Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (14 page)

If “Girl” sounds musically a little more
sophisticated and rhythmic than the norm, it’s because, as Coverdale has
related, the riff originated with Murray, who had still been writing from a
fusion perspective. “‘Girl’ was about a girl who appeared on the
road,” says Marsden, who was handed the song to work on, once Coverdale had
slowed down Murray’s original groove. “We were kind of slowly disguising... ‘pretty
little crazy white girl’— she
was
crazy. And Neil Murray came up with the
riff on that, if I remember rightly and then we kind of put the
music together, played a bit of it to Dave, who did this ‘pretty little crazy
white girl’ and the next thing you know, he’d written all the
words for it, which was great.”

Marsden may not have remembered rightly,
or, more likely, the lyric is a pastiche. “Most of the songs are about my old
lady,” said Coverdale, speaking to
NME
. “She’s a great source of
inspiration. A lot of the songs that have been called blatantly sexist are
about my daughter. I did a song called ‘Girl’ which went, ‘You treat me like a
dog and I shake my tail for you’ because she’s the only girl who’s ever had me
on all fours doing impressions of horses. I know what I mean and my daughter
knows, which is the main thing.”

“Well, the riff from ‘Girl’ was mine, but
that doesn’t really necessarily show off my bass playing,” notes Murray, when asked
about favourite bass moments on the
Come An’ Get It
album. “‘Lonely
Days, Lonely Nights’ has got a lot of improvising on the bass. I was always
kind of proud of ‘Fool For Your Loving’ on
Ready An’ Willing
. I would
take quite a lot of trouble working on parts and there’s some interesting
moving lines on that one. But yeah, overall, I think I like
Come An’ Get It
best of all the albums. But it’s hard to assess.

“You know, generally speaking, you would
play three or four songs on a new album when you went out live, and then
when you’re playing some of those songs, you know, 30, 35 years later, you play
a couple of those that you might’ve done so long ago, and all the
others, when you revisit them, sometimes you think, well, ‘I can see why we
didn’t actually play that one live.’ Sometimes you think, ‘Wow, that was great,’
where such and such’s playing is really fantastic on that song. Because you get
to hear albums so much when you’re doing them, you tend not to listen to them
very much afterwards. But I think David Coverdale is different. Because he
always used to play his own records, his own albums, to vibe himself up before
a show [
laughs
]. He used to know all the songs inside out and backwards,
whereas I would be, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard that in years.’”

The swirling, slippery, slide-guitar-charged
“Hit An’ Run” would have to be one of the highlights of
Come An’ Get It
,
and perhaps the album’s heaviest rocker. Also key to its authority is the
consummate tight bass work and inventive runs of Neil Murray. In the
spirit of everything but the kitchen sink, this note-dense rocker also includes
a return of Bernie’s talk box. Marsden says: “Yeah, well I used it before, and
I used one on
Trouble
, on the Beatles song, ‘Day Tripper.’ I used to use
it on stage and it was always very popular. So we just put that on ‘Hit An’ Run,’
and I still play ‘Hit An’ Run’ every once in a while to this day. It’s a great
song to play. The voice box is always a bit of fun anyway. It’s not hard to do;
it’s an easy technique.”

Come An’ Get It
closes with the Zeppelin-esque “Till The Day I Die,” the opening
sequence being acoustic before bursting into a southern rocky vibe, again Paice,
very surprisingly, stifling the groove, and not helped by the
cardboard production job. There’s a bit of
Led Zeppelin III
’s “Gallows
Pole” about this one so it’s doubly distressing that the record didn’t sound
more organic.

Touring for
Come An’ Get It
proved to be an intensive campaign, the band beginning their European leg in
Germany, a stronghold for them, on April 14th of 1981 and winding up at the
Hammersmith Odeon on June 9th. A second Japanese tour for the
band saw them playing eight dates in late June, followed by the aforementioned short US leg in July, where Whitesnake were sandwiched between opener Iron
Maiden and headliner Judas Priest. A point to make on this: sure, Priest and
Maiden were heavier acts than Whitesnake, but the band could have used more of
this kind of trial by fire. It was really only the metalheads Whitesnake were
going to attract, and there’s no shame in being the band that was the
bluesiest, the most melodic, the least dungeons and dragons inside of that
scene — someone had to be, so why not Whitesnake? In any event, scattered dates
in the ensuing months saw the band play Monsters Of Rock, Donington (yes, a
great fit, a home, as it were) plus, to close out the year, a fairly involved
assault, yet again, on Germany.

