Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (5 page)

“I always wanted to work with another
guitar player, with the twin guitar thing, because I loved the
Allmans and Skynyrd —and Thin Lizzy,” explains Micky Moody on the
acquisition of Marsden. “Those are the kinds of bands I just like, the
sound of two guitars. So Bernie came in the band, who I’d known already for a
number of years anyway, and he used to play with Paice, Ashton and Lord, so he
was part of that Deep Purple family tree. We went into it not really knowing
what we were going to play [
laughs
]. We could only rely on the
guys in the band and what we were listening to. Neil listened to a lot of
jazz/funk, I think probably more than the rest of us, and he also played more
of that stuff. Coverdale was into that stuff as well, and I listened to some of
it. But we just went with what we had; obviously David had a lot of ideas for
songs and we worked them around. But that’s why the first two albums are a
little bit diverse. There’s all kinds of stuff on there based on what we were
listening to. I think it was probably
Ready An’ Willing
where we
actually found our sound.”

At the outer edges of the
Deep Purple family tree, there’s yet another obscure connection, that which
links Whitesnake bassist Neil Murray to Bernie Marsden.

“In the mid-’60s I was a drummer and wasn’t
listening to bass very much,” begins Murray. “I took up bass when I was 17 or
so, and the next few years I’m learning to play, and probably would have been a
fairly standard blues rock player without much black influence, Motown funk or
something. But I happened to get friendly with a bass player from the
Jeff Beck Group, a guy called Clive Chaman. He was on
Rough And Ready
,
and then the album just called
Jeff Beck Group
, in ’72. He was a West
Indian guy, lived in London, who was massively influenced by Jim Jamerson. An
extremely talented bass player. Much more advanced and musically capable than I
was and he became my kind of mentor. And he introduced me to an awful lot of black
music, and in particular Jamerson and Tower Of Power and all sorts of things.

“I can trace my career back to knowing
him because he then was in Cozy’s own band called Hammer in ‘74 after Cozy had
some hit singles here in England —‘Dance With The Devil’ and ‘The Man In Black’—
and they toured around. Bernie was the guitarist in that, and I substituted for
Clive in that band at various times. And basically, because of knowing Bernie
from that band, that’s how I got into Whitesnake. And also because I’d already
played with Cozy in that situation, for then David to say in ‘82, ‘Well I’m not
sure you’re the right bass player to play with Cozy.’ And then
you see later on, I’m with him in Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Peter Green,
Splinter Group, lots and lots of other situations [
laughs
].”

So, how did this consummate blues bass
player wind up playing hard rock?

“Right at the beginning you’ve got The
Kinks and ‘You Really Got Me.’ Even to an extent The Troggs, ‘Wild Thing,’
picked up by Hendrix in an even heavier way. For me, the power of a band like
Cream was taking blues into a much more heavy intensity. Maybe it wasn’t very
heavy metal, but then Cream influenced Black Sabbath when they
were starting off. But for me the real power bands in the ‘60s were like
Mountain and Vanilla Fudge. For me, apart from Clive Chaman and the
Jamerson side of it and Jack Bruce, the other bass player that really
influenced me was Tim Bogert from Vanilla Fudge. He kind of took — and Billy
Sheehan was just saying this the other day when I saw him do a bass clinic — he
took Jamerson and made it heavier. A more distorted sound, but put it into a
rock context. But absolutely, Vanilla Fudge.”

“Neil, I’ve known since 1974,” offers
Marsden. “We played together with Cozy Powell, and we’d known each other
for a long, long time. Neil is a great, great musician. He’s a good stand-up
guy, one of the nicest guys. Back in Whitesnake we all got on very well. We
weren’t in each other’s pockets. We worked together really well, and we played
together really hard. But outside of Whitesnake, we had very little in common.
And I think that’s a good thing.”

