Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (10 page)
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Authors: Martin Popoff
Wrote
Trouser Press
’ Jon Young,
reviewing the album, “When a heavy-duty macho band starts to slow down, or
exhibits less than blind certainty about what it’s doing, expect trouble. The
problem isn’t that Whitesnake is engaged in a rehash of boogie/Bad Co. riffs
(though that is certainly the case); the fatal flaw is they sound like they’ve
heard it all before. How many ways can you thump your chest and grunt?”
Indeed, among the metalhead classes — virtually
the only people giving a damn — the record came off as a bit underwhelming,
certainly against the promise of the album cover.
“I think
Lovehunter
became the
transition album, really,” reflects Marsden, summing up the record. “Without
Lovehunter
,
I don’t think Whitesnake would’ve become... maybe we wouldn’t have gotten to
Ready
An’ Willing
. Because
Lovehunter
was where we started to blossom in
terms of songs and performances. Before Ian Paice joined the band, we were
still a pretty strong outfit, but you look back on those first two albums now, the
direction is kind of low. The effort was 100%, but the direction was kind of
like 5%.
“We were all trying to do everything at
one time, and by that third record we settled down a little bit more. With
Lovehunter
,
we became a band a bit more. So
Lovehunter
, when I look back on it now,
was probably more important than we all considered it to be at the
time. Because when Ian Paice joined the band, it became a different animal,
really. I’m very keen on
Lovehunter
.”
Similarly putting the record in context,
Moody explains that, “The first two albums, I suppose we were on — especially the
first album — more of a limited budget, so that went quite easy. I think, to be
quite honest, we didn’t have much of a direction when we first started. When I
think of it, the first two albums,
Trouble
and
Lovehunter
, with the
original drummer... Dave Dowle came from the jazz rock fusion drumming field,
and I think some of that showed through. And Neil played a lot of that kind of
stuff as well, before Whitesnake. He did a lot of fusion stuff, whereas myself
and Bernie and David and Jon, you know, we more or less stuck to the
rock, R&B kind of thing.
“So when we went in to do the
first album, I don’t think we really knew what we were going to do. David
obviously was a bit more in control. We just threw in what we had. Even on
Lovehunter
,
there a couple of tracks on there where I listen to them and say, well, they’re
very good, but they would’ve been better off on one of these sort of LA-type
fusion records. It wasn’t until
Ready An’ Willing
that we found our
niche. That was the album that really represented what for me was Whitesnake.”
“Yeah, by the time Ian came in, we were
up and running,” agrees Marsden. “Ian made such a tremendous impact — I wouldn’t
say difference — but his impact is all round. As people say, ‘God damn Ian
Paice,’ and now you’ve got Paice and Lord, and you just happen to have one of the
greatest front men you could ever wish for out front. And the
other three of us, we were like what they call journeymen, and we were suddenly
thrust into this limelight that none of us had ever really been in before. And
yet we happened to be the creative force of it as well, which was nice.”
Touring for
Lovehunter
took the
band, as Marsden recalls, “pretty much ‘round the UK [with Marseille as support,
23 dates beginning October 11th,] and Europe, which was opening up for us. But
we did the UK straightaway, and that was, as we’d say, we were always building.
And always playing the usual places. We weren’t very fashionable, they
told us, until they realized that all the venues were selling out. And so we
said, ‘Well, let’s carry on being unfashionable.’”
David Coverdale’s blues metal machine,
Whitesnake, seemed to be making only modest inroads as the 1970s creaked to a
close. Metal was coming back big, but then again, this was not a metal band.
But if metal wasn’t yet on the cards, it was time to get classic. Aiding and
abetting that cause was the acquisition of “light touch” Ian Paice to the
fold, the band now including three ex-Purple partners amongst a total army of
six Snakes.
“Ian came to see the band on a couple of
gigs,” recalls Marsden, “and I saw him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he
said, ‘Nothing. I’d like to do this.’ And that’s it, really. You know, if the
best rock drummer in the world is available, you do it. There was never a
question. The odd thing was, David Dowle, our current drummer, wasn’t really
fired; he was kind of not getting along. We get along fine now, but at the
time he was very much a London city boy and the rest of us were quite happy to
be out in the wilds of the country recording. He didn’t like it very much so he
wasn’t all that happy anyway, so, in the end it, was kind of a mutual thing. So
David went out and Ian came in. There was never any question of getting anyone
else.”
With the demise of PAL, Paice found
himself at a crossroads. He had weighed his options, namely starting a new band
(hard graft, he admitted to himself, knowing full well he was no leader),
joining some established band and playing material he didn’t feel much
ownership to, or getting on with Whitesnake, which fell somewhere in the
middle, and quite intriguing, given the presence of Messrs Lord and Coverdale
in the ranks. For his part, Paice said he was stagnating, sitting at home out
in the country, having played only sparingly for going on three years. Eventually,
after drunkenly and off-handedly asking for the gig, Paice said yes a couple of
days after Coverdale had phoned him up to offer him the job.
