Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (4 page)

“I didn’t know what to expect when I
released
White Snake
, but now I feel comfortable,” enthused David. “The
album’s doing really well in Europe and it’s picked up well in England. I
suppose I can attribute some of that acceptance to Deep Purple. We always were
big in Europe. I didn’t want the album to be an extension of Deep Purple. Hard
rock isn’t everything. I still love hard rock but with
White Snake
, I
wanted to experiment with the different colours and textures of music. Some of the
songs like ‘Blind Man’ and ‘Time On My Side’ were written before Deep Purple.
There is also a ballad on the album and a few funky-type songs. I’ve tried to
explore the white funk style a bit. I’m just happy to play with a good bunch of
musicians. Before Purple, the most I’d ever earned from a gig was a chicken
sandwich and a bottle of Coke.”

That’s an accurate survey of the
record from David. One must remember, this type of music was quite
unfashionable within the crucible of English music at the time, for mid-1977 represented
the peak of punk mania. In the press, Dave was a combination of defiant, cocky,
self-deprecating and appreciative that he had been allowed to make this kind of
record. He has said that at 26 years old they were calling him a dinosaur. In
essence, what he was doing was launching an odd sociological experiment,
testing his assertion that there was a market for blues rock somewhere within a
world gone punk.

What is remarkable, and amusing, is that Glenn
Hughes, the Ian Gillan Band and Paice Ashton Lord all issued albums within
months of Coverdale’s launch, and all of them, generally, were in and around a
proggy, bluesy, funky, fusion-y, softer rock spectrum, with only Rainbow, also
with a record in 1977, addressing head-on a metallic Purple vibe. As an
additional note, David had already recorded his second record by this point,
working on
Northwinds
at Air Studios in London, April 10th to 19th.

“We started recording the
album in London in August last year,” Coverdale told
Melody Maker
in May
of 1977, “and there were no rehearsals, nothing. The musicians did me proud.
There are no all-star famous names among them, although they’re well-known
enough in the business. I got them together through word-of-mouth, recommendations,
old friendships, admiration. They played together superbly. I had enough
confidence within myself not to get into that star-name trip. We did the
album in about two weeks, with the vocals being put down in Musicland. Apart
from the music we created, it also happened to be one of the nicest times I’ve
ever had socially. The best of it was that the musicians were guys playing for the
love of it rather than on a business basis. It was very spontaneous.”

As for second in command, Micky Moody,
Coverdale was fulsome in his praise... “The man is a genius, and I’m sure that
within the next year he’ll be recognized as a real guitar star. Looking at
White
Snake
at the moment, I have to say that it’s an album that doesn’t really
have a definite direction. It’s like a transitional period between me as a part
of the Deep Purple and me the solo guy. I left Purple in March last year, and I
had a lot of songs which I had written but which couldn’t really be played by
Purple. I knew they wouldn’t fit into the concept of the band because we were,
basically, a concept band, playing dance music. It was very frustrating writing
within that concept for so long. So when the split came, and I decided to make
an album, I had plenty of songs in hand. It was odd after Purple, because I
spent so much time just sitting on my ass doing nothing. You tend to fall into
this terrible state of apathy, but once I started working I began to thrive on
it. Now I keep telling myself that I have to be patient! There are business
considerations and politics that dictate what pace you can go at, and I’m
finding it hard holding myself back.”

In later years, Coverdale has gone so far
as to say that Moody was an early hero of his in and around Teesside, recalling
even his Gibson pick-ups and cream-coloured Fender Telecaster, rumoured to have
once been owned by Jeff Beck.

Wrote
Kerrang!
’s Mark Putterford
in a retrospective evaluation of
White Snake
, “David Codpiece didn’t
have a lot to smile about in August, 1976. His lolly-loaded lodgings with Purple
had just collapsed in a dishevelled heap around his (ridiculous) stack heels
and frustrating legal bullshit threatened to stunt his golden career,
temporarily at least. As The Voice itself explains in the small print, ‘The
happy songs were written in my new home... the moody ones were more or less the
results of a three-month sojourn in a hotel in Munich.’ But there’s
little of the former and enough of the latter to brew an aura of melancholy,
disillusionment and downright dejectedness. Despite the soberness throughout,
White
Snake
is an album of latent attraction. I was initially disappointed,
foolishly expecting a Purple paraphrase, but affection grew with acquaintance
of the emotion-sodden songs and their relation to Coverdale’s plight.”

Ten months later, in March of 1978, David
would be back with
Northwinds
, without any sort of touring having taken
place in the interim, due to contractual hang-ups with the Purple camp. The
album, like its predecessor, came out on Purple Records, further
underscoring the degree to which David was tangled up with his old band’s
business. “Yes, another scam,” laughs Coverdale. “It’s funny, when I joined
Purple, I was going, my God, telling my friends they’ve got their
own record company! But it was just a scam by the management. They would go get
the advance, they would take their hefty percentage of the main advance, and they
would take advantage of being the Purple record executives, and then
they would give the band less percentages than they would have gotten from
Warner Brothers or EMI, right? And the band would go, ‘Look, we’ve got our own
record company.’ I’m sitting here in my office which is loaded with platinum
albums and I’m looking at these records, Purple Records, purple with the
big white P on it? So we had our own record company, big deal [
laughs
].”