Perhaps this writer is in the
minority, but the ire that seems to be heaped upon the fragmented follow-up to
Come
An’ Get It
, namely
Saints & Sinners
, I feel belongs here and not
there. Nonetheless the former is a bit of fun pop confection, solid enough,
and, as Marsden reminds us all, it was a successful step up for this band of
Englishmen rumbling down the tracks at a fair clip, even if the
extent of the rail system... well, you can’t lay track across the
Atlantic.

Was it just getting too damn easy to be
Whitesnake? Apparently that’s the party line. The next record would be a chore
to produce, resulting in enough bad vibes for Coverdale to blow the
whole thing up for the first time, although certainly not the
last time.

-8-

Saints &
Sinners
– “Are You Thinking It As Well?”

The operative word as David Coverdale
and his ‘Snakes pondered their next move would be “stagnation.” Sure, in
October, 1981,
Ready An’ Willing
and
Come An’ Get It
would be
declared gold records in the UK. But continued frustration at not breaking
America — nothing wrong with the band’s standing in Germany and Japan — was an itch
Coverdale couldn’t scratch, soon prompting the preparation for sailing away in an
earnest search of the American dream.

Much would be said in the
press, along with an airing of a host of other gripes, some real but some
imagined. Explains Marsden. “There was a lot of stuff where people would say to
me, ‘What do you think of David Coverdale?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, he can be very
difficult, but I love him, he’s great.’ Well of course they’d leave off the
last two bits. Because I was naïve enough, in those days, to say stuff.
Nowadays, I tend to stay more quiet.

“But there was a lot of stuff said about the
end of the first band, and the classic line-up as they called it. But to be
honest with you, it was a non-event, the end of it. There was no big deal about
it. We just kind of walked away from it all. And then the record came out [
Saints
& Sinners
.] You look on the cover, and it looks like a David Coverdale
album. But, of course, people would know it wasn’t once you got on to the
inside sleeve and you saw, ‘Oh no, it’s actually them.’”

“With
Come An’ Get It
, we were
probably at our peak creatively, I would’ve thought,” continues Marsden. “
Saints
& Sinners
, contrary to what you may have read, when we began there
were no real problems. It’s only as it went on and on that the
problems kicked in at the end when all the tracks had been recorded. It ended
up with David and I, more or less just the two of us in the studio, doing
overdubs. And we’re looking at each other, and I remember saying to him one
day, when a couple things didn’t happen that were meant to happen, ‘We may as
well just knock this on the head.’ And he said, ‘Are you thinking it as well?’

“There was no fight, there
was no row, and we did have a very bad managerial deal, which didn’t help.
Yeah, it was very, very poor. What we should’ve done, I guess in retrospect we
could’ve done, was do what Queen used to do, just walk away from each other
for six months, eight months, get stuff together, and then come back and make
an album. But that didn’t happen. David moved to America, and that was pretty
much it.”

“That was the beginning of the
end, in a way,” says Marsden, when asked about the fragmented recording
situation to what would become
Saints & Sinners
, issued November 20,
1982. “We were probably the biggest band, certainly in Britain at the
time, for a rock band, and in Europe and Japan, and yet we were being pushed
around to save money here, there and everywhere by the management. They wanted
to say, ‘Oh, you don’t need to go there. Let’s go to Abbey Road.’ They would
say, ‘Oh no, no, no, you don’t need to go there.’ And you know, let’s do this,
let’s do that. But we all kind of went along with it. But most of
Saints
& Sinners
was recorded at Clearwell Castle, same as
Lovehunter
.
So even though there’s lots of studios mentioned on it, we ended up at
Britannia Row, which was Pink Floyd’s place. And that’s a really good studio.
That’s where I did
Look At Me Now
, and Cozy Powell did some stuff there
as well. And all those other studios are just where they did backing vocals,
and where David may have added a vocal. But Martin Birch wasn’t involved by then,
you see. Because Martin wouldn’t have stood for all that. He would’ve said, ‘No,
we’re going here, and that’s it.’ That’s really what happened.”

