So Cool

Originally published in the New York Press, July 31st, 2001

by Jessica Willis
The summer of ’87, scored in 10 seconds of guitar tablature: a couple of deafening
power chords, arcing into an harmonic shimmy, and landsliding down again. A barely there pause and then, riding on a torchy hi-hat beat and a few more implosive chords, hair metal was spurred to its apex.

"In the still of the night I hear the wolf howl, honay!" Let the loitering outside
the L’il Peach looking for someone to buy us a case of Miller Genny games
begin, motherfuckers.

Whitesnake’s "Still of the Night" was well over six minutes long and pretentious
enough to whiff of Zeppelin, but lead vocalist David Coverdale was more mercenary
than any spreadsheet Page and Plant’s people could ever hope to scribble
up. After firing guitarist John Sykes, the tasty young god responsible for laying
down that unbelievably hollow and huge sound on the album, Coverdale snatched
up a poseur metal lineup that aimed to satisfy both the chinless geek boy and
the booby teen queen: bassist Rudy Sarzo from Quiet Riot, drummer Tommy Aldridge
from Thin Lizzy and guitarists Vivian Campbell (Dio) and the hideously pretty
Adrian Vandenberg, who looked like an Aryan with a Farrah ’do. It was all
cheekbones and gorgeous hair and instrumental breaks and it was the shit, man,
we ate it up like good blotter.

Not that anything else was going on that summer, except for the Crüe show at the Centrum,and Whitesnake was opening, it was gonna rule. But until then, it was too hot
to do anything, so we would stay inside and watch Whitesnake on MTV. Of course
it was the "Still of the Night" video, played in ceaseless rotation,
that completely numbed, titillated and belittled us. There was Tawny Kitaen,
the sixth Whitesnake, Coverdale’s bitch, video co-poseur, hollow and blowzy
and bored and beautiful like Sykes’ power chords; the girl none of us could
ever be or have, condemned to have auburn tendrils of her profuse hair stuck
in her lipgloss for eternity, always two steps away in her stiletto snakeskin
heels.

Coverdale made sure there was something for all of us to be wistful about that summer. I remember Fat Gino, sweating on his vinyl couch one listless afternoon, pulling absently at his pathetic thatch of straightened, coarse, dyed black hair, and staring at the spotlit, sunkissed image of Adrian Vandenberg on the screen. Fat Gino had tears in his eyes. Tears of longing and respect. "This is so cool,
man," he whispered. "This is so fuckin’ cool."