any business patronizing.

  “Well, heavy metal is a broad term,” begins Vai, asked what his relationship to that musical monster is, even if he takes the answer into... fashion. “In the ‘80s, when we were playing heavy metal, my relationship to the clothes and the metal scene that I was doing is very different than what it is now. Elements of what I do are metal, and elements of the way I dress are metal. But conventional metal-type dressing, I stay as far away from that as I possibly can. I do not ascribe to the conventional metal attire. I really never did. I mean sure, I’ll wear a leather coat or something like that. But I don’t think there’s ever any photos of me wearing studs, that kind of leather and studs metal thing. Because it’s always repulsed me. I go for more of a sleek look. I try to make my clothes match the feel of the music. Because the way you look really has a lot to do with how you feel when you’re performing.”

  Next up on Slip Of The Tongue is a second more successful power ballad from the album, “The Deeper The Love” reaching No. 28 on Billboard and No. 35 in the UK. “‘The Deeper The Love’ is something that you can look at like an Otis song,” comments Coverdale, “you know, if you strip away all the, once again, musical embellishment. It’s a good love song. Did you ever hear my Starkers In Tokyo CD? It’s just Adrian and I playing the songs. Starkers means naked, and it was for 60, 70 people, an especially invited crowd. And I love the version on there which is just Adrian playing the simple chords and me singing it.”

  David ascribes the chord sequence of the verses to himself and the chorus chords to Adrian, adding also that he finished writing the song on vacation in Tahiti. The single was issued in three formats, a 7” backed with “Judgment Day,” a 12” backed with “Judgment Day” and “Sweet Lady Luck” and a CD that includes all of the above plus the “Vai Voltage Mix” of “Fool For Your Loving.” “Sweet Lady Luck” is the gem here, a finished non-LP track that is as strong of a middle metal rocker as anything that made the record, despite keyboards that are too high in the mix.

  “It was the ballad that sold records,” notes Keith Olsen. “A power ballad is really good because it’s a way of having a rock ‘n’ roll band be accessible, because radio was not going to play anything other than the ballad. So gee, okay, what do we have to do to get exposure, to get people to actually want to go out and buy it? Because remember, the media is the message. The power ballad was the big thing that year, and so they went out and they toured that album, and everybody was saying, ‘Oh, such terribly disappointing sales.’ Well, okay, we only did four million copies. I’m serious! We did four million copies of that album in sixteen months, where the other one did twelve. Okay, so our business is really down. Well, no, they called it a stiff and the beginning of the end, because it only sold four million copies! [laughs]. It was hideous, what the market did, and what the record company deemed as hits or misses, or successes or failures, and they called an album a failure, because it only did four million copies. And only had one big hit on it.”

  Of course the video was a big budget affair, starring as female foil, a pre-off-the-rails Tawny Kitaen. “The biggest expenses at that time was something that everybody, not just Whitesnake, was suffering with, and it was the videos,” reflects Rudy Sarzo. “The videos got out of hand. We’d spend more money on the videos than we did on the actual recording. Yeah, and we did three videos on Slip Of The Tongue. And, oh my God, they were each about $350,000. And that’s all non-recoupable — the band paid for that. Yeah, but then again, actually, in those days, the record company, the management, would have a meeting with MTV, and MTV, by the end of the ‘80s, they would basically tell you what they wanted included in the video. And if those certain things did not meet the criteria, they would just decide not to play it, which means you just wasted $300,000.”

  “‘Judgment Day’ is a corker, though, isn’t it?” chuckles David, on the album’s late-in-sequence homage to “Kashmir” and “No Quarter” and “Still Of The Night.” Again, like the awkward handling of “Fool For Your Loving,” here’s the Whitesnake board of directors along with upper management failing to turn the band into the Zeppelin of the 1980s. Which was a fool’s game anyway — just ask Kingdom Come, who at this point had acquired a gold record but also widespread ridicule for their efforts at the same transparent ruse.

  Continues Coverdale, thickening the plot, “‘Judgment Day,’ I wrote that song peeved at my old friend — and believe me, at one time we were friends — Robert Plant. He had started on a witch hunt for me and I decided to really stick it up his bottom and do a... you know, I’m a huge fan of Middle Eastern music, and whenever I’m in Portugal, I tune to the Moroccan or Algerian radio or whatever, and everything sounds like ‘Kashmir’ [laughs]. And I mean, no disrespect, because as you know, I worked with Pagey, whom I love dearly. But quite honestly, I had all of these elements of the song. Adrian came in and wrote that beautiful bridge, the music for the bridge. ‘We walk toward desire’ and the rest of the stuff is pretty much mine. I had back surgery after herniating a disk and I was completely compromised on Percodan and I wrote what I call the Percodan riff. Are you a guitarist? (sings it) — that’s the ‘Judgment Day’ riff. I call that the Percodan riff. I was like Lemmy.”

  “Slow Poke Music” is of a type of funky hair metal with pregnant pauses one could see on a late 1980s record by Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe, Extreme or even Warrant. The riff rises to the challenge, however, as one wonders with intrigue how this song might have come off at the hands of John Sykes and the rest of the band-on-a-mission that made the Whitesnake album. Nonetheless, Adrian recalls that this one as well as “Cheap An’ Nasty” were built from riffs that he�
�d had since the waning days of the fine, fine Vandenberg band — and he was indeed coming up with more through the touring cycle, having taken a four-track recorder on the road with him.

  Slip Of The Tongue closes with what is perhaps its most ambitious track, a dark and near epic ballad called “Sailing Ships.” With evocations of Bad Company, the classic English version of Whitesnake, this is demonstrative of how one rises to anything one might call Zeppelin-esque, not by scavenging, but by writing in a zone of magic.

  “‘Sailing Ships,’ that’s about challenges we face in life in general,” Coverdale told Anne Leighton. “The open palette of your life is up to you. You can take the song as if you left home for the first time. It’s any new adventure that you embark on — it’s up to you. Of course, people are instrumental. But in the final analysis, everything else is a catalyst, a galvanizing force to be recognized.”

  The track lived, and lives, on. It was the opener to the acoustic Starkers In Tokyo live album David and Adrian put together in 1997 and it was also reprised for Adrian’s return to rock, the Vandenberg’s MoonKings record from 2014. And on that version, the vocalist is none other than David Coverdale.

  “David and I are very, very in touch, as many people know,” explains Adrian. “We’re good friends and we remained good friends after the Whitesnake period. And David was telling me all the time, ‘Come on, you’ve got to record an album.’ And this was the time I wanted to see my daughter grow up. She lives with her mother, and her mom and I separated twelve, thirteen years ago, so I don’t see her as much as I’d like. And I didn’t want to be one of those dads who popped his head around the door once a year and goes, ‘Hey, I’m dad,’ you know. It was such an important thing for me, because she doesn’t live with me, so I wanted to see her grow up a little bit.