Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (33 page)

The previous Whitesnake campaign, the
“Restless Heart Farewell Tour,” had ended in South America in December of 1997.
The start of the 2003 “25th Anniversary Tour” in January of that year would
mark the longest gap between tours in the history of the band. Previous to
this, the longest time away from the stage would have been between the
end of the
Slip Of The Tongue
tour (officially called the
Liquor And Poker World Tour) and the start of 1994’s
Greatest Hits
tour.

“So I was very, very happy to agree to be
the meat in this particular sandwich,” continues David. “And looking at an
hour, obviously there’s going to be no messing around. We’re not going to be
doing twenty minute drums solos. Well, unless anything really disastrous
happens. So I want to pack it up. And I’m also recording a greatest hits live,
which I’ve never done. I have a website. whitesnake.com. and my board members
are most forthcoming with me about what they want and are desirous of, and one
is a live record. I haven’t made a live album since 1980, and certainly there’s
nothing other than bootlegs which have ‘Still Of The Night,’ ‘Is This Love,’
‘Here I Go Again,’ all that stuff, ‘Slow An’ Easy.’ So basically my feeling
was, when I went out many years ago as a kind of farewell tour to the
rest of the world, it was a lot of the early songs that I thought I would enjoy
doing, the very early Whitesnake stuff, and they got old immediately. And I
definitely agree with you with a statement you made that these weren’t me
anymore. That was a particular chapter in my life that was best left as it
was.”

“The circumstances, you’ve got to
remember, this is the House Of Whitesnake,” figures David, now squarely a
heritage act despite game protestations. “I’m just redecorating it. Not only
redecorating it but putting a whole new bunch of interior decorators in there.
You know, the bottom line with these musicians, they’re extraordinary players.
I said, I want you to look at the songs. I do not want to just simply re-create
the songs, as long as the essence is secure. My whole feeling is, I don’t want
to be a retro/cabaret act, going through the motions. Otherwise I’ll just go
back to Tahoe right now! Basically I said, I want you to approach the
songs as if you had been involved in the original, how you would have done it.
And now, ten, twelve years later, how would you contemporize those songs so
it’s not just a time capsule? So yeah, the songs are going to be very familiar,
but the fire these guys are playing with, it’s very powerful.”

The band of which David speaks was
consisting at the time of himself plus Doug Aldrich and Reb Beach on guitars,
Marco Mendoza on bass, Tim Drury on keyboards and back on the
drums, the southern and stoic Tommy Aldridge.

“Well, actually, both of them
yesterday started to tease each other with blues licks; very refreshing,”
laughs David, referring to Reb and Doug. “I’m an old blues guitar fan. I keep
saying to people, for instance with Reb, (ex-Winger), although I felt Winger
was an excellent collection of musicians, they didn’t have a great deal of rock
credibility. So a couple of people came on my board saying, ‘Oh my God! What’s
this going to be like?!’ And I’m going, ‘Hey, if you don’t trust me, don’t even
bother coming here!’ I don’t listen to what musicians did with other
line-ups. I listen to how they play and what I feel they can bring to
Whitesnake and what I feel I can bring to them to take it further.
I’m going to make sure there are no limitations on this. I mean for instance,
we’re doing ‘Crying In The Rain’ and Doug Aldrich is on fire on it; Martin,
he’s on fire! It is way cool. We have great players and they’re lovely people.
For God’s sake, man, the two guitarists are actually going out to dinner with
each other! I mean, that, I’ve never known. It’s always been bullshit for the
camera, the camaraderie.”

