GREAT WHITE TRIVIA
Trivia
Can't Get There from Here came out in Japan first: Victor Entertainment's Japanese edition (VICP-60628) was released in May 1999, and the American edition on Portrait followed in July. The Japanese CD has a 13th track, a bonus for Japan only. Mark Kendall says he recorded almost the whole album through combo amps, a pile of them in the Twin Reverb mould, and that the Japanese bonus track, which he calls "When the Good Die Young", was the only song on which he used a Mesa Boogie.
"Once Bitten Twice Shy" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 1990 Grammy Awards. Its rivals were Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator", Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood" and Guns N' Roses' G N'R Lies, and the award went to Living Colour for "Cult of Personality". Guns N' Roses were managed by Alan Niven too at the time, and it was their guitarist Izzy Stradlin who had suggested the song to Great White in the first place.
Jack Russell was already in a band at eleven. At sixteen he met Audie Desbrow and played in his band for a while, but quit because they would not do original songs. Around then a guitarist from a cross-town rival band, Mark Kendall, kept phoning him. As Kendall tells it, he had been getting discouraged with a singer who could not quite reach the high notes when Russell came to an audition, and the two decided to build a band of their own. Russell was seventeen when they teamed up, and in 2013 he laughed that he had spent more time with Kendall than with all his wives put together. Desbrow, his old friend, later became Great White's drummer.
Van Halen were what convinced Mark Kendall it could be done. He had watched them play a backyard party, a dollar to get in, and then saw that band from just up the road sign to Warner Bros. and put out a record: if they could, he thought, maybe his band could too, with some luck. In a 2013 interview he put it the same way, recalling that when Van Halen got their deal, everyone around him realised it was possible. In the early 1980s, he says, Hollywood was buzzing, with someone always playing: Motley Crue, Ratt, Dokken.
Dante Fox struggled to find a singer. With Jack Russell in prison, Mark Kendall had to start again from scratch: an ad in the paper brought him drummer Tony Montana and bassist Don Costa, and the three gelled at once, but no singer stuck. One sounded like Rob Halford; John Bush auditioned and was great, but did not fit. Then came Lisa Baker, who turned them into something very different. Her father, who worked in television, set up a couple of industry showcases, but before anything came of them George Lynch poached her for his own band, Xciter. When Russell came out, he auditioned again and joined Dante Fox, the band that would grow into Great White.
It was Don Dokken who sent Alan Niven to see the band. Niven was working in Los Angeles for the distributor Greenworld when Dokken brought him Breaking the Chains; the two became good friends and shared a house. On Dokken's word Niven went to see Dante Fox and was appalled: by his account the bassist was all in black, the guitarist all in white, the singer half and half, a wannabe blend of Van Halen and Judas Priest. Told he had missed it and should look again, he found the second show even worse. Out of respect for Dokken he went a third time, and at the Troubadour an encore of a Humble Pie song let Mark Kendall bring the house down. Niven asked them to bring over a tape.
The name Great White came from Alan Niven. Mark Kendall recalls that the first thing Niven told them on becoming their manager was that he hated the name Dante Fox, and that Great White was a far better one. The band did not take to it at first, but thinking of the shark won them over. Kendall also liked that the name did not dictate what kind of music they had to play, unlike a name such as Slayer, which in his view commits a band to extreme lyrics on every song.
Great White's first label was Aegean, which Alan Niven had just started; the name came from his initials, AGN. Niven says his first signing was Berlin and he wanted Great White as the second. When Jack Russell and Mark Kendall asked him to manage them as well, he told them that would be a direct conflict of interest. Russell's answer was "You'll learn", and Niven took the leap. Aegean released the band's 1983 EP, Out of the Night.
Out of the Night was an independent EP by a band with no real record deal, yet Alan Niven talked two Los Angeles stations, KMET and KLOS, into playlisting it. Mark Kendall still calls it unheard of that the band was in rotation on KMET, the biggest station in town, alongside Queen and Tom Petty. Before long they went from playing to a couple of hundred people to headlining Magic Mountain in front of more than six thousand. For a week and a half they met major labels every day; eight made written offers, and the band signed with EMI America.
"On Your Knees" on the debut album Great White started life as "In Love". Mark Kendall says the band had a stack of songs written before they had a manager or a producer, and once an A&R man took an interest, a lot was changed, the lyrics above all; Don Dokken, who had more experience, helped a little with those. Kendall admits their words were a bit corny back then. "Stick It", from the same album, began as "Money". The demo collection The Roots of Great White 1978-1982, released in October 2019, preserves both early versions, which Jack Russell describes as roughly recorded on eight-track tape.
