Intervju - Doug Aldrich, Whitesnake Doug Aldrich har figurerat i flertalet mer eller mindre obskyra konstellationer, men på senare år har han dykt upp i Dio och numera är han sidekick till David Coverdale i Whitesnake. Bandet är just nu aktuella med den fenomenala livedubbeln "Live in the shadow of the blues", som bl a innehåller fyra helt nyskrivna låtar signerade Coverdale/Aldrich. Platsen för intervjun är fashionabla Grand Hotell i huvudstaden. Ute är kylan på väg att omfamna Stockholm, men inne på Grand tar Doug emot i en trevlig svit och strax innan intervjun möter jag David som glatt tar i hand och verkar vara på ett strålande humör. Samtalet med Doug kom bl a att handla om kommande studioplattan och hans samarbete med David, samt historier från början av hans karriär där en audition för KISS sticker ut lite mer än de andra. These four new songs on the live album, did you write them with David and how much of an input did you have on them? Was it David´s ideas and you worked on them or...? DA: It was a mutual thing. We sat down with acoustics...not every song was the same. One song, "Ready to rock" was something where I generated and "All I want is you" is something that David had previously and he asked me to come up with a couple of sections and help him arrange it. "Dog" we did from scratch. "If you want me", he had a basic idea of chords but didn´t really have a riff, so I just did what was needed. And the other songs that we wrote during that period was the same way. There´s some really cool stuff. Stuff that we thought we should waite on. We wanted first some songs that could almost immediately slipped into the set. Yeah, it was a collaboration, banging ideas. I´d go home and do some work on demos and then e-mail it back to him. He´d make changes and I´d redo it. You know, it´s a long process and we´ve been writing since...off and on, we´ve been doing other things to, but I started sending him ideas at the end of 2003. That´s when he said "Hey, come up and let´s write!" and he goes "I´m not guaranteing you that we´re gonna do anything, but I´d like to write with you and see what we get.". Those other songs that you wrote then, are those the songs that will end up on the new album? DA: Yeah, some of those will and now...this stuff ( the 4 tracks) was finished in January this year and there were about six or seven other ones. And then...this whole year, everytime I play guitar I get ideas and I know David does, so I´ve got a couple of songs that he hasn´t heard yet that I wanna play him and I´m really excited about. He´s got the same thing and potentially maybe some other songs will show up from the other guys. What´s it like working with a guy like David Coverdale? You´ve worked with Ronnie Dio as well. Is it similar or is he just another guy writing songs with? DA: Well, if I sat down with him without knowing him it would be a nerve wrecking thing. He´s a legend! So, it´s an honour for me to have that opportunity, but the way it worked out was just very organic and easy. It wasn´t like anything was forced, so when I´m sitting down with him it´s like sitting with you and playing guitar. It´s a collaboration and it was really easy. At one point in January he came over to my place and we wrote four songs in a week, completed. And then he went home and came back a week later and we wrote another two or three songs and I´ve been up to his house a number of times over the past few years and we had all kinds of stuff. It´s good! I mean, I didn´t really know what to expect from the new songs, but it came out the way that I kind of thought that Whitesnake could sound like in 2006. It´s the old stuff, but a bit updated and I like it a lot. And David´s voice sounds just excellent. DA: Yeah he did some cool stuff. I like, for example you made a good point which I agree with, that there´s kind of a taste of the older versions of Whitesnake and there´s some integrity to those times, but we try to do different things. One thing was that ballad, which structual wise is kind of like an "87" type of song. But the way that he sang on the verse was almost like Bob Dylan and I thought that was really cool. Something different, a little twist! But it still sounds like Whitesnake. I´m glad that you´re seeing that. Do you have any idea when the new album will be out? DA: We´re shooting for June/July. The only thing that could throw a wrench in that, is if we get some tour dates before that and have to get in that mode. That could put us out for a month or something. As of right now, we´re gonna go home the day after tomorrow and have a few days off and I´m gonna go up to David´s some time around Christmas and we´ll start narrowing down the list. At some point you got to put a stop on the writing, even if you have just a verse and a chorus and it´s like "Yeah, we both really love this, so let´s finish this.", but then after that well say "Ok, that´s it! Let´s stop. We´ve got the tunes that we want.". If something comes up and it´s just mindblowing