“I don’t even try and analyze it,” says
Paice, asked about his particular style, one distinguished by a grace, finesse,
a lightness of touch as opposed to a Bonham bash. “You know why? I’ve always
thought, if I know too much about it, that might screw it up by trying to do
something different. People say I have a different way of playing, a different
style of playing rock ‘n’ roll, than a lot of other players. Well, then
that’s good enough for me, and I never really query it. When you have something
that people treat as slightly individual, it’s a very fragile thing.
“And you ask most people who have that,
let’s call it a gift, if they know what they’re doing, they’ll tell you they
haven’t got a clue. They’ll tell you it’s the only way they can do it. And if
you start trying to break things down, you might say, well, if I don’t do that
anymore, and if I played this, making it a little better, then
all of a sudden, you’re not yourself anymore. You start losing the
magic. Or you take the chance of losing the magic. If you play instinctively and
you don’t think about it, then every night, within certain percentages, there’s
a little surprise for you and the audience. And I don’t have the
musical ability to actually do the same thing every night and to choreograph it
in a way that some musicians can. That’s not the way it works for me. It
starts, I start playing, and then whatever happens happens. And I’d hate to
lose that.”
“Whitesnake was the funniest band I’ve
ever been in,” continues Ian, who is distinguished (so far) as the
only Deep Purple member to be on every album, drumming for every “Mk.” “I never
laughed so much in my life; it was great. The band was totally irreverent
toward David, but not in a nasty way. Just seeing the funny side of everything.
I mean, my debut for instance. I think we were playing Hammersmith Odeon, or
one of the big London theatres anyway. I looked across, and Micky Moody and
Bernie were basically holding each other up back-to-back laughing so hard. If they
hadn’t been there, they would have fallen over.
“And I couldn’t work it out, until Bernie
looked at me, and he sort of motioned to me to look at David. And David’s at the
front of the stage there throwing all these wonderful shapes and thrusting the
pelvis and extending the mic stand as part of his personage, and doing this
whole repertoire. And I looked at the audience, and the first fifteen rows, it’s
just pubescent young men. There’s not a chick there to be seen [
laughs
].
And Bernie and Micky had hooked onto this and it just made them
laugh. And within two minutes, I’d gone, Neil had gone. And David never knew. I
mean, throwing all these sexual suggestions to a bunch of 15-year-old boys,
which was... well, it was funny.”
On top of that ultimate heavy metal
irony, Ian once again found himself in a band with Jon Lord. “Jon was never one
of the guys who conceived riffs or rhythms, because that’s not what he did,”
comments Ian, focussing on Lord’s relationship to record-making. “I mean, rock ‘n’
roll is pretty much a guitar-dominated form of music, so guitarists tend to
bring in more ideas; that’s just the way it is. In the same way, drummers are the
boss of the rhythm department, so they tend to come up with different feels and
different rhythm patterns. Jon’s genius was, when somebody had an idea, he’d
say, ‘Well, that sounds great, but what if we did this to it?’ And then
he’d put a whole different chord inversion there, and what was good, suddenly
became magnificent. So Jon’s musical knowledge was where his strengths really
where. When the idea was there, he would take it somewhere else.”
Coverdale now had the band he’d always
wished for, given Marsden’s melodic soloing, Moody’s slide work, Murray’s
marked blossoming, given his chemistry with Ian Paice, and the
power coming out of Jon Lord.
“Ian Paice comes in, and you move in a
different direction purely because of the way he plays,” notes Murray, now
suddenly in a rhythm section with one of the monsters of rock. “And the
same with Jon Lord joining the year before that. The more powerful it gets, you
gain something and then you lose something else. But in terms of being a really
powerful live band, the strength side will always win out. You have to have
that there, the foundation of a really strong rhythm section. And certainly, the
six-piece Whitesnake line-up from, let’s say, 1980, was a really strong and
powerful line-up, and an artistic unit. It wasn’t kind of a lead singer with a
few guys in his backing band. It was all very much a band of equals. And each
of us brought something to the party.”
“As a side note,” continues Murray, “there
were various people suggested, and I suggested Tommy Aldridge for the
band at that point. But other people didn’t know him [
laughs
]. They
weren’t aware of him at that time. Anyway, so then we would go out on tour in the
fall of ‘79 with Ian Paice, and of course, instantly, the songs sound
different.”
Working out the math, Whitesnake was now
six members, with three of them hailing from Mk. III/Mk. IV Purple. One of the
band’s guitarists was a blues guy, the other more of a generalist with less of
a past to plunder, and its bass player was more of a prog fusion guy. The
result? Well, it seemed like the varied experiences of the non-Purple half of the
band cancelled themselves out and Whitesnake was, now, very much, making
records that would squarely and logically make sense following on from
Come
Taste The Band
.
