Photo: David Coverdale | By Lyndsey Parker, Yahoo Music | The Totally ‘80s podcast just aired a big two-part episode all about power ballads, and understandably, the special guest is David Coverdale, the big voice of two of that big decade’s biggest ballads, “Is This Love” and “Here I Go Again.”
Those songs became smashes due to near-constant, high-rotation airplay for their music videos, both starring Coverdale’s then-girlfriend, bombshell actress Tawny Kitaen. In fact, Kitaen’s balletic posing astride the hood of Coverdale’s white Jaguar XJ and the couple’s tunnel-of-love canoodling with Coverdale behind the wheel, in “Here I Go Again,” remain some of the most striking and iconic images in MTV history, some 35 years later.
But when speaking to Totally ‘80s host/Yahoo Entertainment music editor Lyndsey Parker, Coverdale surprisingly reveals that he initially had another classic beauty of the ’80s and ’90s in mind to be Whitesnake’s video vixen.
“It was interesting, because Claudia Schiffer was supposed to be the original ‘Whitesnake woman,’” says Coverdale. “And I got a phone call from Marty [Callner]’s guy, and [Schiffer’s] agents had out-priced her. This is when she was with Guess? Jeans way back in the day. But she was what I thought would be a real beautiful woman to work with in the videos.”
Coverdale had only just started “kind of dating” Kitaen — who had heavy metal cred from posing for the Out of the Cellar album cover and in the “Back for More” video by her previous boyfriend Robbin Crosby’s band, Ratt. Coverdale and Kitaen had randomly met in a “super-hip restaurant” on Sunset Boulevard while he and guitarist John Sykes were in Los Angeles working on Whitesnake’s 1987 self-titled album — the album that would soon catapult Whitesnake to superstardom on the strength of the above-mentioned MTV hits.
“We just connected very well and exchanged numbers; it was one of those things that was entirely innocent,” Coverdale says of his first encounter with the Bachelor Party starlet. “I told her I was a musician and I said, ‘What do you do?’ And she said — because she looked like a model, obviously — ‘Oh, I’m a working actress.’ Which was I thought was very funny, because most of the actresses [in L.A.] weren’t working.”
Pretty soon, this working actress would take on arguably the most high-profile job of her career, right after Schiffer dropped out of that fateful first Whitesnake-era video shoot. “Marty called me up like a couple of days before the ‘Still of the Night’ video and said, ‘Would you stop by? I want to go over some things with you,’” Coverdale recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, actually, I’m going out to dinner with a girlfriend. Can we make it really quick?’ So, he had a house at that time in Beverly Hills. Tawny and I pull up in the white Jag, ring the doorbell, he opens the door, his jaw hits the floor, and he goes, ‘Oh my God, that’s her! That’s the Whitesnake woman!’ And I went to Marty, ‘Well, no, this is a friend of mine. She’s an actress.’ And Tawny’s going, ‘Oh, David, don’t be silly. I’d be very happy to be in it!’”
Even with a new leading lady cast in the famous Whitesnake video trilogy that began with “Still of the Night,” things still almost fell apart. “I was almost $3 million in debt, and Geffen tried to pull the plug the morning of the shoot of ‘Still of the Night’ because they discovered that they didn’t have a recoupment policy for videos,” Coverdale explains. “And I said, ‘Whoa, just a second!’ Marty and I had done so much work. … I said, ‘I’ll find the money from somewhere. We’re gonna do it.’”
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Click here to read David Coverdale’s entire Totally ‘80s conversation: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/david-coverdale-whitesnake-woman-american-idol-jaguar-171137184.html
Photo: David Coverdale (from his facebook page)
Here He Goes Again: David Coverdale on Who Was Supposed to be the ‘original Whitesnake woman,’ and more…