After signing with EMI America the band made its debut album with producer Michael Wagener, then went to Europe as support to Whitesnake and, in 1984, toured the US and Canada with Judas Priest. Wagener, best known for his work with Accept and Dokken, kept telling Jack Russell in the studio to make a fist, Alan Niven remembers. Russell later said the band had started out sounding more like Judas Priest: the first record was too heavy and the second too soft, and only with Once Bitten did they find their true spirit as a blues-based rock band.
After the debut, EMI America dropped Great White. Alan Niven went back to the seven other labels that had made offers, only to find them still sore at having been turned down the first time. So the second album, Shot in the Dark, had to be made independently: Mark Kendall says they borrowed $15,000 from a man named Fred, and jokingly calls the result "Fred Records". Their cover of the Angels' "Face the Day" got onto three radio stations with no label behind it at all, and in the end Capitol, the parent company of the label that had dropped them, signed the band and gave the album a proper release; it reached No. 82 on the Billboard 200. Kendall still marvels at it: people, he says, do not get second chances.
One member of the classic Once Bitten line-up came in from behind the mixing desk. Michael Lardie, who joined on keyboards and guitar, had been the second studio engineer on Shot in the Dark. At the same time Jack Russell's old friend Audie Desbrow took over the drums. Lardie went on to share writing credits with Russell, Mark Kendall and manager Alan Niven on songs such as "Rock Me", "House of Broken Love", "Desert Moon" and "Love Is a Lie".
"Rock Me" was the centrepiece of what Mark Kendall calls a do-or-die record: without something memorable on Once Bitten, he believes, the band's career would have ended there. The song grew out of his fondness for keeping one note going while something else moves over it, so through the verses the bass stays on a single note while guitar licks and even harmonica shift around above it. When the finished track blared out of the studio speakers, the Capitol people jumped around the room shouting "This is it!", and Kendall himself got chills. The album version runs 7:19; cut to 4:12 for the single, it became the band's first Billboard Hot 100 hit, peaking at No. 60 in September 1987.
Getting a seven-minute song onto the radio took a little sleight of hand from Alan Niven. According to Mark Kendall, Niven listed every track on Once Bitten at 3:59, and that is also what the single sent to radio stations said. Kendall had been nervous: the band had never had a hit, and stations wanted songs of three or four minutes to get to the commercials. Nobody said a word, and by the time anyone worked it out, the song was already a hit.
The ballad "Save Your Love" came from a guitarist who was in Great White for just a month. Jack Russell co-wrote it with Stephan Williams, a close friend of Mark Kendall's who, by Kendall's account, was a nervous wreck on stage but tremendous at writing once you got him in a room. Kendall spent about three weeks writing with him alone, which produced "Waiting for Love" on Shot in the Dark. As Williams first wrote it, "Save Your Love" had a big, bombastic intro and muted picking; the structure was so pretty, Kendall says, that the band kept his idea but delivered it acoustically. The single reached No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Once Bitten came out in July 1987, the same month as Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, and both bands were managed by Alan Niven through his company Stravinski Bros. Guns N' Roses had been signed to Geffen by Tom Zutaut, but their reputation was so bad that Zutaut all but begged Niven to take them on. Niven made the two bands work for each other, tacking a couple of Guns N' Roses video shoots onto Great White's and getting them good support slots with Great White. He kept a diary with three columns: where Great White were that day, where Guns N' Roses were, and where he was supposed to be.
The idea of covering "Once Bitten Twice Shy" came from Izzy Stradlin of Guns N' Roses, who played it to the manager both bands shared, Alan Niven; Niven took it to Great White. The song was Ian Hunter's, from 1975, a No. 14 hit in Britain but little known in America, and Mark Kendall had never heard it. What Niven loved was the lyric about life on the road, a perfect fit for a band that never went home. Following Once Bitten with an album called ...Twice Shy completed the saying, too. Nobody planned it as the single, Kendall says, but it turned out so well that the record company decided that was the one.
Great White had crossed paths with Ian Hunter twice before they ever covered his song. Mark Kendall recalls that Hunter once rode along on the band's tour bus to one of their shows and simply hung out. Then, on the 1984 Judas Priest tour, the band needed a drum riser, and their sound engineer, a good friend of Hunter's, knew he had one; Hunter lived in New York, and they collected it, quite literally, from his backyard. The funny thing, Kendall says, is that neither meeting had anything to do with the cover.
Great White changed a few words of "Once Bitten Twice Shy". Ian Hunter's "Greyhound bus" became a "grey tour bus", and where Hunter sings "I, I, I" in the chorus, Jack Russell sang "My, my, my". Mark Kendall says that once they had changed the chorus a little, the song took on a life of its own. Since few Americans knew the original, plenty of people never realised it was a cover: Kendall once stood in a record store behind a man who asked for a band whose name he did not know, the "Once Bitten Twice Shy" band, because his daughter loved them; the guitarist of that very band was standing right behind him.