you´re gonna go ahead and cut it and with this type of thing (live album) we only had room to do a few songs. We were gonna start with two songs and the we both were like "You can´t just leave it at two. Let´s just give them some rockers, something that covers everything and then we´ll save the rest for the record. But when you´re in the studio, sometimes someone will play you something...maybe I´ll have a riff or somebody will and you´re just jamming and all of the sudden Tommy starts and it´s like "Let´s just record this for a little bit!" and who knows, man, some of the coolest songs have been written like that, just really quick. So hopefully the rest of the guys will have an input as well and bring ideas? DA: You know, the table´s been open and I think David originally said to everybody "Send up whatever you´ve got! Whatever ideas you´ve got!" and I don´t know, but I don´t think he really got much and if he did, maybe it wasn´t what he wanted to do. Like I said, I joined the band in the beginning of 2003 and by the time we got off the road I had half a dozen songs and then I went home and immediately started doing demos and e-mailed them to him and he called me a couple of days later and said "I want you to come up and let´s write! I´m not gonna guarantee you that we´re gonna record a record or anything, but you and I will be in the studio together one day." He´s good to his words. Cool! I´m wondering about your history as a guitar player. When did you start playing guitar? DA: When I was eleven, so I´ve been playing a long time. Some thirty or so years. What made you get into guitar playing? Did you have any childhood heroes like Ace Frehley or something like that? DA: No! He´s a good guitar player and KISS is an amazing band and I have nothing but respect for them, but that was a band my younger sister was into. You know how it is when your younger sister is into something, you´re gonna be into other things. Actually I had my bands and my younger sister had hers and my older sister had hers, but mine was Zeppelin, Deep Purple, UFO, Rainbow and Sabbath. Those things. And then later on Van Halen, Aerosmith and stuff like that...and The Stones was one of the early ones. I didn´t appreciate how much of an influence that stuff had on my life until later..."I remember when I was a kid...! My older sister was into Jeff Beck and she had "Blow by blow" and I didn´t even have a record player at that point, so I really got into that record and he´s always been one of my favorites. But I didn´t go see a concert and go "I wanna be like that guy!". My younger sister had a classical guitar and one summer all my friends were gone and I was sitting around looking for something to do and I just liked the sound of guitars when I would hear it on the radio. So I got this classical and taught me some chords and I fucking learned how to play "Smoke on the water" in the wrong key (laughs) with open chords. Imagine if Richie got paid for everybody who learned how to play that song. Then I eventually got an electric guitar and I just started hacking away with friends. I went from there. You never took lessons or anything? DA: When I got the electric guitar, it was a cheaper guitar, I went to a lesson. My mum said "Ok, I´ll give you the guitar but you´re going to the lesson!". The guy...we just didn´t hit it off. First thing he said was...I had it in the box. I didn´t have a case. I put a towel inside it and put the guitar in the towel and I closed the box. I go to the lesson and the guy says "You can´t come in here with the guitar in a box, you gotta get a case!". And I was like "Sorry, man!". And he goes "Ok, what kind of guitar player do you want to be? You want to be a rhythm guy that plays like this or a lead guy that plays like this? Or do you want to do like me and play both?". And I was like "I guess I want to be like you!". And he goes "Good, good choice!". So after a couple of weeks of that guy I said "Fuck this!" and I just started jamming with friends and through that people would show me things. Once I learned how to play a bar chord, that opened up a lot of opportunity to learn more and more songs and I just learned by ear really. Later on I started getting a little better and I was in high school and I was like a younger kid hanging out with the older kids and jamming all the time. They kind of didn´t take me seriously because I was the younger guy and that kind of kicked my ass to go "I wanna fucking be good!", so I started practising and get into it. Did you grow up in LA or...? DA: No, I grew up on the east coast of the US. I was born in the South. We moved around a little bit, but it was always on the eastern seaboard and when I graduated high school there was no scene. I was in high school in Pennsylvania...Philadelphia, and there was no real music scene and a matter of fact I couldn´t even go to a bar because bars were 21. We used to sneak over the border and sneak id´s and get into clubs in New Jersey and see bands and