Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (2 page)

Coverdale explains how he got broken in
to the band: “‘Lay Down Stay Down’ was one of the first lyrics I wrote. It was
interesting. Obviously I was in awe [of Blackmore], my whole inspiration was
Hendrix, that style of guitar playing. And Blackmore was a phenomenal musician.
I’d always worked with good players but these guys were something else, and, of
course, they had the ego and the sound and equipment to put their
money where their mouth was. So working with Ritchie was a marriage made in
heaven.

 “And I was learning as I was going. I’m
a good sponge and I was soaking it all in. And the more comfortable I felt, the
more comfortable I felt providing musical ideas. Because I had been writing for
a few years, just with the local bands. And we connected very well. Both of us
were fans of medieval music, which is a modal concept similar to Bach, and we
both enjoyed similar acts or whatever, and so I would feel more comfortable
putting in chord ideas and melodies.

 “We did all the rehearsals at a place
called Clearwell Castle in Gloucester in the Forest Of Dean, which is basically
our second home. We rehearsed in a crypt and I’d tape a cassette because they
had just been developed and I would fashion lyrics out of those things.
Stormbringer
was written mostly in the studio which was a huge expense, very time-consuming
and you kept having to compromise just in order to get it done. But Ritchie had
said to me, ‘You know, the
Burn
album was really successful.’ It
re-established them in 1974/1975, we were the most successful selling act in the
world, and then there was a collective sigh of relief that we maintained it by
making the change from Mark II to Mark III, that they had maintained the
success level, so they could put their feet up. Which wasn’t Blackmore’s vibe
and it certainly wasn’t mine. So a bit of laziness crept in there
in terms of the input into songs.”

The other problem in Purple besides
degenerating personal relationships, was that the brash young upstarts in the
band were having the temerity to introduce elements of funk and blues
and balladry into the band, for goodness sake. Fast forward a few years and
Whitesnake would carry on right where
Burn
,
Stormbringer
and
David’s third and last with Purple,
Come Taste The Band
, had left off.

“With
Stormbringer
, we toured
about a year and we were really at our height,” says Glenn. “Blackmore at the
time was thinking of leaving, and I think from the genre of the
songs that David and I were writing, like ‘Hold on’ and ‘You Can’t Do It Right’
and ‘Holy Man,’ it was a little more apparent that it was becoming a crossover
group. Ritchie always built his songs around the Bach guitar playing, and I
really respected Ritchie for that because he was an originator, the
first true innovator of that kind of music. I think he had gone as far as he
wanted to go in Deep Purple. You know, I think the format of Gillan and Glover
and all that stuff was a great metal band, whatever you want to call it.

“And when David and I came in, the
band started to become more, and I’m going to say, soulful. Because we grew up
in the North of England, we grew up listening to American R&B. Rather
than try replacing Gillan and Glover with two look- and sound-alikes, they
replaced them with two totally different commodities, and it showed very
strongly on
Stormbringer
what it was all about. And I like change in
music. I don’t want to make
Burn
II. Led Zeppelin did a really good job
in their careers of making different records every time. So that’s how I feel
about
Stormbringer
— it’s a different record.”

“It wasn’t so much David; it was the
influence of Glenn,” qualifies drummer Ian Paice. “David was the new kid on the
block and he was very malleable. He was just enjoying the vibe of being in a
big rock ‘n’ roll band. Glenn’s influences were so different, although on the
first album,
Burn
, they were kept under control. When it came down to
getting down to the second one,
Stormbringer
, I mean, Glenn can’t help
it. He likes the music that he likes and that was starting to change it. So it
was starting to change from being a hard rock ‘n’ roll band to something that
was becoming a little more funky, which Ritchie hated. And Ritchie, being true
to himself, just went ‘That’s it, I’m off. I don’t like what’s happening, I don’t
think I can get it back to what I wanted it to be.’ And I think he saw the
way that, ‘If I have my own band, I can control it.’ And I think that’s why
Rainbow was formed.”

Even if Whitesnake would morph to be a
bit more heavy metal by the mid-1980s, Coverdale’s disdain for the
term, and genre, underscores where he wanted Purple to go, and where he would
take his own band once he had control, just like Ritchie and Rainbow.

“Oh my God! I wrote two songs which could
be termed heavy metal or whatever,” sniffs David. “I’ve never embraced the
expression ‘heavy metal’ because all my themes are emotional. But I wrote two
songs to keep Ritchie Blackmore happy, which were ‘Burn,’ (which I still think
is a classic,) and ‘Stormbringer,’ which basically if you look at the
lyrics, they are more or less sci-fi poems. But it never felt comfortable for
me to have those. In fact, I think that’s where he got the name Rainbow from, the
hook in ‘Stormbringer.’ ‘Burn’ I can enjoy any time of the day but I don’t
really go for ‘Stormbringer.’”

“Look, you know, people have always said
when Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale came into Deep Purple,” says Glenn, “it
was like, we changed the sound of the band from being a straight hard rock
metal group to being a more bluesier, soulful, intelligent sounding music, I
thought. When you replace guys like Gillan and Glover, you’ve got a come up...
I don’t sound like Roger Glover; of course, Roger doesn’t sing. And I certainly
don’t sound like Ian Gillan, and neither does David. I think it was a really
bold move to replace those two and have a Top Five record all around the
world with
Burn
. The
Burn
record stands up for itself; it’s
brilliant. But Ritchie, midway through the
Stormbringer
tour, realized
that the end was nigh for him, because the power was being taken from him, in the
music. Because it was being written by all of us guys.”

