Rare Whitesnake Track Released

This is kind of cool. Now you can hear a previously unreleased version of Whitesnake's "Is This Love" from the band's self-titled album. The song will be included on the upcoming thirtieth-anniversary reissue of Whitesnake.

I'm always interested in little rarities like this, so it was nice Rhino released this in advance of the album dropping.

Comments

[Him]

Hmmm . . . unreleased or just a demo or just a lark in the studio? Not really an amazing find. Though it does show Coverdale achingly inching closer to the sheen that drowned out any semblance of what Sykes, Murray, Dunsbar, etc., added to the mix.

Given that, I wonder: was this recorded while they were in the band? I can't see how it could be anything other than that, unless this was done afterwards at some point. All the more reason to see Whitesnake as what it always was (save for some brief flashes on mainly UK releases), Coverdale's band. Which isn't such a bad thing . . . the further back you go!

[Metalboy!]

Well, OBVIOUSLY, it's a RARE (until now) previously unreleased demo.

I'm with Allyson, this IS interesting...

For me, with rare studio demos like this, it's all the unvarnished guitar pyrotechnics of a guitar superhero I always find so fascinating.

As far as WHO that is, it's hard to know in advance of the actual release, as we don't have the liner notes yet, with what I assume is John Sykes credited. One can only hope he will be credited, as you can already hear Coverdale's outsized ego inflating by the second in the song's intro ...

"This is the chorus that will take over the world!", says Coverdale before the band launches into beating the hell out of the insipid couplet, "Is this love, or am I dreaming? Is this the love I've been searching for?" which would brainwash the masses into making it a Top 10 Hit, taking the album to multi-platinum success.

I'll give him this, bravado aside, he knew he had a hit on his hand when they were laying the pipe with this recording.

As HIM points out, the overproduction of the final release buries a lot of the intracacies and flourishes of this demo, yet if you listen to that final version that would ultimately create the genre I dubbed here years ago, "Receptionist Rock" (the stuff playing softly on the local soft rock radio station on a boom box stashed under big haired receptionists' desks in office buildings across the U.S. in 1987), you can still hear most of those little guitar noodlings that make it so listenable.

The song that was ultimately released, certainly one of the most definitive Power Ballads of the 80's, really is the best of both worlds -- it's got the lush keyboard washes to make the chicks swoon and the guitar work to keep the guitar hero worshipper's ears listening. That is, until we ultimately burned out on it after all that heavy (well, frequent would be the better term) Radio and Headbanger's Ball rotation, the latter of which where the song ALWAYS got in the way of the really hard rockin' stuff we were really craving to hear -- PRIEST, "Electric Eye" or ACCEPT, "Midnight Mover" anyone?

Still, after not listening to the album in it's entirety for 29 years, I'm all ears to get brainwashed all over again, this time in all it's remastered glory, especially by sleeper throwaway barnstormer, "Children of the Night", one track I have continued to listen to repeatedly over the decades.

p.s. I assume it's John Sykes on this demo, not Adrien Vandenberg (no slouch either), who took over after Sykes departed because of "creative differences", but it will require the discerning ears of the 80's Guitar Aficionados on here to tell us before the liner notes come out with one would assume will be the proper credits. That is, unless, of course, Coverdale wants to copy Page ("Still of the Night") yet again by not giving credit where credit is due (Page often forgot to share credit for the songs he reinvented until court orders forced Atlantic to add Willie Dixon's name to Zeppelin's albums.