"Once Bitten Twice Shy" entered the Billboard Hot 100 on 13 May 1989 and climbed to No. 5 on 12 August, spending 26 weeks on the chart: Great White's biggest hit. The RIAA certified the single gold on 26 July 1989. The ...Twice Shy album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and stayed 50 weeks; it was certified double platinum on 28 September 1989. Its predecessor Once Bitten had charted for 53 weeks and gone platinum on 27 April 1988. Much later, on 15 December 2015, the 1993 compilation The Best of Great White 1986-1992 was certified gold.
The piano ballad "The Angel Song" was written on guitar. Mark Kendall says he composed it entirely on guitar and the band then gave those parts to the piano. He worked out the melodies with Jack Russell, while the lyric was mostly manager Alan Niven's, with a contribution from Russell; as Kendall remembers it, the credit is just Niven's and his own. Released as a single, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on 30 September 1989 and reached No. 30, giving the band, along with "Once Bitten Twice Shy", its first Top 40 hits.
"House of Broken Love" was the last single from ...Twice Shy, issued in early 1990, some nine months after the album. The album version runs 5:58, 1:44 of it intro; the single was cut to 4:13. Its B-side was a medley titled "Bitches and Other Women": the Rolling Stones' "Bitch" and "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll" run together with Foreigner's "Women". Written by Jack Russell, Alan Niven and Michael Lardie, the A-side reached No. 83 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Great White carried the shark of their name into their titles and their imagery. They followed 1987's Once Bitten with 1989's ...Twice Shy, completing the saying, and in Nigel Dick's video for "Rock Me" a woman fires a harpoon gun while the women around the band wear shark-tooth necklaces. The 1991 album Hooked went further: its cover showed a naked model being lowered into the sea on a giant fishing hook, which Louder's history of the band judges a mistake, one that made them seem further behind the times than they really were.
The first single from Hooked, "Call It Rock N' Roll", was chosen over the record company's objections. Mark Kendall says the label was nervous that this basic blues number sounded too close to "Once Bitten Twice Shy" and did not want it as a single, until manager Alan Niven argued long enough to win. Kendall now sides with the label: he would have led with the album's cover of Steve Marriott's "Afterglow", a mellower track that would have shown people something different. The single peaked at No. 53 on the Billboard Hot 100, but Hooked reached No. 18 on the Billboard 200 and was certified gold on 18 April 1991.
Psycho City (1992) was an especially personal album for manager Alan Niven, and in hindsight its titles, "Big Goodbye", "Never Trust a Pretty Face", "Love Is a Lie", "Step on You", read like a run of betrayals. Mark Kendall says "Love Is a Lie" was Niven's idea and that some of its lyric came from Niven's own experience rather than the band's; it nags at him a little, he admits, but Niven was like a sixth member. It turned out to be the band's last album for Capitol, and it stalled at No. 107 on the Billboard 200.
Can't Get There from Here (1999) was produced by Jack Blades of Night Ranger. Mark Kendall says it was partly the record company's idea: John Kalodner thought Blades would work well, and so did the band, who had toured with Night Ranger back when "Rock Me" first hit the radio and knew him well. The drums and bass were recorded in Los Angeles, and the tapes then went up to Blades' ranch, where Michael Lardie, Jack Russell and Kendall did the overdubs. When the album was a song short, Blades took a fragment of music the band had and finished it with the songwriter Gary Burr; as Kendall remembers it, Blades wrote the whole thing on the phone with his Nashville collaborator in about ten minutes. The result was "In the Tradition".
Great Zeppelin: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin is a live album, not a studio one. It captures a concert at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, California, in December 1996, and was first released in 1998 by the French label Axe Killer; an American edition on Deadline Music followed in 1999. In 2019 Jack Russell said his own band, Jack Russell's Great White, was making a live sequel, Great Zeppelin II.
For a while there were two bands calling themselves Great White. Jack Russell started his own version in 2011, and in March 2012 he sued Mark Kendall, Michael Lardie and Audie Desbrow for carrying on under the name while he was on medical leave; they countersued. After a year of litigation and three days of closed-door mediation before a U.S. magistrate judge, the two sides announced a settlement in July 2013. Most of its terms stayed confidential, but the band would keep the name Great White, and Russell would perform as Jack Russell's Great White.
The intro of "This Is the Life", on 2017's Full Circle, was played by Mark Kendall's four-year-old grandson. He ran a metal pick down the middle of Kendall's guitar in a pick slide that went all the way up to the headstock; told to keep it on that string, he nailed it on the first take. The riff the song grew from came from drummer Audie Desbrow, who hummed it to bassist Scott Snyder, who worked it out on guitar before Kendall shaped it into a song. The singer is Terry Ilous, the band's vocalist at the time.