Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (11 page)

Here’s how bassist Neil Murray recalls
constructing the album. “Very easy to record. We were down in a kind of
residential, not really a farm, but it’s called Ridge Farm Studios, so we were
all kind of set up in a converted barn. There were fields and countryside
around; I guess there was a farm next door. The building we actually lived in
was like an old manor house dating back quite a few centuries. So you’ve got
big lawns and a tennis court and, I suppose, a swimming pool but not in an
incredibly grand manner. It was just sort of relaxed, sitting around, not
really having much to do with the outside world, which was the
point of being there. But there weren’t that many distractions either.
You got up and maybe read the paper and went over to the studio and worked for
twelve hours and had a big meal at some point.”

In fact, most of the early Whitesnake records
benefitted from the same process. “Yes, all very much the same thing,” says
Murray. “We were there for maybe a couple of weeks doing an album, maybe one or
two tracks a day, maybe more even with respect to backing tracks. It was all
very unpressurized. You might say, ‘Okay, maybe we need more of an up-tempo
song to finish off.’ There would be a certain amount of writing going on at the
time of recording, particularly lyrics. David would always be doing those at the
last moment.

“Bernie didn’t get there for a few days
because he was still on vacation so we came up with, for example, the
track ‘Ready An’ Willing’ without him. We had kind of been finding our sound up
until that point. And that was the first album that Ian Paice had been involved
in and he was very much responsible for taking Whitesnake to a higher level.
Somehow, the band really found its sound of that era on that record and then
Come An’ Get It
kind of consolidated it.

“You’ve got a real mixture on there,
obviously a really Free-influenced track, ‘Carry Your Load’, and typical boogie
woogie type things. Ian has a great feel. He’s very influenced by jazz and funk
and all sorts of different styles, not just heavy metal bashing. He’s a kind of
groove player and it gives you a lot more to play live. And he’ll do some very
startling things that you’re not expecting, particularly on stage. He really
keeps you on your toes. It’s hard to explain. His sense of time is great, a
great sound; he just generally plays the right thing and makes it very easy to
play.”

Marsden offers a slightly different take
on the album’s title track, a sinister heavy metal whack that stood out as a
forbearer of things to come. “Well, ‘Ready An’ Willing’, it’s a bit of a
mystery for everybody because it doesn’t have my name on it. And that’s because
we had a policy at the time of having one track on the album we would kind of
split between all members of the band. And then Ian Paice came into the
band, and Ian Paice, because of him being The Bank Of Paice – and him knowing
what it was like to sell millions of records because of Purple  – when it came
time to do the credits, Paicey said, ‘Well, Bernie shouldn’t be on it.’ ‘Well,
he wrote most of the song.’ ‘Well, he wrote the last two songs, and nobody
wrote anything else, but it was divided between the band.’ And he said, ‘Oh,
no, no, if this album sells a million, that means I make £2000 less,’ because
he was very money-sorted, whereas the rest of us were just getting on the
road and playing rock ‘n’ roll. But that’s Ian all over. That’s why my name
doesn’t appear on it, even though I’m kind of a part of it.”

Coverdale, however, sided with Paice on
this one, saying that the track was being cooked up primarily by himself and
Moody, precisely because Marsden was still in Africa. One would surmise the
missing credit is a dig at the irksome situation. After all, this was indeed the
track designated by Coverdale to be the one on which the entire band gets
credited. The slight adjustment to that policy... well, Bernie was supposed to
be back from vacation and working.

“‘Sweet Talker’ was written just before
we went to the session,” continues Marsden. “I more or less had the
idea for the song, David wrote the words, and ‘Fool For Your Loving’ was a
classic Coverdale/Marsden/Moody. I kind of had the riff, and the
riff goes through the song to the bridge part. And Micky had a kind of really
cool piece to join them together, which is from another song of his. I said, ‘Well,
why don’t we put that in this?’ and it all made sense, and David wrote the
words. And it took about, I should think, maybe about an hour-and-a-half. ‘Love
Man’, I thought was a great modern blues at the time.

“David got a lot of stick for sexist
lyrics and I thought that was quite amusing that he wrote that. I mean, some of
the words later on did get a bit explicit but we always used to just laugh
about it, really. It was kind of good, that was. We were under a bit of
pressure because we were due on the road after Christmas when the
album was done. So there wasn’t a great deal of craziness going down when we
did it.”

Neil Murray adds to the
tale of “Fool For Your Loving,” the record’s rich and majestic, but oddly
despondent opening track, the only tune that was something of a hit single from
the record, reaching No. 13 on the UK charts and No. 53 in the
US. The track would be re-recorded and re-attain hit status in 1989, but its
rightful karmic place was in the here and now anchoring
Ready An’ Willing
.

“I could tell it was going to be a fairly
commercial song with a fairly good hook, so I went back and re-did my bass on
it and put in as much as I thought I could get away with, really,” remembers
Murray. “And then when it came to mix, I think Ian had a lot of say. I think they
started mixing that one first, and I came in to listen and the
bass was pretty much in the background and I said, ‘Look, that’s not really how
it’s supposed to be. I put all these new bass lines to it in order that it was
going to be heard. Why didn’t you turn it up?’ or whatever.

