Whitesnake <\/i>was my first rock album experience. I wasn\u2019t even three years old when it was released, but it changed my life about a decade later after my favorite aunt played the tape for me in her Ford Expedition. Before Whitesnake, I mainly cared about video games, movies, television, and comic books. Music, outside of church hymns and a Motley Crue single (\u201cDr. Feelgood\u201d) that my mother hated, wasn\u2019t important to me. <\/p>\n
I say all of this so that you can chalk this positive review up to nostalgia if you\u2019d like. Then again, nostalgia would suggest that I still like Get A Grip <\/i>by Aerosmith (their 1970\u2019s output made me forget it), The Legend of Zelda on NES (not fun), Transformers (though I gave the dreadful Michael Bay movies a chance), and the Spider-Man clone saga (I was rooting for Peter Parker the whole time!), but I don\u2019t. <\/p>\n
The truth is that I keep finding more things to appreciate about, yes, the album that gave us \u201cStill Of The Night\u201d (the song most associated with Led Zeppelin), \u201cIs This Love?\u201d (I always skipped this one \u2026 until recently), and \u201cHere I Go Again\u201d (which the great David O. Russell film \u201cThe Fighter\u201d uses more than once). <\/p>\n
It\u2019s enlightening to look at Whitesnake\u2019s career before Whitesnake<\/i>. Years ago, I was excited to find an earlier Whitesnake tape, the 1978 EP Snakebite<\/i>. This album, while not unlistenable, is hardly remarkable. Lead singer David Coverdale sounds like he\u2019s holding back on the majority of the record, and the riffing is standard 1970s hard rock fare, just not as catchy. As I listen to Whitesnake\u2019s first hit, \u201cAin\u2019t No Love In The Heart Of The City,\u201d it\u2019s not surprising that it isn\u2019t what most people remember about Whitesnake (whether that\u2019s good or bad). The song does little to set the band apart from Bad Company, Foreigner, or any other successful blues-based group of the 1970\u2019s. <\/p>\n
From there, the band got more sexual. For example, the cover of Lovehunter <\/i>featured a naked woman straddling a gigantic snake in strike mode! Album titles like Ready An\u2019 Willing<\/i>, Come An\u2019 Get It<\/i>, and Slide It In <\/i>let you know what they\u2019re about, and each of them went gold in the United Kingdom (Slide It In <\/i>would get a boost to double platinum after the self-titled LP). The band had started to come into its own, especially with the great song, \u201cSlow An\u2019 Easy,\u201d but it would take a different lineup, new production, and a different version of \u201cHere I Go Again,\u201d a track on 1982\u2019s Saints & Sinners<\/i>, to reach a larger audience.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
OK, so superhot actress Tawny Kitaen \u201ctrying to fuck a car,\u201d to quote Chuck Klosterman\u2019s Fargo Rock City<\/i>, in the \u201cHere I Go Again\u201d music video really helped, too, but better production and a small but important lyric made the song far more palatable. In the Whitesnake <\/i>version <\/i>of \u201cHere I Go Again,\u201d Coverdale sang \u201cLike a drifter I was born to walk alone\u201d instead of \u201cLike a hobo I was born to walk alone,\u201d the lyrics in the Saints & Sinners <\/i>version. Either way, the line was ridiculously dramatic, but Coverdale comparing himself to a dirty bearded man \u2013 rather than a loner who might not smell so bad \u2013 just didn\u2019t fit the glam metal craze of the 1980\u2019s. <\/p>\n
The other thing is that when you get past the car sex and everything else, \u201cHere I Go Again\u201d is a great underdog anthem. As I mentioned, the track is featured prominently in the 2010 film \u201cThe Fighter,\u201d which takes place during the 1990\u2019s. Director David O. Russell is onto something: \u201cHere I Go Again\u201d represents the guy with the odds against him, no matter how cheesy and inauthentic the song is. It\u2019s laughable that Coverdale, a guy dating a beautiful actress at the time, was able to sell the underdog theme with his vocal performance, but he did. <\/p>\n
Another important piece to the success of Whitesnake <\/i>was guitarist John Sykes. Coincidentally, I was talking with a friend in the bar last night about how great the guitar playing in \u201cCrying In The Rain\u201d is. The vibratos particularly kick ass. This isn\u2019t the case with the original \u201cCrying In The Rain,\u201d the second borrowed track from Saints & Sinners<\/i>. The guitar playing on the original is tiny<\/i> in comparison. Sykes is not usually mentioned in discussions of great guitarists, but his musical philosophy \u2013 less blues and more metal \u2013 helped cement Whitesnake\u2019s tremendous success. Before Sykes, Whitesnake was stuck in the 1970\u2019s. But with Sykes in the lineup, the band was able to give listeners something that sounded current. Admittedly, drummer Aynsley Dunbar also did his part in bringing a heavier sound to the band, but Sykes\u2019 playing was indispensible. <\/p>\n
Having said that, I can\u2019t claim Whitesnake <\/i>is a great album with a straight face. Its lyrics are silly and trite, the singles ultimately make or break the listening experience (though if they work for you, there\u2019s five of them), and \u201cDon\u2019t Turn Away\u201d is one of the worst pieces of filler ever. But it\u2019s quite easy to call Whitesnake<\/i> a decent pop album that established the lasting cultural identity of the band. And I have the tape in my aunt\u2019s SUV to thank for the start of my wonderful relationship with music. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":27635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5777],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-42270","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-whitesnake","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42270"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}