Comparisons to Purple would ruffle the
feathers of everyone in the band, with the non-alumni amongst them
coming up with a t-shirt that from afar said “DEEP PURPLE,” but up close was
revealed to read, “No I wasn’t in DEEP fucking PURPLE.” A further
annoyance was the periodic chatter that Deep Purple, in some guise, was going
to reform and re-take their rightful place. It was no idle threat. The idea was
always a possibility, gaining traction, fading, championed by some ex-members
(and managers), dismissed by others. And then, of course, a reunion would
actually come to pass not far in the future, with real impact on David’s fiery
fiefdom.
In any event, for now, Whitesnake
ensconced themselves at the infamous Ridge Farm in late 1979 to lay down what
is quietly, and without flash, becoming the band’s timeless milestone; its best
serious piece of art.
Ready An’ Willing
indeed exudes a sense of
steadiness, a sense of charm, and logically so, given that it’s nestled
enigmatically between the eclectic early work and the stadium roar of the
big hair years. It is not so much the cusp album or the crossroads of a shift,
but an island state between two foreign worlds.
Before work could begin at Ridge Farm,
however, everybody would have to get back on the same page, back into work
mode. David had expressed that he was a little ticked off that Bernie had been
on holiday in Africa when he was already rarin’ to go, having returned from
vacation in Belize recharged.
“Ridge Farm was out in the
country and Genesis had worked there in the past and we were recommended to the
place by a mutual engineer,” explains Marsden. “It was in the
middle of winter and freezing cold. And I felt like the boy child, because I
slept in a stable; it was a converted stable [
laughs
]. Come Christmas
Eve, I was beginning to think, ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ It was the
first album we did with Ian, so the vibe was really good. And I wrote ‘Fool For
Your Loving’ right in that very room, so I always have fond memories of that.”
Marsden can’t say enough about Jon Lord
and Ian Paice as performers
par excellence
. “They practically ruin you.
Because once you play with these guys, the poor guys who come afterwards are
always chasing the dragon [
sic
], because these guys are so good. I got
over it and you find other people. But suddenly, when you’ve been playing with
Ian Paice and Jon Lord for six years, and suddenly you’re not – it’s tough, it’s
tough.
“Paice as a drummer, I’ve just seen so
many people on the side of the stage; they would come onstage with us in the
old days and say ‘Can I stand here and watch Ian?’ and I’ve seen Paice reduce
grown men drummers to tears. Because what he does is so easy and yet so
impossible. It makes it look like these other guys are just beginning. The guys
are great. And they are a very important turn on my career, because when I joined
Paice Ashton Lord in 1976, pre-Whitesnake, they kind of put me on the
rock map, so to speak. I was suddenly playing with these guys, and they
elevated me into a very prominent position.”
“Paicey was great in those days,” offers
Marsden looking at the personal side of the band. “We used to call him The Bank
Of Paice, because he was always the one who had some money when we were all
broke. He would say, ‘You want $20? Okay, well, next Tuesday, you pay me back
$25 [
laughs
].’ That’s why he’s still a very rich man. Jon Lord, we used
to call The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow because we could never get him up. We would
be in studios all over the world recording, and we wouldn’t see Jon for days
because he wouldn’t come out of his room. That was his way of preparing for the
gig. He would walk in and play the most stupendous keyboard parts you’ve ever
heard.”
David Coverdale reiterates the
importance of Ian Paice to the band. “
Ready An’ Willing
… I’ll tell you
exactly what happened there. Paicey was involved, the drummer, and that was the
first time the band really started to sound like it did in my head. The rhythm
section was distinctly shaky before that. Whitesnake was always a live entity,
so the songs would not translate very well on record, but it was a great live
show. That was the strength of it. But
Ready An’ Willing
was the
first time I started to get it right. And I put a great deal of the
onus on the fact that Ian Paice had joined. Because he is a very secure, very
dynamic and very powerful drummer. I think the first half of the
album is the beginning of what it should have sounded like.”
“The album took about a month, I think,”
continues Marsden,
Ready An’ Willing
having been constructed in early
1980 with a release date of May 3rd. “It was this tiny old farm place and there
was a pub down the road we used to go to when we had a break, and everybody had
to bend over double, even myself. I’m only about 5’ 8” and I would have to duck
to miss hitting my head on the beams, so everybody would go down to the
pub and have a few drinks and come back with black eyes and cuts on their
heads from bumping into the beams. It was like an ER unit. And on the
album there’s a thing about developing our Rusper stoop or something like that
[the credits, in part, read: “The Plough” in Rusper for developing our
Quasimodo impressions and Groucho Marx stoop]; people wondered what the
hell that meant. But it’s because we would walk around for hours after coming
back from the pub, still bent double so we wouldn’t hit our heads on the
ceiling.”