“Neil is probably the best rock bassist I’ve
ever played with,” adds Moody. “He’s so consistent and so good, and he puts so
much effort into it. He really does, and it’s funny, because in the
early Whitesnake days, when we were together, I never realized how good he was.
Until later on, years later, when I would listen to the old Whitesnake stuff again,
and I’d just focus on the bass playing, and it’s like, it’s perfect! It’s just
everything he plays is just absolutely perfect, and he’s even better now. Just
a fantastic bass player. He really is. That’s all I can say, really. There’s other
bass players I’ve worked with, but Neil just has that something extra, the
right thing at the right time.”

Finishing off the first line-up were
drummer Dave “Duck” Dowle and keyboardist Brian Johnson, who were collared from
Chapman and Whitney’s Streetwalkers. Dowle had replaced none other
than Nicko McBrain in that band. Johnson was soon replaced in Whitesnake by
Pete Solley –
who had played in
Paladin, Procol Harum, and most importantly, Snafu with Moody – within
a few months. Dowle was not David’s first choice, Coverdale having preferred
Graham Broad, then quite unknown but later a legendary sideman, and for
bassists, anyone from Alan Spencer to DeLisle Harper, Chrissie Stewart and
Mickey Feat.

Also discussed by David in interviews
down the road, as being on his wish list included Trapeze drummer Dave Holland,
who went on to Judas Priest, plus Trapeze guitarist Mel Galley, who eventually
did join the band. Another drummer who David had always admired was Cozy
Powell, who also eventually joined, after his manic work schedule cleared
itself in the early 1980s.

So now we had ourselves a Whitesnake,
even according to the adverts for
Northwinds
, one of which reads... “David
Coverdale coming in on the
Northwinds
. David Coverdale will take you by
storm. The man that shot to fame as Deep Purple’s lead singer is now on the
road with his own band, Whitesnake, and coming your way. Catch them
if you can on tour or vinyl. Guaranteed to blow your mind.”

-3-

David Coverdale’s Snakebite – “A
Particular Creative Umbrella”

The newly minted David Coverdale’s
Whitesnake was scheduled to be unveiled to a waiting world on February 23, 1978,
via a gig at The Sky Bird Club in Nottingham. However, that show never
happened. Coverdale indicated that the band first played at Lincoln Polytechnic,
remembering also that the van broke down on the return trip to London.

“I have to keep on correcting people,”
confirms Neil Murray. “Because they take it from an initial record company
publicity thing, where we were booked to play The Sky Bird Club in Nottingham.
That definitely was not the first Whitesnake gig. It was Lincoln. I’ve got a
list of every gig we did, on a spreadsheet [
laughs
]; I keep diaries and
stuff, and so in general, I know absolutely what happened on which days.”

On April 7th to the 13th, the
band was to be found at Central Recorders studio with the legendary producer Martin
Birch, who was famed for his work with Deep Purple. The end result would be a
brightly rocking four-track EP called
Snakebite
which presented to the
world in fine fashion many of the Whitesnake moves to be celebrated certainly
through to the early 1980s. Featuring oddly arresting and “collectible” looking
cover art — a rudimentary and simple line drawing in black and red on plain
white; lyrics on the back — the EP would be issued as a 7” in both standard
black plus white vinyl.

But why just an EP?

“The record company wouldn’t commit to an
album,” explains Marsden. “That’s why. It looked like it was a done deal with
EMI, but EMI International, which is what that record was on, was kind of a
poor man’s part of EMI. And the guy that ran the show there, he was a big fan
of the band but he said no, I want to sign them. But his bosses wouldn’t let
him sign us for an album. So they said, well let’s do an EP. So we did the
EP, and he put a lot of work into it, doing the white vinyl version and making
sure it was a picture sleeve and stuff like that. And it created a lot of
interest. But without him... that was a guy called Robbie Dennis. He should be
credited high up in the Whitesnake story, because he was the guy who wanted to
go with it. And, of course, after that, because that record did pretty well, we
went straight in to do
Trouble
, and after that he became a hero within the
label. You’ll notice very soon after that we were on the EMI label, on Liberty.”

As for the street-level cover art, as alluded
to, that was a UK thing? “Correct,” agrees Marsden. “They changed them
all over the world. Yeah, we had no say in that. We didn’t even see the
covers, until, I think,
Lovehunter
, which was even a
fait accompli
.
We just said, let’s have a painting of a woman. That’s what we said and that’s
what we got. I think the only one we had some clearance on was
Come An’ Get
It
, with the painting of the apple and the snake — good cover.”