“I went home dejected and at three o’clock
in the morning I got woken up by the phone. Martin Birch said, ‘Yeah, we put it
back your way; it sounds much better.’ It could have sounded quite different.
And I think the version on
Ready An’ Willing
is much better than the
version on
Slip Of The Tongue
and I think some of it has to do with the
way the bass line runs through it, very much from my point of view. But I
thought it was a strong song. Others on there… ‘Sweet Talker’ is just a
straight rocker. Generally we would play together as a band, and some things
would be replaced. Certainly the vocals would be redone again. I think all of the
early Whitesnake albums were done like that; probably
Slide It In
as
well.”

Murray is dead correct about “Fool For
Your Loving.” The bass line is magnificent, forceful, fluid and thankfully,
loud and clear. A crucial element of this regal, timeless track. Marsden indeed
calls “Fool For Your Loving” his favourite Whitesnake track of all time,
because it “encapsulated what Whitesnake was all about at the
time.”

Curiously, Coverdale said that the
idea was to write a song for B.B. King, when B.B. had been working with The
Crusaders.
Sounds
magazine had Marsden doing a few interviews with older
artists and he got to talking with B.B., and B.B. suggested Bernie come up with
something for him. But after taking a listen to the acoustic demo, Coverdale
and Martin Birch had decided that they couldn’t let it escape.

More from Murray on producer Birch: “The
sound pretty much seemed to be a refinement of what had been happening on the
previous album and it sort of continued on inasmuch as the guitars are not
really heavy, heavy guitars, really in-your-face. The bass is quite featured,
which is great for me. The whole thing is quite dry sounding and Martin had the
same kind of basic idea for Iron Maiden when he went to work for them,
which is not really using loads of overdubbing and studio effects. Just get a
good solid representation of how the band really is and don’t work it to death
doing hundreds of takes. He’s very much an engineer producer, not a producer
producer, where they’re telling you what to do. He’s just trying to capture the
sound. And he’s pretty much in charge of how the final mix sounds. And it
certainly was to my benefit.”

And Murray seconds Marsden’s opinion that
work on the album was more or less, all business. “No, no wild parties, not really
on that album. I mean, we’re fairly self-contained. There might be the
occasional wives or girlfriends popping in, but we were not really a big party
band. But we always had a great laugh and the whole early period of Whitesnake was
constant amusement. For example, Bernie and Micky individually can be very
funny, but put them together and they’re hilarious. Sometimes it’s silly
pranks, and others it’s general fooling around, drawing caricatures of people,
fairly childish. But we would never get really out of our heads doing
destructive things. It was more just having a laugh.”

Another great track on the
album was the Zeppelin-esque “Ain’t Gonna Cry No More,” which Murray recalls
this way. “That would have started as an acoustic number and then
we would all get together and say, ‘Okay, what can we do with it now?’ and then
we would go into the band part. But I’m so used to hearing it done acoustically
with Micky and Bernie because they tend to do that in the Company Of Snakes
show; I’ve almost forgotten that it does go to that up-tempo band part in the
middle. I wasn’t involved in the writing of the songs but we would all just
kind of take something that was bare bones and make something out of it.”

As with “Ain’t Gonna Cry No More,” nearly
everything Whitesnake did touched down at some point on the blues rock idiom. “Carry
Your Load” and “Blindman” were down-tempo, desperado-type tunes celebrated by the
likes of Bad Company, whereas “Black And Blue” and “She’s A Woman” were up-tempo
and boogie-based, the latter, very much in the hard rock world but still framed
like a rock ‘n’ roll song.

David Coverdale clearly understood the
band’s place within this framework, telling
Hit Parader
’s Charley Crespo
at the time, “We’d like to think of Whitesnake as a progressive R&B band,
what the Yardbirds would’ve been if it had stayed together. First and foremost,
the influence of the band is very blues-based. But instead of going back and
playing the old twelve bar sequences, we try to take the blues into a more
modern structure in terms of music and make the themes more identifiable with
today rather than 40 years ago. Also, our music is physical, which I think has
been missing for a long time.”

This idea of making the
blues interesting, is what the British blues boom needed to do not to die a
death. It did, indeed, die a death quite quickly by the end of the
1960s, but a few bands got the message, most notably Led Zeppelin. Others
like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath completely burned the playbook. Which, of
course, is another reason there’s a Whitesnake.

“There are three ex-Purples in
Whitesnake,” continues David. “So it’s impossible to deny that some of the
things are going to sound like Purple, because I wrote a lot of songs for
Purple, and I’m doing a lot of the songwriting now. And of course, with Jon
Lord and Ian Paice there, it’s gotta sound like some of the Deep Purple stuff.
I like to think that the only thing that I’m using that’s coming from Purple is
the experience. There’s no conscious artistic motivation to carry on where
Purple left off.

“In fact, with Whitesnake, it’s a much
more open situation as far as writing is concerned. Under the
creative umbrella of Whitesnake, we can write anything, soul, rhythm and blues,
rock ‘n’ roll. Whereas with Purple, my writing was getting so fucking small,
because it was only hard rock heavy metal. There was no way you could change
that, because people who picked up a Purple album were picking it up for one
kind of music. As a writer, it was frustrating, whereas with Whitesnake, we can
do what the fuck we want.”