Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (3 page)

Piling it on, the band was also grousing
over writing credits, and Tommy’s heroin habit was affecting his playing, most
graphically brought to attention in the UK where he was heckled mercilessly. It
was all too much, and the hero of our story, after a maelstrom of three records
in two years plus white knuckle world tours, felt trained, bold, creatively
excited about the future, and optimistic enough to quit Deep Purple.

 “When I actually left, Glenn wasn’t
told,” explains David. “We would stand together; that’s when I first came up
with the expression ‘The Unrighteous Brothers.’ So, I’d flown over to England
for Ian Paice’s wedding, and Glenn was going, ‘Oh Dave, I’ve got all these
great ideas; we’ve got to use our voices more’ and all of this, and I go, ‘Glenn,
hasn’t anybody told you? I’m out.’ And he was utterly shocked. And I was like, ‘We
blew it. It could have been incredible, but we blew it.’ Which is one of the
reasons now, if I feel that kind of negative energy creeping into any scenario
– even private ones, let alone professionally – I change it. If I can’t see the
light, I change it because there is too much compromise. It really is a
difficult pill to swallow.”

“Initially it went very well and then
it tended to go south somewhat the more peripheral indulgence that went on,”
sighs Coverdale. “It was actually a very, very tough time. I left Deep Purple,
which was pretty much a well-kept secret out of respect for Jon Lord and Ian
Paice, but it was really degenerating very badly in terms of the
shows and attitude. A lot of drugs and alcohol were rearing their
ugly heads. And there was a great deal of disrespect for the legacy of Deep
Purple, which I still maintain.”

And then, says Coverdale, well, there
might not have been a Whitesnake had David joined... Rainbow!

“I think what alienated Ritchie from me
is that I didn’t do Rainbow,” says Coverdale, a pretty unlikely candidate for the
role given the baggage of the previous three years. “Initially, he presented me
with these songs. And I said, these seem like
Machine Head
songs. You
know, if you listen to, other than Ronnie’s vocals, they are very
Machine
Head
songs that could have easily been Gillan-era, Mk. II as it’s called,
and I felt it was going back. Like I said, the climate at the
time was about moving forward. And, of course, I was getting me licks, in doing
the blues and soul elements. It wouldn’t have worked.”

-2-

White Snake
/
Northwinds
– “I’m Not Sure You’re The Right Bass Player To
Play With Cozy”

When Deep Purple imploded, David
Coverdale found himself taking stock. Married in 1974 to German Julie
Borkowski, a child on the way, having been living in what he described as “a
beautiful big cuckoo clock of a house in Bavaria,” all he wanted to do now was his
Wilson Pickett-styled songs, as he dubbed them, but louder. By his own
admittance, he went from a “boy” in awe of Purple to a classic case of LSD –
Lead Singer’s Disease. And not to be negative about it, the point is that David
Coverdale had grown into rock star britches, with the confidence and resources
to establish an act based on himself as its centre.

The naming of all this would be a mess.
Coverdale has said that he’d always wanted his new thing to be a band
situation, and the name of the first record,
White Snake
, seemed to lean
that way. Think about it. It’s a debut solo album, and yet you give it a
provocative flashy name, and one that could be a band name.  And yet talk about
fence-sitting: it’s debatable or arguable from both the logo and the
spine of the original vinyl whether that title is supposed to be one word or
two.

Second record,
Northwinds
, is credited
again to David Coverdale, even if debate still rages deep into the
night whether it’s called
Northwinds
or
North Winds
! Then there’s
a four-track EP called
Snakebite
, credited to David Coverdale’s
Whitesnake, which, to confuse matters further, becomes a hodgepodge of an LP
(for outside the UK) credited to Whitesnake called
Snakebite
— the
four tracks of the EP combined with four tracks from
Northwinds
.

Finally, there’s a “first” LP called
Trouble
,
and the neat freaks can all relax. Musically speaking, there’s a direct line
through all of them from lots of funk and blues and balladry and experimentation
at the beginning, to something up into
Trouble
that might be described
as closer to what came before the solo career, namely, an approximation of Mk.
III-era Deep Purple.

The
White Snake
album would
feature a complicated cast of characters, half band and half not, but second in
creative and historical importance among the
dramatis personae
would be
old buddy Micky Moody.

