Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  “I told you the mistakes,” summarizes Kalodner, in any event. “You know, I wanted to say that even though I totally put this whole thing together 100% myself, including the writing in the band, I also wanted to tell you about the mistakes I later made. Because that’s something you have to learn from. I went into the ‘90s having learned from the Whitesnake experience. As I said, when I made the huge Aerosmith record, it was having known that I fucked-up the follow-up Whitesnake record. I think in the rock era, only Jon Bon Jovi and maybe Metallica have outsold Get A Grip. Because it had five hit singles on it.”

  And so Kalodner had ideas that would help him overcome his self-admitted mistake, although he couldn’t apply them to Whitesnake. Time hadn’t allowed him yet to have learned the Get A Grip paradigm of which he speaks, this idea of ensuring the hits are there up into numbers equalling four, or in Get A Grip’s case five. But down a similar road, he was trying to impart onto David the wisdoms gained from A&Ring Permanent Vacation and Pump, namely the idea of outside songwriters and the attendant magic one might conjure north of the border in Super Natural British Columbia with the likes of Bruce Fairbairn or Bob Rock.

  His other exhortation to Coverdale was, of course, to put the team back together. “The thing is, Adrian Vandenberg was great in Whitesnake, but as an addition to their music, he was nothing. I begged David Coverdale in every way I could to just please write the next record with John Sykes. I did everything that I knew how to do, from all the years I had been making records and what I learned from Ahmet Ertegun and David Geffen. These British people are so stubborn, he diminished John Sykes and wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Nobody is as good-looking as John Sykes except maybe Jon Bon Jovi,” laughs Kalodner, reminded of quips directly from David where he says that John even made him want to look as good as he could, let along write and perform as good as his guitarist. “I mean, I never saw anyone who looked like that, a guy who looked like that. You have to see him to believe it. I mean, in his day, what was he, 6’ 1” or whatever, and with the long natural blonde hair. It just was beyond belief. And the guy was a big manly guy, not some kind of pussy-looking guy. It was fascinating. That’s what my whole envisionment was, Coverdale and Sykes — you know, being together at the front of the stage.”

  But at least for Kalodner, the ending has been a happy story, with the king of Fantasy Island in the white suit very much enjoying retirement. “Well I am,” laughs Kalodner. “The one thing I’m enjoying the most is not having to deal with the craziness that happened every day. And believe me, it was crazy. That’s the one thing I can tell you for sure [laughs].”

  Over the page: Bringing things right up to date, David playing Madrid in 2013. With four platinum albums, he's not done badly for a lad from Saltburn-by-the-Sea. (Dr_Zoidberg)

  Epilogue

  “We Looked Like Christmas Trees”

  Married to Tawny Kitaen in February 1989, David Coverdale, by 1991, was working on the divorce. Professionally, somehow Slip Of The Tongue felt like a failure, and if we ascribe to David’s artistic integrity, it was more of a sting that it was a critical failure than anything commercially drooped.

  If it was ironic that Coverdale’s label, Geffen, had signed a dirty hair metal circus called Guns N’ Roses (pretty much the anti-Whitesnake of the Strip, yet still very much of the Strip), the irony became richer when another Geffen record called Nevermind, issued on September 24, 1991 killed the likes of Whitesnake dead with alarming efficiency. Compare the dusty “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video with the likes of the high gloss “Here I Go Again” and David looked very much like yesterday’s news, representative of an era of conspicuous consumption overblown and now outgrown.

  Fortunately, Coverdale knew it. At the close of the exhausting Slip Of The Tongue tour, September 26, 1990, he came to the realization that he was living a life of illusion, punctuating the occasion by having his wardrobe girl burn all his embarrassing stage clothes. He soon meets Cindy, the woman who would become his wife, and he would do for a bit what he kept sayin’, that is relax and become a homebody (apropos that Cindy and David would meet for the first time at a hair salon, in Reno Nevada, on... Rock Blvd).

