David Coverdale proved on Dec 17th in Gothenburg that he´s taken the current incarnation of Whitesnake as far as he can. Although DC increasingly needs the band to fall back on, the success or failure of a Whitesnake concert is still very much a result of Coverdale´s performance. In some areas he did very well, and less so in others.
I saw less energy than at Sweden Rock (June 6th 2008), and less energy than a couple of years ago. This wasn´t helped by the slight feeling of `another day at the job´ that I got from parts of the band. But then again, the conditions could have been better. The atmosphere was initially less than lively in `the Scandinavium´, as DC called the venue while reminiscing about his first time here with Deep Purple in 1973. A nice touch (DC alone on stage for this `speech´) and although I´m sure it happened in Stockholm too, it felt sincere and shows he still has lots to give to an audience.
During the course of the evening he went for quite a lot of crowd contact, passing out beer and reacting to things going on out there. He also had regular exchanges with the band. For example, when trying to remember what year Soldier of Fortune was written, Aldrich offered `76 with DC playfully responding `1976? Are you fucking kidding me?´, implying that the guitarist didn´t know his Deep Purple history very well. Things like that kept it fresh. He could have kept the chatter to a minimum and just got through the show, but instead he worked hard and managed to get feedback from the crowd, even on this Wednesday night with people more or less coming in after work. This was not South America.
His singing sounded better than expected, without making any comparisons to the old days. In the opener Best Years I got the odd feeling of delivery and vocals not matching, though I´m confident that any playback rumours are just that. But, he sure does have a lot of help from his backing singers. Timothy Drury now even sounds like DC in the lower registers.
As for the performance of the actual songs, I´m afraid there´s really nothing new to report, going back to my comment about DC having taken this as far as he can. There´s only so many times you can hear them perform `Love Ain´t No Stranger´, `Is this Love´ and `Fool for your Loving´ with these kind of dynamics (Marshalls to 12, drummer banging away on `empty barrels´) before you start to long for something else.
And we got something else in the shape of 2 glorious acoustic versions of The Deeper the Love and Soldier of Fortune. The `another day at the job´ feeling immediately went away, all the `empty noise´ did too, and what was left was DC´s voice and an acoustic guitar. This was the real thing. Whether it would work for a full evening I´m not sure, but those songs (plus an impromptu and inspired acoustic snippet of Slow an Easy) were the highlights of the evening and made the `bad, bad boys´ delivery of the rest of the songs feel redundant, especially since DC clearly does not have the voice for that anymore.
Speaking of redundant, the 10-minute extended guitar solo, featuring both Aldrich and Beach, needs to go – a totally pointless exercise in notes and speed. The drum solo was better, and hinted that Chris Frazier probably knows a trick or two from outside the `Tommy Aldridge catalogue´.
In summary, the Whitesnake machine is so well oiled, with background vocals and everything, that it wouldn´t be a problem for DC to keep on touring like this, featuring this kind of presentation. But I can´t see how it could be fulfilling to him, creatively speaking. I know it wouldn´t be for me as a fan, and if they came here again I wouldn´t go.
Last night´s performance showed glimpses of a DC that still can shine. Let´s hope we can see more of him in the next couple of years.
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing