Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (16 page)

Unfounded rumours of Coverdale hooking
up for a project with Jimmy Page circulated at the time. More substantive was the
idea that David, as suggested by old friend Cozy Powell, would join himself and
Michael Schenker in the Michael Schenker Group. Also admitted by Coverdale,
while looking for new guitarists, a certain Adrian Vandenberg had met his gaze,
although who he really wanted in Whitesnake next was Gary Moore.

Plus, it was as good a time as any for the
press to resume placing odds on a Purple reunion. “It didn’t really rear its
head that much,” notes Murray, however, on the subject of reunion talk. “I
think Deep Purple had to go away for a reasonable amount of years before there
was a demand to have them back again reformed. I could imagine from time to
time there must have been offers from Japan for things like that. And the
dubious Purple reformation in, I think ‘81, with Rod Evans and a bunch of other
people, that might have given them the thought that, ‘Oh, well, if those guys
can put together whatever it was, a gig at the Forum or something in LA, even if
it never happened, maybe there is a market out there, and maybe we should do
that.’

“Similar situation in Black Sabbath when
I was with them. When you’re with a label that is stopping you from reaching the
heights that you think the band should be reaching, you start to get itchy feet
and you start to think, ‘Well, what can we do about this?’ You know, the
following year, when David wanted to make changes in the band anyway... well,
it was a very difficult transitional period. But I think the band changing from
being very democratic to being David’s band, and very much under the
influence of Geffen in America, who wanted young, good-looking guys in the
band, I think that was also a big impetus for Deep Purple to get it together.”

The fate of Rainbow was, of course,
ensnared in the same sort of scenario. I asked Neil Murray if there
had been much of a rivalry between these two acts going through very similar
career struggles. “There was,” laughs Murray, “but it was mostly hearsay. I
mean, there was rivalry between Whitesnake and Rainbow, but it was sort of in
good humour. Myself and Bernie had played with Cozy Powell and he was a friend
of ours, so that wouldn’t have been a serious rivalry. We heard secondhand
about David and Ritchie having a bit of a set-to backstage at a show somewhere
in Germany. But you’ll always get the viewpoint of the person who’s telling you
the story. You’d never know what the actual truth of it is.”

Further pushing the process to the
Purple inevitable, David, adhering to the theme of dissatisfaction with his
band, wished out loud that Ian Paice had performed as well on the
new Whitesnake album as he did on Gary Moore’s last record. Reading between the
lines there, David had been grousing that everyone in his band, almost to a
man, had suddenly all been too busy to give Whitesnake their due.

And hence, even during the
promotion of
Saints & Sinners
, lo and behold, Cozy Powell was already
Whitesnake’s new drummer and Colin “Bomber” Hodgkinson, a Jan Hammer jazzer,
was the band’s new bassist. Cozy, had, in many ways, been a classic case of the
inevitable. Colin, on the other hand, had been involved in a project called
Olympic Rock & Blues Circus with Chris Farlowe, Pete York, a horn
section... and Jon Lord.

“I didn’t know Jon before that,” Colin
told journalist Pete Bell, “but I got to know him pretty well, and he said to
me, ‘How would you feel about playing for Whitesnake?’ I knew David Coverdale
and Micky Moody of course; they were all mates from the times of the
Starlight. They used to come and play in there and sing in there.
In a way, because of what I’d been doing with Hammer and the other
genre, that kind of rock thing, I thought, well, why not? And they
still had that thing where they played quite a bit of R&B-type stuff as
well. It was nice; Micky Moody, Cozy Powell played, so I said Okay.”

“I went and did Cozy’s album for him,”
continues Colin, “and that was my audition — I didn’t know that at the
time. So I just went to meet them and said Okay, and that’s how I got involved
with that. I completely didn’t know. Amazing really. I lasted a year with them,
but I knew it wasn’t for me. We did a lot of things in Europe and then
a month in Japan. I enjoyed part of it, but at the same time it was playing the
same thing every night.

“My aims weren’t really the
same. It wasn’t really what I wanted to do, to be honest. I realized it was
totally different. So that’s what it came to. Micky was certainly a wonderfully
funny bloke, and there were quite a lot of laughs. I remember we played at the
Budokan at Tokyo, which is really the Martial Arts Academy, but it’s a 15,000
seater, and it was absolutely sold-out. And we were doing one of the
heaviest rock things we played, and Micky Moody comes over to me and looks me
in the eye and says, ‘The blues!’ I absolutely cracked up. But that was the
end of that. After that I more or less started to work in Germany all the
time.”

