Hiding In Plain Sight: The Instrumental Mastery of a Hair Band Veteran

Guitarist John Sykes and a new guilty pleasure from the bad old days

Today’s person of interest played guitar and co-wrote a bunch of songs on one of the big hits of the hair-metal era – the self-titled 1987 Whitesnake.

That alone is probably enough to send most self-respecting rock snobs exiting this page as fast as fingers can swipe. I get it: The airbrushed stars! The shrill pomposity! The taint of contrivance lingers. Those hair-metal bands (and the adulation they puzzlingly still inspire) are uniquely tricky to defend. I won’t try.

Before you go, though, spend a moment with a clip from a band that’s rightly beloved by rock snobs everywhere: Thin Lizzy. It’s from 1983, and the tour to support the band’s then-current and unfairly maligned Thunder and Lightning album, the last studio work from leader Phil Lynott before his death in 1986.

That’s British guitarist John Sykes, playing a live solo that delivers exactly what the situation calls for: Brisk, impressive-sounding single-note lines interrupted by lunges in the direction of the blues, followed by triumphant/histrionic(?) sustained wailing in the upper register. Sykes provides more than the minimum daily requirement of rock guitar drama, and notice the way he does it: With authority and control and respect for melody.  There’s frenzy around him – he’s creating lots of it! – and yet his playing is scarifyingly precise. He makes intricate etude-like devices sound like warmups. He leans into some phrases and pulls back on others, displaying a classical guitarist’s command of tone, subdivision, and small gestural nuances like vibrato.

After Thin Lizzy, Sykes joined Whitesnake. He contributed in big ways to the making of the band’s breakthrough (and still most successful) album, and then, before the tour, was fired by lead singer David Coverdale. Both men attributed the split to personal differences. Coverdale was able to ride the success Sykes helped create for years afterward — despite the fact that subsequent Whitesnake music was never as interesting. Sykes earned an eternal spot as a rock trivia question, and went on to form one of the curious footnotes of the hair band era, Blue Murder.

Signed by Geffen (Whitesnake’s label), Blue Murder was a power trio built around Sykes and featuring two protean musicians, fretless bassist Tony Franklin (then best known as part of The Firm) and veteran drummer Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge, Rod Stewart, many later hair bands). Everything was lined up for success; Geffen hired the already-revered Bob Rock to produce, and after a long search for a vocalist, Sykes — who in 2004 was named one of Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists — reluctantly agreed to sing.

The eponymous Blue Murder debut dropped in April 1989 and did not immediately set the world on fire; it peaked on the Billboard album chart at #69. Sykes has said it sold around 500,000 copies, and blamed himself for not switching labels. In a 1999 interview, he said, “In hindsight, I would have done better with a different label.”

Encountering Blue Murder now, it’s easy to see Sykes’ point: This is typical Corporate Rock Product that’s just a smidge nastier and funkier than Whitesnake. The songs are solid – and also predictable. They’ll bring you back to the formulaic songwriting of the era, as well as the alternately heroic and salacious (depending on the topic!) posturing of the frontmen. It’s the kind of generica that was just begging to be lampooned (Spinal Tap) — until it was mercifully exploded by the howitzers of grunge.

Still, even in this familiar (some would say numbing) context, Sykes’ distinctive presence on guitar lifts things up. He plays as though there’s nothing in his way, tossing out jazzlike sprawls of inside/outside melody, executing feats of technical wizardry as fluidly as he plays long tones. He chops up the meter into tiny little prog-rock morsels, then cranks out serrated planks of chords he maybe pilfered from the Jimmy Page trickbag.

And then, before you can call out the theft, Sykes leaps into a baroque fantasy of triplets cascading into still more intricate triplets. He’s showy in ways Page never was, satisfying the sparkle demands of the hair metal idiom. All of his solos (see “Out of Love” starting at 2:30, above) are thrilling and stupendous — and loaded with a surprising range of improvisational devices. They challenge close analysis, defy transcription. You get the sense he could have dashed the solos off in one take. On the other hand, he might have cobbled them together phrase by painstaking phrase in the studio. And it seems unlikely, but he might have written them out, too. When the ride moves with this kind of speed, and torque, and daring, the details tend to blur anyway.