Into the music on
Snakebite
: “Bloody
Mary” begins with boogie-woogie piano and then pops into a guitary, Stonesy
roots rocker. Notes Bernie, “‘Bloody Mary,’ that was David’s song. He had that
hook, line and sinker; that was all done before we went in the
studio. That was a single; it was kind of promoted as the 45 at the
time, from that EP.”

“Steal Away” was a funky hard rocker rife
with slide, and distinguished by a military drumbeat from Dowle. “‘Steal Away,’
that was, I think, all of us,” says Marsden. “And there are Syndrums
[electronic drums] on that. They were new at the time [
laughs
], but then
everybody got them. But it was a pretty cool song, and a bit of a precursor to
what was going to happen with Whitesnake, really.”

“Come On” was the most modern and
straightforward song on offer, cruising into the memory circuits like heavy Bad
Company. The track would become a live staple, all the more surprising, given
that... “‘Come On’ was the first song that Dave and I wrote together,”
says Bernie. “We did that in a flat in London, not even in a rehearsal place. I
always liked ‘Come On;’ I thought it was a great song. And there
was a love song that never ever surfaced, a fifth song for that EP. It was
going to be a five-track EP, which was unusual for the time. It was called ‘The
First Time’ or something like that, but it got lost.”

Finally, “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of
The City,” a dark and stirring ballad, would become one of the
most famous songs of the band’s early incarnation. David has said that he and
Micky performed a rearrangement on it, slowing it down, which worked well as an
audition piece for the revolving door of players they were trying to bring into
the band. It’s Whitesnake’s equivalent to Thin Lizzy’s “Still In Love With
You,” Scorpions’ “Still Loving You,” or Purple’s “Mistreated,” a showcase for
Coverdale’s bluesy phrasing and a jam for the band. The song, written by
Michael Prince and Dan Walsh, was first made famous by Bobby Bland in 1974 who
included it on his
Dreamer
album. On the surface a love lament, critics
have interpreted it as a song about poverty and depression in the
big city. Covered by dozens of artists over the years, Whitesnake would adapt the
title for their popular first live album in 1980.

Definitely a big hit for the
band. “To the point where people still to this day think we wrote that song,”
agrees Marsden. “Because we had the bigger version of it. I was a huge Bobby
Bland fan, and I was a big fan of his old stuff. But then I still liked the
modern period of his, which is the ABC stuff, and I just loved the
Dreamer
album, and I loved ‘Ain’t No Love In Heart Of The City.’ And I
thought with David’s voice we could do a great version of it, which we did. But
the reason we made the lyrics, if you ever read the lyrics on it, it’s wrong.
That’s because in the studio, I couldn’t remember the middle eight, the
second middle eight, so I just kept repeating it. That’s my fault — we didn’t
actually play the record until we recorded it. But yeah, we slowed it down and
I’d come up with that kind of opening riff, and David got totally involved in
it, which is very, very good. He sang a fantastic version.”

Assessing
Snakebite
, Murray says
that, “There wasn’t much difference between the EP and the first album because they’re
only two or three months apart, really. The EP was our first time in the
studio and you know, there are a couple of bits and pieces that, maybe even on
Trouble
,
we wouldn’t have done that way. But we were just kind of experimenting. ‘Come On,’
‘Ain’t No Heart’ and ‘Steal Away’ we used to play live. ‘Bloody Mary’ was a
single, so we did that on TV, miming, quite a lot, in those first few months,
but I don’t think we actually ever played it live. And the difficulty is, once
you’ve played some of those songs so often, particularly ‘Come On,’ which used
to be sort of the first song in the set for a couple of years, you forget how
it was in the original. You don’t listen to it anymore and you just kind of get
used to how it is now on stage, as it were. But when I do listen to that EP, it
sounds a bit uninformed. I mean, until
Ready An’ Willing
, Whitesnake
didn’t really find its true sound.”