  “David has been working hard for quite a long time now,” said Steve Vai back in the midst of touring Slip Of The Tongue, at which time there were already rumours of the band being shelved. “I think there’s going to be a break after this tour for some time before we start working again. When the time comes to get together, we’ll reassess the situation and see what’s going on. We talk about writing together — we throw around ideas and they sound good, so we’ll see how it develops.”

  Already though, it seemed as if Vai’s eye had wandered to other things, namely his high-profile new solo album, Passion And Warfare, which would become his only gold record. The album was issued amidst Whitesnake tour dates, July of 1990. “It’s perfect, it’s timed exactly the way I wanted it to be. With the Whitesnake thing, it gave me the opportunity to make a great rock album and go out on tour which is what I really like to do. Passion And Warfare is being exposed to an audience now that may not have picked up on it if I wasn’t in Whitesnake. So Whitesnake is a real plus for me. I feel that if the music is good, the kids will pick up on it. Look at Kenny G — he plays clarinet and sells out arenas!”

  “I didn’t want to have vocals on the record because then it would have been a statement of a rock band. I’d be taking on a career move, and I didn’t want to compete with Whitesnake in that regard. I’m looking forward to having my own band someday. I can sing, but I’m not that good. Ultimately, I want to find a singer because I like playing with singers. I’ve been now with Coverdale and Roth who are extremely colourful, vibrant, enigmatic, and can control an audience. I need to be in a band with people who are as powerful as I am.”

  Soon back in the saddle after the likes of Vai and the rest of his not-so-much family had dispersed, David Coverdale would enter a new marriage of sorts, with one Jimmy Page, for an overwrought record called Coverdale Page, issued March 15th of 1993.

  Bloated, excessive, a record of the 1980s plunked in the 1990s? “It kind of was,” says bassist on much of it, Ricky Phillips. “And to be honest — and I don’t mind being quoted on this—I really think, as good as that record was, and I think it’s a great record, I would’ve loved to know what it would’ve sounded like if we all went in and cut the whole thing in three weeks the way we rehearsed it. I’ve never played them, and they are safeguarded now, but our rehearsals of those songs, same songs, they’re so live and huge and Zeppelin-y sort of sounding tracks, and not as overproduced. Everybody at that period in time just got so overproduced, and that’s what that record ended up sounding like. The Led Zeppelin approach would’ve been fantastic, more to my taste.”

  “His work ethic is so on the money,” says Phillips of Page. “He doesn’t really flounder or search for too much. I remember us jamming on an idea for maybe a couple of hours, trying to get to someplace, and it was there. But the way he did it was very productive. Not a lot of lost time, and he would move on if something was just not happening. Maybe come back to it later and maybe not. But I wrote most of the keyboard parts, actually. It’s funny and, as it turned out, I thought all my stuff would be replaced because they got other guys who came into it who were better keyboard players than me. I started out playing keyboards, but I would never hire myself to be a keyboardist, put it that way. But I did have a knack in a sense of what works with rock, and I have great appreciation for guys who do that well.”

  “So I would knock these things out, and Jimmy would stand over my shoulder and go, ‘Can you...’ and he would hum me a note or he would point to the keyboard, or say something over my shoulder, ‘Make this a dominant over my guitar chord’ or whatever. So he had really cool ideas like that. We would — Denny Carmassi and I —we’d get up early. We would probably meet by eight, nine o’clock in the morning, in his condo — we were both staying in the same condo complex — and
we would work on whatever we would work on with Jimmy the night before, the day before. We would go to the studio by... or actually it was a chalet in Tahoe that we had rented and set up, and we would be there by 10. We would work with Jimmy from 10 ‘til noon, maybe have some lunch, maybe work ‘til two, ‘til three, and then David would come in to see what we have been working on and start singing.”

  “We did this for a number of weeks, and then over I guess the four or five month period, we finally found ourselves at Little Mountain,” continues Phillips, referring to the Vancouver hit factory that might have helped Whitesnake live past Slip Of The Tongue. “And I was actually never supposed to be the bass player on that project, which most people don’t know. They asked me if I would come up and help them woodshed all this material. They needed somebody that had a songwriting background, but it was clearly their songs, the two of them, and only their songs. But somebody that had a good song sense; that was to be my job. And all of a sudden they were handing me tickets to fly to Little Mountain. It did go really well, and we did have really good chemistry between the four of us. I remember phone calls from John Entwistle, who was a hero to me, and other guys, that they were trying to decide whether they’re gonna put a supergroup together or whatever. But that never came to happen, lucky for me, and so I was able to go up and start basic tracks.”