For the record, the credits read, “The
backing trax were recorded at Rock City, Shepperton; The Truck Mobile at
Clearwell Castle, Gloucestershire and Britannia Row, London, by Guy Bidmead.
The vocal trax were recorded at Battery Studios, London by Martin Birch
assisted by Bryan New. All backing vocals by D.C., Mel Galley and Micky Moody
A.K.A. ‘The Paratroopers.’ Mixed at Battery Studios by Martin Birch Sept/Oct
1982.”

Digging deeper into the
above citations, David has said that the band thought about self-producing this
time, and that he had been pressurized by a deadline to deliver the
record as far back as December 1981. He indicated that two weeks at Shepperton
produced little more than one drum track before the band uprooted to Clearwell,
where maybe another track got done, and then much more was accomplished at Britannia
Row way back in January 1982. Essentially all of the vocals were recorded at
Battery, in a compressed flurry of three weeks indicated by the
above noted period for the mix, namely September and October of 1982. David has
also said that Martin, who had been ill, had to perform quite a bit of magic at
Battery on the backing tracks to bring them up to scratch, all of which caused
further resentment from David to the band.

Guy Bidmead, essentially co-producer on
everything except the vocals, up to this point had been an engineer on numerous
albums since the mid-1970s, and in fact would retain that designation for many
albums since, rarely credited as producer, as is the usual career path. Previous
to engineering, or “recording”
Saints & Sinners
, he had recently worked
on Cozy Powell’s
Tilt
and Bernie’s
Look At Me Now
.

“They decided to move away from Martin
Birch, even for
Saints & Sinners
,” explains Murray. “We used a
different sort of engineer, not really a producer, for all the
recording of that, or most of it anyway. And then, I suppose, people weren’t
totally satisfied with the sound we were getting, so Martin was brought in at the
end of that project to finish it off.”

Wobbly signals are sent from the
album starting with its album cover, which features an oddly amateurish looking
photograph of a sculpture, more of a trinket, really, underneath a plain white
Whitesnake logo and the title text, and an ampersand where there
should have been an “an’!” The back cover is what Bernie is referring to above,
inexplicably consisting of the credits, song titles and a dodgy black and white
live shot of David and David alone.

Once inside, however, the
album explodes with one of the band’s unheralded classics. “Young Blood” is a
strident rocker, and boldly recorded at that. Moreover, Ian Paice seems to have
his mojo back, propelling it with a rich groove and accentuating the
marauding metal classic with his celebrated light touch and predilection to use
snare more than most.

“Rough An’ Ready” keeps up the
record’s raucous factor, the band presenting a hard rock shuffle, this one
credited to Coverdale and Moody, with neither Moody or Marsden getting as much
of the song nods as generally was the case in the past. In fact, Micky was
already one foot out of the door, as it were. “At the end of ‘81, I left the
band, because it wasn’t really happening,” notes Moody. “It wasn’t going in the
right direction, and financially it wasn’t really happening, and people weren’t
particularly happy with the way things were going. So the band kind of disintegrated.
And in ‘82, David asked me to come back and help finish off the
Saints & Sinners
album. In a nutshell, there were business problems
and money issues — the usual things that creep into a band. The first band had
broken up at the end of ‘81. David wanted to try something different, so he got
away from the old management company. I left because it wasn’t really fun
anymore and, like I say, we weren’t generating the kind of money we wanted too.
I won’t go into that, but in ‘82, I was doing a few gigs with Bernie and that’s
when David asked me if I wanted to come back and finish off the
album. By then, he had gotten in with Mel Galley because of the
Glenn Hughes connection with Trapeze. He wanted to put the band back together
with him, Cozy Powell and myself. To be quite honest, there was no magic there,
in that particular band.”