“He was thinking he wanted the
band back together with Mel Galley and Cozy Powell, and Colin Hodgkinson, and
would I like to come back in,” says Micky, about this period, in which he had
been back for the album, but then the band fell apart once again. “So I went
back in in ‘83, but really, it wasn’t the same band. The vibe wasn’t the
same, and I didn’t really enjoy it, to be quite honest, that much. It was
veering more toward moving to the States, and then involvement with Geffen
Records. I could see I wasn’t really the right guitar player to go into that
kind of thing. And of course, it became very successful after that, in ‘86/‘87,
with a different kind of music, different kind of line-up. But there
was no way that I would fit into that kind of bracket anyway. I realized in ‘83,
that for me, it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

More clear-cut is the fact that Bernie
Marsden was now gone. “No, I didn’t do any of those sessions,” he says, when asked
about Colin and Cozy. “That was completely after me, after David had decided
that he wanted to re-form the band with different people. And yeah, that’s a
kind of crossover. So I know nothing about
Slide It In
at all.” But he
acknowledges Micky’s problems with David. “Yes, and ongoing. Yeah, to this day.
To this day. Yeah, classic... I guess, you have to talk to him, really. But he’s
difficult. Yeah, we haven’t spoken to each other in seven or eight years now. So,
there you go.”

“We just never cracked America in those
days,” sighs Marsden, on what could have been. “If we would’ve cracked America,
the whole thing would’ve been different. We signed to Atlantic, but then
we were kind of downgraded to a label within Atlantic. I think, when I say
downgraded, I don’t mean that against the guys. I’m sure they were very keen.
But there wasn’t the money involved to get it to America to tour. And you know,
even when we did tour there, we’d be out with Iron Maiden and with Judas Priest
— we called it the heavy metal sandwich. It was Judas Priest, Whitesnake and
Iron Maiden opening. I mean, great guys, you know — it was a load of Englishmen
on the road — but we should never have been there. And then we got a Jethro
Tull tour. You know, wasn’t the most ideal billing, although it went very well.
But I think because of that, the record company over there said, ‘Oh, we can’t
do much with these guys, you know.’ And then bless him, John Kalodner, when he signed
David, he heard ‘Here I Go Again’ from the album, and said if you re-record
this, we go out and we’ll have a No. 1. And bless him, he was right.”

And yet, as alluded to, things were not
too bad on his side of the Atlantic. “Oh, we did sell out European and Japanese
tours. We’d do gigs where The Police were opening, Dire Straits were opening.
You know, we were a big band, in Europe, doing well. We did festivals. Billy
Squier opened for us. Billy Squier opened for us all across Europe and he was
massive in America at the time. I’m still in contact with Billy. He’s a good
guy. I went to Japan three times, and we came to the States, but we never
cracked it. Japan we cracked within one tour.

“And we all presumed as well, America’s
next. But it never happened. But again, because of the management, we were not
really making any money. And you know, that’s a whole different story. That’s the
technical side. And I tend not to do too much about that because fans are fans
and they don’t want to know about bad management, percentages and stuff like
that. But the States... I remember
Lovehunter
time, we did, what would
you call it, almost a showcase, at Los Angeles University. Joni Mitchell came
to that gig [
laughs
]. But that was a one-off. We were out there
for like a long weekend, stayed at the Sunset Marquis. Abba were there,
Phil Collins was there. So I remember, standing in the pool in the
shallow end, while the two girls from Abba were swimming. And Phil Collins and
I, standing next to him, I remember saying to him, ‘Tough old life, isn’t it?’”

Above and
next page:
Backstage passes
from 1984 and 1987/88. During this period, Whitesnake were at their combined
creative and commercial peak. (
Martin Popoff Collection)

Above:
Map of Donington. The band played the place
so often, surely they didn't need one? (
Martin Popoff Collection)

Over the page:
David and ex-wife Tawny Kitaen, who starred in several
Whitesnake videos: she wasn't always popular with band members. (
George Rose/Contributor
)

Above:
The hair metal version of Whitesnake. L-R:
Adrian Vandenberg, Steve Vai, David Coverdale, Tommy Aldridge, Rudy Sarzo. (
Pictorial
Press Ltd
)

Over the page:
Adrian Vandenberg in 1990. "Here I go
again." (
Cathy Griffiths
)