“David did two solo albums prior to
Whitesnake, which I was involved in,” explains Moody, grappling with Whitesnake’s
messy early history. “I go back a long way with David. I come from the
same town as David and Paul Rodgers, Middlesbrough [it is the nearest city to
Saltburn-by-the-Sea], in the northeast of England, a very working class area
where people do steel work. I went to school with Paul. We were in class for
four, or five, years in high school — we don’t call it that; we call it
secondary school. I grew up with Paul. We were from the same town and were in the
same classroom. We put a band together when we were 14 years old. That was the
Roadrunners. We then had The Wildflowers. We went to London and Paul Kossoff
was working in a music shop and we all became friends. I went back to
Middlesbrough to learn some classical guitar and Paul formed a band with Paul
Kossoff and the rest is history.”

“And I knew David in the
late ‘60s, and then I went off to London, moved down south, as you do, as you
did,” continues Moody. Again, this was the trial-by-fire with his band The
Wildflowers, which besides losing Paul Rodgers to Free, would hatch the
career of Bruce Thomas (Pete Bardens/Quiver/Elvis Costello & The
Attractions).

“When I went back to my hometown in 1968 there
was a young guy who was a student who was called David Coverdale. As I say, we
come from the same town. We would be in a coffee bar and David would be sitting
there, as he was coming back from art school. I got talking to David and he
was in a local band. I was in the top local band called Tramline that was very
much influenced by the West Coast thing. I got to know David then.”

Tramline had actually produced two
records for Island, but the material... it would be a running joke inside of
Whitesnake, with Bernie Marsden exclaiming with relief that he had no skeletons
in his closet like Micky’s early records.

“A few years later, about 1974, I heard
that he’d joined Deep Purple,” continues Moody. “He’d passed an audition. I was
very pleased for him. He was working in a boutique and singing like
semi-professionally, so I was very pleased about that. And before he went to
live in the States, just after that, with Deep Purple, he called up his old
mates from the Northeast, of the late ‘60s, including musicians and some guys
who had moved to London to become roadies or truck drivers or whatever, and we
had a party to send him off to the States. He was going to Malibu to live and
he found out where all of his old mates were. We had a big send-off for him
where we got drunk and stoned and did all of that stuff we did in the
‘70s.

“And I never heard from him for about
eighteen months after that. He called me up, said he was living in Germany, and
asked me if I’d like to be involved in some solo projects he was going to do. He
came to my show that I was playing a few days later in Munich. I was playing
with a band called Snafu at the time. We had a drink and a month later, I was
staying with him for a while. I thought he only wanted me to play on a couple
of tracks. He wanted to get away from the hard rock. He had such a fantastic
voice that he wanted to do ballads, soulful stuff and acoustic stuff.

“I ended up doing two albums with him.
The first one was
White Snake
and the second was
Northwinds
. And
from there, on those two albums, he wanted to get away, really, from the
heavy rock thing, the Purple thing. But David is a very versatile singer, and
had loads of ideas for ballads and soul stuff and funk. He could sing all of
that. He used to do cabaret and stuff when he was very young. He could sing all
kinds of things. So I think he’d written a lot of different things that he
wanted to get off his chest and get down onto disc, and I helped him do that.
And then after that, he wanted to put Whitesnake together, but we still didn’t
want to go down that Deep Purple road, because, as a guitar player, I never
came from that heavy thing.”

Moody and Coverdale’s first
collaboration together,
White Snake
, would be recorded at Kingsway
Studios from August 3rd to the 17th, plus the evening of the 25th, 1976. Vocals
would be added at Musicland in Munich from the 26th August until the
30th “after midnight.” Issued in May, 1977, the album’s first single would pair
dark R&B ballad “Hole In The Sky” with “Blindman,” another
ballad, but this one toward Bad Company.

Still so much part of the
Purple camp, the album would be issued on Purple Records, Roger Glover would be
producing, and the studios used... Musicland had been the domain of both Purple
with Coverdale as well as Rainbow and the Ian Gillan Band. Additionally,
Kingsway is also very much associated with Ian Gillan, through his part
ownership and the recording of Ian’s albums there with both Ian Gillan Band and
Gillan. One big dysfunctional family, and as Whitesnake slithered
forth, much of the family would be reunited.

