Whitesnake guitarist thinks fans should stop comparing different band lineups: “Come on, man, you like the band, or you don’t!”
When a band’s been in the game long enough, chances are they’ve been through a number of lineup changes to keep the wheels turning. And generally, fans will always hold one lineup in higher stead than others.
The ‘golden era’ of an artist’s career, while sometimes reflective of their period of peak commercial success, is often relative, and is different to different fans depending on when they discovered the artist’s music.
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Hard rock outfit Whitesnake were a band with a laundry list of previous members, including Steve Vai, Bernie Marsden, Joel Hoekstra, Doug Aldrich and so many more over the course of their on-and-off 40-year career.
And in a new interview with Chaoszine, Dutch guitarist Adrian Vandenberg reflects on the fanbase’s tendency to have favourites in terms of lineups.
Remembering the band’s Restless Heart tour in 1997, he says: “In certain countries, it went great. South America, man, people went nuts. But in many other countries, they only wanted to hear the 1987 album.
“And England… holy shit, England has always been so split up. You got the guys saying, ‘Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden, that’s the real Whitesnake.’ Then the other guys go, ‘No, no, John Sykes is the shit.’
“It’s like Van Halen, you know? ‘Sammy Hagar is better than David Lee Roth.’ ‘No, Roth is the guy.’ I don’t know why people do that. Come on, man, you like the band, or you don’t, you know? So, the same thing was happening on that tour. People were expecting that big pompous 1987 sound in some countries.”
“We had some surreal experiences in weird cities, man,” he also says. “Great memories, and it was different playing with that lineup. We hit Japan, Europe, South America and Russia, which will probably never happen again the way the world is now. At least not in our lifetime – it’s a strange world we live in right now.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