they were just doing covers. I thought "this is kind of going nowhere!", so I just decided I wanted to be on my own and I went out and within a month I was in a band and we were playing in Hollywood. Getting experience. I was wondering about the band Lion? Was that band based in LA then? DA: That was yeah. But it kind of had a different flair to it because we had a singer from Scotland. He was a huge Whitesnake fan. We got together in 1985 and I was teaching at that time and somebody brought in the "Slide it in" record and I thought that it was a cool band. I had never really heard of them. "Slide it in" was the first one and one day he was playing this record and I thought "Who the hell is this?" and he said "This is Whitesnake. Come an´ get it." I thought it was amazing and how come we never had heard this? And he said that they were not available here, or something. He had all the records, so he turned me on to that stuff early and I think it kind of helped me to work with David, because I had a little bit more of a background than maybe other people. I didn´t realize you were in Lion. I have the album "Trouble in angel city". Was that the second album? DA: Well, yeah. It was actually the third album. The first one was called "Power love" and it was an ep and that was pretty much Japan only. The next one was called "Dangerous attraction". We released that in the beginning of ´87 and that was kind of our best effort. We realized at that time that we were on a bad record deal and we were never gonna make a penny. We didn´t know that going into it, but when it got time to get paid it was like "Well, the paper says you don´t actually get paid!", so we took some old songs and some songs that we had passed on and we recorded those to make "Trouble in angel city" with a new label, a smaller label, to prove to the major labels that we were free. And we were also ready with a new badge of songs which were more of what we wanted to do, but still nobody would sign us so the band broke up and eventually we took those early Lion songs that we were saving for a new record and made them for a band called Bad Moon Rising. Then you were part of the whole LA scen, which I´m a huge fan of. You must´ve come across other bands that were up and coming around that time in Lion? DA: Mostly...we were really different, because of Cal´s (the singer) influence. My influence was coming from a British side, because all my guitar players at that time, with the exception of Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, were English guys and German guys, so our sound was a little on that bluesy kind of European side. So we were thrown in with all these bands and I think when Mötley Crüe and Poison and all the other LA bands at the time, Ratt, got signed and were moving on to arenas, we kind of took over that whole scene and it was kind of special. It was a little late to get signed to Electra, but we got the Columbia/Epic label. We always put on really good shows and it wasn´t the glammy type of thing with us. We were trying to be a little more serious, just a different flavor. We´d always put on good shows and bring in extra sound and it always sounded kick ass. But I was there, in the beginning when I moved out, the first night I ended up at The Troubadour and there was, what turned out to be Blackie Lawless, just sitting there every night drinking at the bar and then one day there was a flyer and it´s this new band WASP, their first show at The Troubadour and I go down there that night and "Hey, that´s that guy who´s always sitting at the bar!". It was flames and they had the red meat they were throwing at people getting hit in the face and shit. Cool times! DA: It was! I actually at that time, I never really hung out. Every night of the week it would be both sides of the street packed and people all dressed up and hair spray "Don´t light a match!" (laughs). But I didn´t really go out. I had a girlfriend and I was teaching all day, so by the time I got home I was fried. But we had some people that supported us and go out and put up flyers and stuff. Then I read just recently and I didn´t know this at all and I know a lot about KISS, but you auditioned for them back in the early 80´s. DA: It wasn´t by my choice. If someone had said "Hey, KISS is holding auditions!", I probably wouldn´t have thought I was the right guy to go down there. I read that Eric Carr´s girlfriend said something? DA: Yeah, a girl comes up and says it and I didn´t know Ace Frehley had left. It´s one of those opportunities like say you´re a journalist and someone comes to you and says "You´re a journalist, but instead of writing about music, we want you to write child book fiction and it´s for a huge company!" and keep in mind that I was 18 and I was still trying to find out what the hell was going on in my life, but I just said "Hey, that´s a big band and something special!". And obviously I was too young for them. Do you remember if you played on songs they were working on, besides