Ever the swashbuckler and scallywag, Dave
writes on the back cover of
White Snake
, rock star punctuation included,
“The music on this Album was conceived and given the ol’ once over at
Deutschland. (Somewhere in Europe). The happy songs were written in my new home
and also the Familie Ritzers fine residence – the moody ones were more or less the
result of a three month sojourn in a hotel in Munich. Anyway without Micky
Moody an’ Roger, I would have had to do it on me own, GOD BLESS EM. Thanks to
everyone, particularly Jools, Dembreigh und John, and me mother
– who forgave me the day I was born. This Album is dedicated to all in
NEVER-NEVERLAND; for whom one day it will all surely happen…”

No one in the ragtag gathering
that was called upon to make this record was as important to the
process as Micky Moody. It is with Micky that the Whitesnake sound is born,
right here on this record, along, of course, with David leading the
charge and singing up a blues rock storm.

“Well, funnily enough, just to give you a
short history,” says Moody, on winding up in this place stylistically, “I
started playing in ‘63, and at that time, of course, you had new bands like The
Beatles and The Rolling Stones coming up, and I particularly liked the
Yardbirds. I liked the blues thing, Spencer Davis, The Animals, this kind of
thing, and that was the direction I followed for a while. And then
Eric Clapton joining John Mayall, Jeff Beck, and all this kind of thing. We
were so lucky to actually be around at that time, especially as teenagers, to
absorb all that music. It was fantastic, really. So it went from there,
really, Jimi Hendrix... it all happened in the ‘60s. I don’t know that that
would ever happen again. We were just very, very lucky.”

Duane Eddy mattered as well, Moody told
Jeb Wright. “Yes, he was an influence on me when I started playing guitar in
1963, when I was a kid. I used to love ‘(Dance With The) Guitar Man’ and all of
that; in 1987, there was a TV program to commemorate the tenth anniversary of
Elvis Presley’s death. I was in the house band and Duane came on and played ‘Love
Me Tender’ and I got to back him. He was a very quiet and deep sort of guy. I
did shake his hand and tell him he was an influence on me. I also got to play
with Eric Clapton. I played live with him in a charity situation. I have never
been in his band. I played a charity show with him two years ago and he was
great. It was a thrill for me, as I have loved him since the Yardbirds.”

With the way players in Purple’s orbit
seemed to be part of a revolving door scenario of projects and sessions, I
asked Micky if he’d ever been part of any high profile audition processes in the
1970s.

“I didn’t. I mean, to be quite honest, I
was very shy and retiring as a kid, when I was starting. I was in Tramline and,
after that, I joined a soul band playing James Brown stuff and Sam and Dave and
all that, which I really like, and Booker T & The MGs. And from that, the
singer with Juicy Lucy asked me to join. He’d seen me playing with Zoot Money,
and he offered me to join Juicy Lucy. So, I didn’t do anything. I never chased
anything, to be quite honest. Maybe I was just lazy. But I just seemed to be in
the right place at the right time, and it wasn’t until Snafu, sort of ‘73,
that I involved myself in actually putting a band together.”

“I wanted to play something that wasn’t
as hard rock as Juicy Lucy,” continues Moody. “Juicy Lucy, I enjoyed, and it
was playing with one of my favourite guitarists, Glen Ross Campbell, steel
guitarist; I used to like him from The Misunderstood, in the early ‘60s; I used
to hear him on the radio. And so with Snafu, I got more into Ry Cooder and more
authentic stuff, and Little Feat, this kind of thing. I was really playing hard
rock for a few years, and it was only when David got in touch with me to help
him with the solo albums that I thought Hey, I better get myself a Les Paul
here’ [
laughs
], and
start getting the Marshall cranked up, because it looks like I’m going to need
to be a bit heavier. I was a big fan of the Allman Brothers, but I was never a
great fan of Deep Purple. I liked some of the early Led Zeppelin stuff, because
I liked Jimmy Page and the Yardbirds. But really, I’d drifted away from that.
It was more sort of a funky, lazier, bluesy style, like Little Feat — I used to
love their stuff. That really was my cup of tea for a while. And it was really
David that got me back into rocking for the early Whitesnake. So I think some
of his influence was the funky stuff, on some of the stuff I’d been playing.”