“If you want my honest opinion, the
management was not good to us, no,” adds Moody. “That’s just my opinion without
going into details. You know, they did put us on the right track, etc. etc.,
got the press, we got the record deal. But beyond that, I won’t even go into
what I think of the management. Because that’s something I really don’t want to
think about. I don’t think it was the right management, personally.”

Moving forward through the
tracks, “Bloody Luxury” seems nothing more than a reprise of “Wine, Women An’
Song,” a pop boogie number, with Jon throwing a dated keyboard sound towards a
mimic of the unimaginative riff. Notes Bernie, “‘Bloody Luxury’ was called
something else; I can’t remember what it was called but it had several titles.
In general, though, they were just songs around that David had come up with.”

“Victim Of Love,” however, is a
moderately inventive rocker, pulsating along to a sturdy Neil Murray bass line.
Structurally, with its thump and its pregnant pauses, there’s a subtle eye to the
future — this feels very much like a
Slide It In
track, although not
something that could have survived on any record past
Slide It In
.

“Well, there are some good songs,”
defends Coverdale, when I’d asked him about this star-crossed record back in
2001. “I mean, there are always good songs on my stuff. I’m a song guy. But it
was definitely a jigsaw puzzle of a record. A lot of the performances were
lacklustre, but, as I say, some decent songs. It’s interesting for me, because
since I’ve started this davidcoverdale.com, I get direct information from the
source. It’s very hard for me to bump into members of my audience. You know, I
would arrive at the show, do the show and I would be gone, so to have this
direct contact with them and them with me. Some of the songs that resonate or
connect with them over the years blow my mind. I’ve gone on there
and said, ‘Well, I don’t think this is a particularly good album’ and suddenly
I’m nailed by a thousand people saying, ‘That’s my favourite fucking album!’
You know, what do I fucking know?! All you have to know about me is that I do
my best. Whether it’s good enough at that particular moment, whatever, that’s the
best I could do at the time, health, professional, distractions, whatever.”

Speaking to UK metal press legend Dante
Bonutto upon release of the record, David had put on a brave face, even though
much of the extensive chat with Dante had been about blowing up the
band and reconstituting it for its next assault on the charts.

“I would say it’s the best thing we’ve
done; certainly my singing has never been better. ‘Victim Of Love’ is a great
little rock ‘n’ roller, ‘Bloody Luxury’ I like very much — I can see that going
well in concert — and ‘Crying In The Rain,’ from what a few people have told
me, could well be the new ‘Mistreated,’ and it’s time for a change anyway. If I
didn’t think this album was up to standard, I’d have burnt the
masters, though I’d probably have ended up floating in a river in Hull. It’s a
fine testament to the power of ‘de Snakes, but the next one will be even more
powerful, that’s for sure!”

As for singing after an uncharacteristic
number of months away from the mic... “It’s not like riding a bike. Initially,
I just did backing vocals to try and ease myself in, but the first lead vocal I
did was ‘Love An’ Affection,’ and that was a straight take. And then
I went on to ‘Saints An’ Sinners,’ and that was straight through too. I was
singing like a dream; perhaps the layoff did me good — there are some real
severe notes in ‘Victim Of Love.’”

Said David at the time to Chris Tetley,
on bolstering the vocal end of things, “I used Mel Galley, singing, doing the
backing vocals with Micky and myself to try to get the vocal identity of the
new band across. Which is very good, because Mel’s got a great strong voice,
and can fight with me for centre stage. It’s going to be even better,
obviously, because these are songs which I wrote with the idea of Bernie and
Micky singing with me, but of course with Mel now, we can go a lot further
vocally.”

Closing side one of the
original vinyl is the aforementioned and immense “Crying In The Rain,” of
course, re-re-recorded by Whitesnake 2.0 and turned into a gargantuan hit.

“‘Crying In The Rain’ was a big old blues
opus,” explains Coverdale. “That was written after the breakup of my first
marriage, written in Portugal, for a contractual album I had to do to get out
of my management deal. When I got out of Deep Purple, I had inherited these
couple of managers because of extraordinarily long-term contracts and I was led
to believe at that time I had to make a choice between one or the
other of the Purple managers. And the one I picked I never felt comfortable
trusting but I was never given any choice.