“There’s no serum for Coverdale’s
snakebite,” read the label hype at the time, in an ad featuring band shot and
illustrated snake. “David Coverdale’s Whitesnake has been described by
Record
Mirror
as “fabulous, simply magic.” By
NME
as “totally persuasive.”
Sounds
reported, “Even if they only played one song, (their) inherent greatness…
couldn’t possibly have gone unnoticed.” Discover Whitesnake’s power for
yourself on
Snakebite
. A four-track single. That’s half an album for
only 99p. And there’s a special collectors edition in white vinyl with a custom
label and bag. ‘Come On,’ ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City,’ ‘Bloody
Mary,’ ‘Steal Away.’ Four tracks in the right vein from David Coverdale’s
Whitesnake.”

As discussed, the four tracks from the
UK-generated EP would be combined with four from
Northwinds
— “Keep On
Giving Me Love,” “Queen Of Hearts,” “Only My Soul” and the frantic heavy metal
shuffle of “Breakdown”— to create an eight track album that was North America’s
introduction to the band;
Snakebite
, by Whitesnake.

And the paste-job worked fine. Three of
those were heavy blues rockers of three different postures, while the
fourth, “Only My Soul” was an acoustic ballad of the same moody “desperado” temperament
as “Ain’t No Love.” Whitesnake had an album on its hands.

By this point, says Murray, just as the
axis had shifted from Coverdale solo to Whitesnake, the geographical centre of the
band had shifted from David’s sojourn in Germany to the UK, the
band, in one sense, becoming the quintessential UK rock act. But why did David
wind up living in Germany in the first place?

“Well, he was married to a German lady,”
begins Murray. “Plus, with Purple, they had a very good relationship with
Germany and Munich in particular. I think they’d recorded a couple of albums at
Musicland Studios in Munich. And Ritchie in particular was very struck with, I
don’t know, the German way of life or the attitude or something. There was
something very negative about Britain in the ‘70s. We went through all these
strikes going on and power blackouts and stuff, and we would go to America — or
they would; I mean, I was still stuck here [
laughs
] — and they
would have loads of success and luxury and whatever, and come back here, and it
all seemed very miserable and dark and depressing.

“And in Germany, I think, they
also had a much more admiring view of star musicians — like the
guys in Deep Purple. Whereas in Britain, the tendency is try and bring people
down to your level. Whereas in other countries, quite often, it’s like, ‘Oh my
God, it’s David Coverdale!’ like a superstar god. And that can be very
attractive. So, a combination of circumstances. I mean, it’s all just
conjecture on my part, because I wasn’t there, but when I basically first
jammed and then auditioned with Whitesnake at the end of ‘77, David was already
married to this German lady, Julia. Soon after they had his daughter. And, you
know, he in particular was happy to be part of the German lifestyle for a bit.
But then they moved over here when Whitesnake got going, and that continued on.
So he wasn’t living in Germany after, I would think, some time in ‘77. But he
probably spent quite a lot of time back there now and again. And we toured there
quite a bit. That was one of our big territories.”

Whitesnake played live fairly regularly
during March 1978, but only sparingly in April through June, making it off the
island for the first time on June 17th for a show in the Netherlands.
It was a mix of clubs and theatres but soon the band’s fortunes would be
improving.

“To me, it’s basically a different suit,”
Coverdale told Mitch Lafon, explaining the mission of those early days. “When I
was with Purple I learned to tailor the style of music I was writing for the
identity, but within three years that became an ever decreasing circle. So,
when I formed Whitesnake I wanted Whitesnake to be able to embrace a plethora
of styles under a particular creative umbrella called Whitesnake. I wanted to
do hard rock, R&B, blues and, if necessary, with good commercial hooks and
I’ve done very well harnessing that.”

Mission accomplished and Whitesnake had
carved out a modest position for themselves with music that was about as
unfashionable as could be, given the punk, new wave, post-punk and pre-New Wave
Of British Heavy Metal times in which it was birthed. David had built himself a
ship of dreams. Now all he had to do was launch it against the aforementioned waves that threatened the seaworthiness of his new venture.