It was one of the biggest rock albums of the ’80s. Whitesnake’s 1987 - titled simply Whitesnake in America - was a multi-million selling blockbuster that yielded a US number one hit with the anthem Here I Go Again. But as the band’s leader and frontman David Coverdale revealed, the making of this album was a nightmare of epic proportions.
At one point, Coverdale was struggling with an acute sinus infection and fearing that his career as a singer might end. As recording was delayed, he was warned that he was $3m in debt to his label Geffen Records. And before the album was completed, guitarist John Sykes was dismissed after allegedly suggesting that if Coverdale lost his voice, Whitesnake should continue with a different singer – a proposition as ridiculous as it was mutinous.
“It was,” Coverdale said, “a very troubling time in my life.”
Coverdale had formed Whitesnake in 1977 after three years of fronting British rock legends Deep Purple. Originally styled as a blues-based hard rock act, perfectly attuned to Coverdale’s soulful voice, Whitesnake did good business in the UK and Europe during the late ’70s and early ’80s.
But Coverdale had always dreamed of breaking America, and with that goal in mind he reinvented Whitesnake in the late ’80s.
One of the younger musicians that Coverdale brought into the band was former Thin Lizzy guitarist John Sykes, and together they created a new Whitesnake sound, slick and super-sized - as illustrated by the power ballad Is This Love and the epic Still Of The Night, the latter essentially Led Zeppelin for the hair metal generation.
Coverdale also chose to revamp two great old songs from earlier Whitesnake albums - Crying In The Rain and Here I Go Again - which turned out to be one of the smartest moves he ever made.
The 1987 album was recorded with Whitesnake stalwart Neil Murray on bass and Aynsley Dunbar (ex-Journey) on drums. But by the time the album was released on 7 April, 1987, John Sykes was out.
Coverdale subsequently put together a new touring line-up featuring two guitarists, Adrian Vandenberg and Vivian Campbell (ex-Dio), plus two ex-members of Ozzy Osbourne’s band, bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Tommy Aldridge. And it was this version of Whitesnake that starred alongside Coverdale’s then-squeeze Tawny Kitaen in the racy videos that became symbolic of the glamour and excess of ’80s rock.
In a 2021 interview with Outlaw magazine, Coverdale recalled how he had to battle against all the odds to create the greatest success of his career.
“The intentions are always very simple,” he said. “To try to better the last album musically, lyrically, vocally…
“And when I started doing the guide vocals in Little Mountain studios in Vancouver, around ’85, my voice was kicking ass! A lot of the guide vocals were probably keepers, to be honest.
“But then I started to get really, really nasal, and I couldn’t sing for shit. I was underneath the key and I could not get above it.
“It turned out that I had a serious sinus infection and also a deviated septum from birth. My septum actually collapsed on me, and it wasn’t drug-related at all. If it was, I’d say so. I had to have surgery, and there was a fifty-fifty chance that I’d be able to sing in the same style that I’d worked in for all those years.
“I was afraid. The idea of being unable to sing and perform was horrifying. All the things you take for granted suddenly taken away from you.
Adding insult to injury, it was rumoured that John Sykes was plotting to oust Coverdale from his own band.
"I heard that,” Coverdale said. “Petty daft, really. It kind of compromised any chance of continuing working together, as you can imagine…”
The singer was also bankrupt, or close to it, during the making of that album.
“We were so far behind in delivering the album, and so in debt – almost three million in the hole. But, fortunately, not for long…”
He remembered the exact moment when he first sensed that this album was going to be a hit.
“When MTV picked Still Of The Night as their favourite video and played it every hour, every day for weeks on end, sales of the album went through the f**king roof! I became aware that this was something very, very different to the success I’d experienced with Deep Purple. This was an entirely different level. It was an extraordinary validation for all the bullshit I’d been through, and I grabbed it with both hands and enjoyed the f**k out of the ride!”
The videos for Still Of The Night, Here I Go Again and Is This Love featured Tawny Kitaen, whom Coverdale married in 1989.
“We were Rolling Stone’s Couple Of The Year!” Coverdale laughed. “Go f**king figure. And my car was so recognizable from the videos that we were chased down the Strip [Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood].
“It was Beatles stuff," he said, "very strange, and it became extremely uncomfortable for me. That was one of the reasons I moved out of LA to Lake Tahoe, a village of eight hundred people.”
Coverdale and Kitaen divorced in 1991. He was remarried in 1997 to Cindy Barker.
As he said to Outlaw in 2021: “The 1987 album opened more doors for me than Deep Purple ever did. But my greatest victory – and I’d prefer the word ‘reward’ – is my marriage to Cindy and my amazing children. I am blessed with daily victories. My life and career is a cornucopia of delights!”
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