jamming on old KISS classics? From "Creatures of the night" then I guess? DA: Yeah, it was in a studio and I got a call from Eric and I was at a musicstore and I didn´t have a phone, so he called the musicstore and said "I want you to come to the Record Plant!", so I went and there was Gene and Paul behind the glass singing background vocals. And I think Eric said, and he could probably tell that I was really nervous, he said "Let´s just wave to them!"and then we went next door and had a couple of shots and I wasn´t even old enough to drink. Then we go into the studio and Gene comes in and they put the track on and I put a solo on one of the songs. Do you remember which one? DA: No I don´t remember, but I remember a couple of songs on that record and actually I don´t think it was the whole song. It might not have had the vocals on it or something. They just wanted to hear me play on top of their stuff. I might have been soloing over the verse (laughs). Gene Simmons, as I said in a recent interview... The major scales? DA: Yeah. He said "Do you know them?" and I said "No!" and then he hums it and of course I could play it, I just didn´t know what it was. This was before I was teaching by the way. In spite of whatever, he wrote down some songs and I went down and jammed with them in this huge airport hangar thing on Sunset Boulevard and then a couple of weeks later they called me to come back. So I went back and it was really interesting. I could just see that I was not comfortable, whereas now, as you get older and gain experience and savvy and stuff, you can be put in a situation and you may not be comfortable, but you find a way to go "Hey, I´m just gonna do what I do!". Forget about all these distractions and stuff. At that time I was just blown away being in the same room with those guys. Did they want you to join the band or...? DA: No! They wanted to check me out and we played and they invited me back, but it was obvious that I was a kid. They´re not gonna have a kid join the band. I read on some website recently "They should´ve got Doug!", or something. "No, they shouldn´t!". The guy that they got was a really cool guitar player for them and they had some cool songs with him. What were they like back then? You got to see them without make up. DA: They were older and they had a lot of money! (laughs) I used to live on...I went to the grocery store and bought noodles for 10 cents a pack at that time and you´d eat three packs a day so it cost me 30 cents a day to live and my apartment was about half the size of this room and I didn´t know about being on your own, but eventually I figured it out. Cool! So what´s next, besides a new studio album with Whitesnake? Any solo projects coming? DA: Not really. I´ve been so busy. David and I talked and we´ve worked all year on this thing and then we had to take a break to go on the road. The reason why we have credit for remixing stuff is because when we went on the road we left it in the hands of a mix engineer and we were getting sent mp3´s and we weren´t happy enough with it, so when we came home we went back in the studio and remixed it. Sorted out the sonic parts of it that we weren´t happy with and it took awhile, but I was busy doing some other things with David and then we came on this trip. But I´ve got a side band that I have been working on called Burning Rain. I´ve got a record written, but I just don´t have time for it. I can´t be in two places at once and obviously this (Whitesnake) is my priority. But I´ll get to it some day. I´m looking forward to it and especially the new Whitesnake album. It´ll be real interesting to hear. DA: Yeah. It´s gonna be a lot more diverse than this (live album) and I´m really trying to find a way to fuse the the bluesiness of the older Whitesnake with the...that´s a weird thing man, fusing the old style with the "87" era, because in the States still, people don´t know about the older stuff. A lot of people will hear "Don´t break my heart again" on the dvd and seriously go "When did you write that?". They never heard it before. In the US and Japan and some places in Europe, the Sykes, Vandenberg and Steve Vai era is much more popular and then you go to the UK or certain places in Europe and they love the original line up. I didn´t realize it would be like that, but it´s something I have to consider now when I´m working on songs. I wanna do stuff that fits with that whole thing. I don´t worry about pleasing anybody. I know what I think and I think these songs (live album) is a good apetizer for the main course. But I do think there´s a point to keeping the integrity of the whole thing with Whitesnake, opposed to just going "Well, the "87" record sold more so I´m gonna do the stuff like that!". That´s not the way to go about it. I love old Whitesnake and it´s an influence in my writing. Ok. Well, thaks a lot! Really nice talking to you Doug! DA: Thanks Niclas! Whitesnake - Official website

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