“Power. Passion. People spoke about it,”
continues David, ever charming, turning attention to Tommy Aldridge, a welcome
spot of loyalty and continuity, part of a pair of two old warhorses getting
along and getting a pay check. “I very rarely go back, but I found when I was
researching drummers, I was actually looking for Tommy Aldridge Jr. or Tommy
Aldridge II. And one of the great things is, the bass player I’ve wanted to
work with for many years, Marco Mendoza, he’s actually worked for Tommy on and
off for five years. Musically it’s really hard to get a rhythm section that
communicates with each other. Because that’s what I build on, you know? And
that could’ve taken God knows how long to actually get a rhythm section that was
hooked into each other. And this, I’ve got to tell you, the first days
rehearsal, when we plugged in, some of these guys had never even met each other
and it was as if they had been playing together for five years. It was really,
really happening. But Tommy, I’ll tell you man, we sat down and discussed how,
near the end, Whitesnake had lost that blues base entirely and was just overtly
flamboyant. It wasn’t just the clothes. We looked like Christmas trees.
Over-decorated. And that was actually carrying into the music which was
unfortunate. Because I write very emotional, primitive music and if it’s
over-embellished, you miss the whole point.”

Interesting that David would say, “I very
rarely go back.” It’s a statement that opens doors to Coverdale’s psyche.
First, that’s a sentiment of which the premiere example in rock is Robert
Plant, nemesis to, and always the smarty-pants in, the Coverdale/Plant dance.
Second, he could have meant that as a statement of fact, a detached
observation. Third, and likely telling, is an interpretation we might have
divined through the process of this book, namely that once David is crossed or
double-crossed or disagreed with, he doesn’t look back, he doesn’t change his
mind, he goes with the new decision and the new reality and wants to believe
he’s been right.

In any event, Coverdale would prove to be
sufficiently fired up to begin thinking about a new record under the
Whitesnake banner. “As a matter of fact, yes. Doug Aldrich was playing around the
other day. It’s interesting, because I have no desire to make what one would
call a corporate record. But I love to write, I always have. I have tons of
music, but right now of course, the obvious thing is to get these
guys all greased on the songs we’re going to be performing. But, of course,
like anybody else, when they plug their instrument in, they’ll play some chords
and I’ll go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s that, what’s that?’ And we started to
mess around with something the other day which was pretty cool. Oh, I have no
doubts we’ll end up doing something, and, God willing, I’ll be able to maintain
some kind of independent scenario, maybe through whitesnake.com or some little
indie label. I just don’t want to go the other way, Martin. I’ve had enough of the
other thing. I cannot work in an industry where people don’t care about music.
Oh, it’s terrible! An artist like Tom Petty comes out with a theme
album for God’s sake.”

Meanwhile, classic-era Whitesnake
members Neil Murray, Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody had formed a band called
Company Of Snakes (evolved from The Snakes), first issuing in 2001 a live album
of vintage Whitesnake material called
Here We Go Again
, and then
in 2002,
Burst The Bubble
, a solid old school hard rock album of
originals, proposing, as it were an alternative Whitesnake universe.

“It includes quite a few tracks that
Bernie and Micky recorded with the band when they were called The Snakes,”
explains Neil Murray, with respect to
Burst The Bubble
, “which was with the
Norwegian singer and rhythm section. That album only came out in Japan so it
was kind of a good opportunity to take those songs and rearrange them
and re-record them. This is what we’re working toward, rather than be some kind
of tribute band to ourselves. And Stefan Berggren is singing on it. It’s
straight-ahead, rather bluesy rock. It certainly sounds like it is descended
from Whitesnake as it were, certainly not radically different.”

 “It’s what I would like to call a
classic British rock album,” adds Marsden. “It’s got overtones of pretty much everything
we’ve always done, but we also haven’t tried to stay exactly as we were before.
I can only write a certain way because that’s the way I write songs, but I’ve
tried to include some of the feelings that people would have today. But at the
end of the day I’ve always been a bit of a songsmith in that I’m always
interested in how good a song is, rather than how good you can make a song with
production. We’ve tried to work that way. There’s not many of what we would
call unnatural overdubs on the album. It’s basically the guitar solos which we
work out, and we try to reproduce those on stage. The last thing in the
world you want to do, as far as I’m concerned, is make a fantastic studio sound
you can’t take on the road with you. So I like to think that we are in our own
way, a traditional British rock outfit.”