A similarly odd assortment of
contributors as the last record, also with Roger Glover producing, one
intriguing touch was the inclusion of Ronnie James Dio and his new wife Wendy
providing back-up vocals for opening track “Keep On Giving Me Love,” a funky
hard rocker that serves as an early blueprint for a room in the
Whitesnake manse.

And n
ow it was
time for Coverdale to get his live act in gear. Besides the clear-cut choice of
pal from home Micky Moody, David hired on a second guitarist by the
name of Bernie Marsden, who had been playing for Paice Ashton Lord.

“What happened was, Dave and I had met
in Germany,” begins Marsden. “I was doing the Paice Ashton Lord album. He lived
about an hour away from Munich. So he came over to see the guys, where I met
him for the first time, and we got on really well. But he didn’t really know
what I did. And he’d heard some tracks. This was the Paice Ashton Lord album,
which is a very fine record, but guitar-wise, I’m very much in Steely Dan mode
on it, just playing kind of click solos and those kinds of guitar parts, rather
than trying to be Ritchie Blackmore or something. So he didn’t know what I did.

“And then I bumped into him in London,
and I said, ‘What are you up to?’ And he said, ‘I’m here to put a band together.’
And he said to me, ‘Would you come down? Because I’m auditioning drummers
tomorrow.’ He says, ‘And your background with Cozy [Powell] and Ian Paice would
be valuable for me.’ And I said ‘Okay, yeah,’ and he said, ‘Bring a guitar with
you.’ So that was the idea. So we got in there and when we started playing,
along with these drummers and bass players, he was at the back, and I didn’t
know he came in. He wasn’t there when I got there. And he said, ‘Can I have a
word with you?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ We were playing this kind of Allman Brothers type-stuff, funnily enough, and he said, ‘I had no idea you played like that.’

“He said, ‘What’s this rumour I hear
about you joining McCartney’s band?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a rumour. Nothing’s
happened at the moment.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can match his kind
of offer, but I’d really like you to be in this band.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s
no conflict there because I haven’t had an offer, and it’s been a few weeks
now.’ A few days after that, we had our first writing session and it was pretty
obvious that we were going to write very well together.

“‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was No. 1 at the
time and I thought, hmm, Okay. It wasn’t that hard. If it would’ve been
something like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’ I might’ve been more inclined to hang around
[
laughs
]. So that was it, really. It was quite simple. It was a
no-brainer, really. I knew it was going to be a really good rock ‘n’ roll band.”
[Note: “Maybe I’m Amazed” is generally regarded as one of McCartney’s finest
songs, whereas “Mull Of Kintyre”, to put it mildly, maybe isn’t, thus
vindicating Marsden’s decision to sign on the dotted line for Coverdale.]

“David wanted to put a band together,”
remarks Moody, offering his side of the story, “and he wanted me to help him
put it together, which I did. I was the first ever Snake back in ‘77. I helped
put Whitesnake together. At first, it was called David Coverdale’s Whitesnake
but he didn’t want that. He wanted it just to be called Whitesnake. I was the
one who said that we should have two guitar players. Like I say, I wasn’t into
hard rock; I was playing Little Feat and The Allman Brothers and that kind of
stuff, which is really my cup of tea.”

Coverdale had worried that not only was
he not sure about having two guitarists in the band but whether
the budget could handle it. In any event, Marsden materialized at rehearsals
with his Les Paul and it was off to the races.

“I was with a band called UFO,” says
Marsden, asked about his baby steps into the biz, “and that was my first pro
gig and I was about 20, 21. I had had gigs offered to me before that; I had
auditioned for stuff, and then I would get the gig and then realize, I don’t
really want to do this. One of the bands was a band called Renaissance, who did
pretty well in America, and I think Canada. But if you can imagine their
music and me, it just didn’t fit.

“You see, in those days, when you
auditioned for people, they kind of didn’t tell you who the band was until you
got in the audition. So you found yourself applying for a job you didn’t want
anyway. It was this thing of turning professional, you know? So that was kind
of a funny thing. You would get the gig and then you would say actually, I don’t
want it, and then you’d see the guys who auditioned two weeks later and they
would say, ‘Well, I thought you joined Renaissance?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, well
I turned it down.’”

Marsden had only briefly flashed through
UFO, spending about ten months with the band and doing a bit of writing on
Phenomenon
,
before moving on. “I was with a group called Babe Ruth,” he remembers. “We did
pretty good in Canada, actually. I had a desire to write a certain way when I
was younger, and I did write that way, and put that basically down onto the
album. But the older I got, the better I became at it. Then there
was Wild Turkey, with one of the guys from Jethro Tull, and we were kind of
into an Allman Brothers-type thing in those days, and I’m talking a long time
ago. But we definitely carried some of that forward into Whitesnake with the
twin guitar thing.”

Next came the aforementioned Paice Ashton
Lord, and after that, well, Marsden wound up inventing the Whitesnake sound
along with Moody and Coverdale. It was Marsden who suggested bassist Neil
Murray, who had been playing with fusion band National Health, might fill the
bill. Coverdale had been dismayed that most of the bass players they
had been checking out had been inspired by the punk rock of the
day, and that his music, especially something like “Ain’t No Love” was going to
require someone a little more studied and old school. Murray, despite his disconcerting
“straightness” fitted the bill, most notably, due to his melodic sensibility.