“By
Stormbringer
, we were flexing
our muscles,” continues the so-deemed Voice Of Rock. “You’ve got to remember, I
was the leader of my own band for years before I got to Deep Purple. And when
you’re a leader of the band, writing and producing and doing what I was doing
at an early age, I was still in that headset. And I must say, as a five-man
group, Deep Purple, we were all our own leaders. We were all very, very much
strong individuals. But at the end of the day, it was Ritchie’s last call on a
lot of the stuff we did, but he was obviously losing his power.”

“At that time, the whole climate was that
you had to progress,” muses Coverdale. “And one of the things that I wanted to
bring to Purple was blues. And I loved soul music. The year that I joined Deep
Purple, my most played records were Sly & The Family Stone’s
There’s A
Riot Goin’ On
, Stevie Wonder’s
Music Of My Mind
and Donny Hathaway’s
Live
. I mean, nothing to do with rock, but I loved rock, in the
sense of the early Allman Brothers, original Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck Group.

“So, I thought it would be entirely
appropriate, without compromising the identity of Purple, to inject more of a blues
element, more of an emotional element instead of motorbikes and whatever and
planets. I can only write about what I know. But of course the
great soul element started to creep in. And that was not really where Ritchie
was at all.

“You know, this song on
Stormbringer
,
he gave me this guitar riff, and I can only respond how I feel instinctively
and naturally to a piece of music. And I was motivated to write this thing
around ‘You Can’t Do It Right (With The One You Love),’ singing across this
riff. And he went, well, it’s great but he was hoping he might give me his kind
of influence or inspiration for this particular guitar riff. There’s a song
from the Band Of Gypsies called ‘Changes,’ you know, Buddy Miles, and I didn’t
get that vibe at all. And I tried messing around with it and I said this feels
right. And of course it gave Glenn a perfect opportunity to zip into his Stevie
Wonder thing. And all of this stuff alienated Ritchie. Ritchie is very much his
own man. So that was fine. There were a lot of positive things I learned from
Ritchie and certain things I found disagreeable.”

Two strong singers who were also strong
personalities; griping amongst the old guard and the new; a struggle between the
blues and the Bach-inspired modern metal of the day... then Ritchie leaves the
band and a new problem emerges in the guise of a new guitarist, unknown,
American, and, worse, considerably into chemicals.

“Tommy Bolin, he lived with me for three
months before he joined the band,” explains Hughes. “Tommy Bolin was a very
sweet, kind, philosophical, hippie-ish, generous, loving person. There wasn’t a
bad bone in his body. The only thing was, Tommy was riddled with drug
addiction. I had no idea he was into the morphines and the other
stuff at all. And we talked about it and he joked about it, but I hadn’t
realized my friend was actually getting to be hooked on the stuff. But Tommy
and I also have stuff we wrote together. He was a great guy. I mean, I was sort
of into my disease as well. The cocaine was definitely drug of choice in the
‘70s, for people who could afford it. So I was in my own head at that time.”

“Look, here’s the deal,” explains Hughes
on the making of
Come Taste The Band
, Coverdale’s third record and the
last for the band before the Mk. II reunion in 1983. “Tommy Bolin joined Deep
Purple in, I think, June of 1975. In June and July we basically rehearsed in
Los Angeles. We wrote a couple in the studio. Then we went to Munich to
Musicland Studios and, you know, Tommy Bolin had moved into my home in Beverly
Hills. There were definitely two camps being set up, maybe three camps being
set up. There was me and Tommy to one side, David alone, and then
Jon and Ian. And, it was very obvious when we went to Germany that it was me
and Tommy hanging out.

“If you listen to the album, there
is definitely a Tommy and Glenn influence on the one side, and Coverdale is
doing the big voice in the middle. We were the toxic twins of the
band. Tommy and I were young and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”

Was David also a little wild?

 “I wouldn’t like to comment on that,”
says Hughes. “All I can tell you is that David was a weekend warrior. You know,
I got along with David fine. I don’t know if he got along with me very well. As
far as the friendship was concerned, it was deep. As far as the
musicianship was concerned, I think it might have been fragile to say the
least. There’s a song called ‘Dealer’ that I actually sang. And I went to bed
one night and the next morning I came back and David sang it. And I went, ‘What
the fuck?!’ I guess I was voted off the track and I sang it like a motherfucker!
It was brilliant. If you know anything about Purple towards the
end, I think we did an hour and 45 minute show and David was off stage for
about 45 minutes because the band was jamming and I was doing a lot of singing.
And I think he was a bit pissed off about that. I’m just a progressive person
on stage and I like to jam. Tommy and I were doing that, and then
Jon Lord... Ian Paice is a ferocious drummer. And I just think the
David Coverdale thing, although he was the singer, he could have stayed on
stage and banged a tambourine or something but he was off stage.”

There was definitely a source of
resentment on Coverdale’s part as he explained to Tony Stewart back in 1976, “I’m
not ashamed of any of the shows I did. I worked my bollocks off. No one was
talking about sacking me, I left. We were working for a concept, and then
I got the impression that everybody was trying to inject their little bits of
fiddly-diddly. Then it got disjointed and became too abstract. It went off on
tangents. It wasn’t how Deep Purple should have been anymore. For such a hard
bunch of blokes, though, we got really spineless in the end; just accepting the
situation and not doing anything about it. I wanted out.

“I refuse to stand on stage with Glenn
while he’s doing his bloody ‘Georgia On My Mind,’” continued David. “And I’m
standing there in the dark saying, ‘C’mon, get it out of your system. Where’s the
band? C’mon, Tommy get it out, c’mon Jon do your classical bits’ — and I’d go
off and have a cigarette. Where’s that at? That ain’t no fucking band. Then Ian
turns round and says, ‘Dave, stop bellowing so much.’ I got that gig on the
strength of my talent. Nobody did me a favour. Those cats wanted me to work.
Like, I’ve got the goods to do it, and up to now people have only heard one
facet of my talent.”