  “I think about half of it,” continues Phillips, on how much of the bass on the thing was him. “I played everything, but because we were only going for drum tracks, I thought we were going for basic tracks, so I was giving it my all. But Jimmy was kind of there half the time and half not, while I’m doing the bass tracks, and he had planned on doing all of his stuff as an overdub. But the beauty with him is that natural swagger that he has. And although we copped it and we really, really had it nailed, if we didn’t record with each other, I’m going to be tight with the drums of course, I’m going to follow the kick drum. But where he moves in some of the riffs and some things like that that need kind of a single voice, as he went in the studio, anything that he couldn’t do or play with me, or it didn’t feel pocketed, they had a guy that was playing on the Miami Sound Machine — they were recording at Criteria at that point in Florida. They moved the project. Better weather, and I think Jimmy just bought a house down there. But it was cool as far as being able to write all these parts, and be around to kind of put that together, and be way more a part of it than I thought I was going to be in the beginning.”

  “It took Jimmy a year to do his parts,” continues Ricky, concluding a tale that sounds very much like the making of Slip Of The Tongue. “So if they would have put me up in an apartment, they would’ve had to put me in an apartment for a year. I know that John Kalodner was not going to do that [laughs]. But I had great talks with John, and he told me what was going on too. He was a great guy in my corner, and wanted me to do things with him beyond that, which was the first time I ever met John. We got on well; it was a good time. Made some really good friends on all sides of that camp, guys that he had in the studio, engineers, Mike Fraser. Mike Fraser and I had worked together in Bad English, so I was familiar with how good he was.”

  “The Coverdale Page situation was fascinating,” reflects John Kalodner, who, as Ricky has alluded to, had his hands in this one as well. “First of all, personally, I really wanted, you know, Whitesnake to be Whitesnake and I really wanted Led Zeppelin to be back together. So at the time, it was the best I could do, to put a great singer with a great guitar player. But they did not do very much work on the record, especially Jimmy Page. When I was down at the sessions at Criteria, Florida, his great moments were great, but he did not invest much time into it. You know, he’s maybe the greatest guitar player, well, first the greatest rock producer of all time and maybe the first or second greatest guitar player besides Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. But he did kind of minimal, and Coverdale kind of got in that groove in doing minimal. And so they gave it a shot, but I don’t feel either of them gave it a 100% shot; it was kind of half-hearted. That’s just my opinion.”

  After asking me my opinion of the record, to which I replied that besides the hugely under-rated Walking Into Clarksdale album, I haven’t liked much of what Jimmy’s done since In Through The Out Door (which was mostly a John Paul Jones triumph), Kalodner theorizes that, “Except for Jeff Beck, I’ve never really seen anyone play like Jimmy Page. And for some reason... I don’t know if it was by not having Robert Plant with him, he just was never that inspired since then. So I did everything I could to promote the final Led Zeppelin, whatever it was gonna be, which didn’t happen. Because I wanted to see if my theory was correct or not.”

  And the forced marriage didn’t sit well with the vocal patriarch of the entanglement, one Robert Plant. “There was a bit of a feud,” notes Kalodner, “and in the end, I had to write an apology letter to Robert Plant, which I did voluntarily. I hand-wrote an apology letter to him when I was in Argentina with Aerosmith in 1994. Page and Plant were there for some reason. Because Jimmy told me Robert was really pissed-off at me, and I wanted to tell him that there was no disrespect at all to him. He was offended that I would put David Coverdale with Jimmy Page. I guess he felt that David Coverdale was second rate, maybe, I don’t know. But he didn’t like it. And he’s one of the few people who I actually wrote a letter to, because he’s such an important person in rock history, a whole letter about how it happened and how I felt bad about it. You know, if it offended him, I did nothing to offend him. But he felt that way. But that’s another thing that nobody knows, except Jimmy Page — he knows I wrote the letter.”