The band once was working with Jørn
Lande, but as Marsden explains, that was unhealthy for their sense of
legitimacy. “Jørn is a fine singer. You know, here’s the situation, and I’ve
got no axe to grind with him whatsoever. We did a couple of albums, a live
album and a studio album. The studio album was only made for Japan. It was only
released in Japan, and he sings fine. The problem I have with Jørn is that he’s
a David Coverdale clone. And it got to the point where at first it was kind of
fun, but then it became almost embarrassing. Because instead of having the band
doing Whitesnake material, we had almost a copy situation. It’s impossible for
me and Micky Moody to be in a band copying Whitesnake, because we were the
originators. And I would try to argue this with people like yourselves who put
this point to me, and I couldn’t argue, because you had a lead singer who was
impersonating David.”

Zoom forward to 2013, and this general
idea continues through a new band called Snakecharmer, its ex-Whitesnake
members being Neil Murray and Micky Moody, A self-titled album emerged and it’s
every bit as solid and swaggering as
Burst The Bubble
.

“It wasn’t preconceived,” muses Moody.
“We didn’t sit down and say, right, me and Neil are from Whitesnake, and Laurie
Wisefield is from Wishbone Ash, so it’s got to sound like a cross between
Whitesnake and Wishbone Ash. We just went away and we came up with some musical
ideas, which we gave to Chris Ousey, the singer, because none of us write
lyrics; so obviously, you know, everything went to him. But to be quite honest,
it was that myself and Neil were in the early Whitesnake, so part of that sound
is genetically drilled inside of it somewhere. It’s sitting there,
although this band was never put together to be any sort of competition to
Whitesnake whatsoever. Two guitars have always appealed to me; I just like the
two guitars. Providing that the guys were on the same wavelength.

“With Bernie Marsden, I worked with him
for a long time, not just in Whitesnake, but other bands — Snakes, Company Of
Snakes, M3 — and it’s early days for me and Laurie. I knew Laurie before, but
we haven’t worked together. Actually, we haven’t done any gigs, so there’s
a lot more to come from myself and Laurie. With this album we just went in and
took a very professional approach. We didn’t stretch out. We haven’t had a
chance to stretch out, really. But also with myself and Neil being in the
band, people do expect to hear something that sounds like some of the
early Whitesnake stuff. There’s no way we’re going to go try something else.
Part of our roots were in the early band, and we were there, and we helped
create the sound, so that sound is in us, and that’s going to come up anyway,
and it’s the sound of two guitars.”

Yes, so to summarize, including M3, there
were a tangle of bands there for awhile (and it continues) which acted as an
alternate Whitesnake, both directly, through the playing of Whitesnake
chestnuts, but then growing and expanding to include fine, fine originals,
written with maturity and performed with aplomb. And next to a Whitesnake that
until 2008 wasn’t writing and recording new material, Moody, Marsden and Murray
were providing food for thought to the Whitesnake faithful. Up into mid-2014,
Bernie had been on the verge of issuing a star-studded solo album and Neil and
Micky were to cut a deal with their label Frontiers for a second Snakecharmer
record.

“Well, I think, there’s quite a bit of
Ready
An’ Willing
in there,” noted Marsden, on the record he had spent the
last year upon, provisionally entitled
Shine
. “And you know, we’ve got
David singing on it, which is fantastic. Getting him involved was really,
really good for me. That felt really... I don’t know, what’s the
word, it felt right. To do that track, and then to say, ‘Mate, do you want to
sing on this?’ ‘Yeah, of course.’ So it was great. We didn’t have to ring up
managers and stuff to do this. It was just two guys talking together.
He did it and it was great. And then Joe Bonamassa got involved – well, Joe was
involved really from the beginning, and it was through him that I got to meet these
people from his record label and I’ve been playing with Joe off and on for
about two years, invited out to his gigs and stuff, and then finally the
guys came out and said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to make an album for us.’ And I
said, ‘Well, I’ll make an album for you but I want Joe to play on a track’.”