  All told the Coverdale Page album went platinum, but that was after an uncommonly big push by the label. The band played seven Japanese dates, but the thing didn’t feel like a celebration to anybody and any further live work was scotched. Five singles were issued from the album, but only “Pride And Joy” made much of an impression, maybe “Shake My Tree” as well.

  Four more years would transpire before David would return for an album, unreleased in the US, called Restless Heart, billed to David Coverdale & Whitesnake and tellingly self-produced. Lest anyone be further confused, it is a variously poppy, bluesy, rootsy, but still often heavy rockin’ affair and very much the solo album it was intended to be. What’s most surprising is the element of continuity represented by the fact that David’s co-writer on almost all of the songs was Adrian Vandenberg, writing pal for much of Slip Of The Tongue. David tries a number of things on this commendable record, but what he tries across all songs is a repudiation of all the clichéd excesses he’d come to represent as the kicking boy of hair metal.

  “After Coverdale Page, my manager and I discussed that maybe it was time for me to start working as David Coverdale,” David had told Mitch Lafon. “All of my record contracts are David Coverdale A.K.A. the artist known as Whitesnake. It’s never involved anybody else’s signature from any chapter of Whitesnake. It’s always been David Coverdale also known as the artist Whitesnake. I made an album called Restless Heart that was to be the pre-cursor to Into The Light. It was a David Coverdale solo record and the executives I worked with at EMI in London who had agreed to help me make this transition from Whitesnake to David Coverdale got replaced by other executives who wanted it to be a Whitesnake record. So, I had to put tougher guitars on and turn the fucking drums up, but to me it wasn’t a Whitesnake record. It was a David Coverdale solo record. But I came to the realization that the way I’m known whether I like it or not is as Whitesnake. It’s my franchise [laughs]. I don’t have the ego that says, ‘I want my name up there.’ That’s just not necessary. It was just my manager and I talking. We just did Coverdale Page so why not Coverdale? Never pulled it off and who cares?”

  Salving the reality that David was now a low-key recording artist was the fact that the band’s 1994 Greatest Hits album had notched platinum status in the US. Highlights to the package were three European bonus tracks from the golden era and a gentle reminder from John Kalodner that there’s a radi
cally more polite version of “Here I Go Again” that got done, seemingly, just because.

  After another low-key Japanese release, an acoustic live album called Starkers In Tokyo, David returned with his first official solo album since Northwinds back in 1978.

  “Oh, I think this is the most consistent record I’ve done,” Coverdale told me back in 2001, with regards to Into The Light. “I’ve never had a piece of work that has been so critically across the board applauded. As I say, I have total faith in the record. It’s just the ability to get it out there. At this point in time, I had no idea there were so many good archaeologists digging around and finding the bugger ([laughs]. As I say, I’ve never really embraced fashion other than in the late ‘80s when it became very fashionable to be in a hard rock band. Otherwise, I don’t think I would ever have been able to sustain a 30-year career. The circumstance is that I have total faith in the record. It is not a fashion record. It hasn’t been as overtly successful as I would have hoped but I still maintain that it can be made to be successful. The tunes are very approachable, it’s very me, it’s a good kind of cross-section of who I am, what I’ve done, where I am, and where I intend to go. The essence is always songs with me utilizing the three elements that I feel are very appropriate to my expression, which is rock, soul and blues.”

  “As I say, it’s interesting that the most successful record I ever had is the 1987 album,” continued Coverdale, “and that album was actually two years old before it saw the light of day. So there is a testament to the fact that I’m not fashionable. You know, and it might just not be the right time right now. I had great success with the song ‘Slave’ on American radio; it got to No. 13 on mainstream rock, which is unheard of for an independent. But it’s very expensive to compete with the majors who can afford to schmooze the radio chains and it’s really hard to get involved there. And I have a great relationship with American radio in terms of support, but it’s a case of being able to afford to maintain that profile.”