Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (6 page)

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Trouble
– “The Room Literally Shook”

David Coverdale, post-Purple, was his
own worst enemy. Sure, he could lament his lack of success through a
rockscrabble solo career, which then untidily morphed into Whitesnake with
compromised band names, confusing album titles and EPs. But facts were staring
him in the face: the public did not want funky R&B or blues
fusion or whatever it was he was selling, right alongside the
flailing Ian Gillan Band and the already failed Paice Ashton Lord. It was up to
the strong-willed lead singer and his band of pirates to change that seemingly
insurmountable public perception and slowly, toward some measure of success, he
would do just that.

July to August of 1978 would find the
band working on their first proper album, to be called
Trouble
, at
Central Recorders on Denmark St, in the heart of London’s Tin Pan Alley off
Charing Cross Road. Roger Glover had turned Coverdale onto the
place when they had been working together on
Northwinds
. Cramped and too
hot, with the control room upstairs, it nonetheless served its purpose — plus
it was cheap.

With Jon Lord suddenly free, just as they’re finishing up the record, David hauls him into the Whitesnake fold after attempts to
poach the talented Colin Towns from Ian Gillan’s band fail, as does an attempt
to coax Tony Ashton to enlist. Indeed, it could have gone the
other way. Jon and Ian had been lobbying Coverdale to join Paice Ashton Lord,
with David wisecracking that it wouldn’t have been a good career move for any
of them to be in a band called CLAP! To complicate matters further,
Mick Ralphs from Bad Company had been lobbying to get Lord into his band, only
to have Paul Rodgers quash the idea (and remember, Rodgers and Moody were in a
couple of bands together back in their youth).

The process of making the
Trouble
album found Coverdale presenting his mostly piano-based ideas
(born in Bavaria!) to Moody and Marsden on a Teac 3300S at what he called a smelly
cellar behind the Purple offices at 25 Newman Street, in London’s West End. The
album was hammered out in ten days including mixing (and fortifying visits to the
Newman Arms, a really cosy little pub), with much of the conclusion of the
process consisting of erasing keyboardist Pete Solley’s tracks so that Jon
could add his talents.

 “Jon brought to the table what Jon Lord
did,” reflects Marsden. “I mean, when he overdubbed the stuff on
Trouble
,
we had already recorded with the previous keyboard player, before Jon joined the
band. And literally, when Jon brought his Hammond organ and stuff into the
studio, I mean, the room literally shook. And you know, Jon had a presence
about him, as a person, and you know what he was like as a musician.”

Adds Coverdale, “A lot of people don’t
realize... they either look at Purple as a collective or particularly Ritchie.
But a huge part of Deep Purple’s sound was Jon Lord’s left hand on that
customized Hammond organ. My God, it would shake your haemorrhoids when he
would hit the bottom end of that Hammond.”

“Jon Lord is the diplomat, the
analyzer,” adds Glenn Hughes, remembering his days with him in Purple. “He was
probably the backbone of the group, actually. At the end, when a lot of
decisions were made, they were by him, because he was the more stable person, I
thought, at the time.”

Neil Murray makes a good point, however,
that even though Pete Solley’s tracks were replaced by Jon’s, Solley’s input
can be felt through the record’s jazz fusion touches. “You’ve got to remember,
Pete Solley was the keyboard player on
Trouble
, and recorded the
whole album. So his influence, keyboard-wise — which wouldn’t be Hammond organ
and more traditional kind of rock band keyboards — it was more sort of synthesizers
and stuff. But then Jon Lord came in and replayed all of the keyboards on
Trouble
,
having not been involved in the writing or the rehearsing of it at all.”

Murray can’t remember if that meant that
Lord more or less played to Solley’s parts or not, but he asserts that the
rushed process would have resulted in Jon not really being Jon. “I wasn’t there
in the studio when he was doing it. I would’ve thought he brought his own thing
to it, he wouldn’t have had enough time to really be familiar with the
songs. And also, you know, you play differently if you’re on your own, overdubbing
on recordings than when you’re playing all together as a band. You’re so under the
spotlight in the studio that anything you try out almost has to be right the
first time. Whereas if you’re just rehearsing away all together,
you can make a mess of things and try stuff out. You know, it doesn’t matter so
much.

“And then you actually hone it down to
what is really required or what works the best. And the trouble is, really, you
should go out on the road and play all the songs twenty times before you go in the
studio. But generally speaking, that’s not possible. And that’s the
frustrating thing about any album. That you could do it so much better, where the
performances or even the arrangements could be a lot better if you were able to
play them live first and try them out.”

“We would all do solo spots and we would
hang out together,” muses Moody, on the band as gang in the formative years. “We
would have a lot of fun and we were all mates. It was like being in school
again. It was the best camaraderie I have ever experienced in my entire musical
life. Of course, we never made much money. Bands don’t, unless they
sell lots of records. We never cracked the States and we never even came there.
Unless you crack the States you don’t make much money. In those days, the
record companies had money to put in the bands.”

On the subject of money, David recalls
that he had begun the process of sharing the publishing rights on one song per
album. He hoped that would assuage some of the misgivings about how low the
wages were that he had to pay the guys back then.

The cover art of the record, at least in the
UK, mimicked the indie NWOBHM look of the EP, using only black and red ink on
white and minimal imagery. Like
Snakebite
, however, the
art would be wisely shelved for something that popped a bit better, in
Trouble
’s
case, an angry white snake being hatched from a levitating egg.

“This album is going to give you nothing
but trouble,” read one full-page ad for the record, which included a full slate
of UK tour dates. “
Trouble
is the new album from Whitesnake that has ten
potent tracks including the current single, ‘Lie Down (A Modern Love Song).’ ‘Lie
Down’ is the first single since Jon Lord joined David Coverdale’s Whitesnake to
complete the band’s line-up. Listen to Whitesnake and get into
Trouble
.”

Trouble
opens with a squarely heavy metal rocker called “Take Me With You,”
distinguished as much by Neil Murray’s tight bass line as David’s lascivious
lyric. It’s a fast one, missing any trace of the blues, and it turns on an odd
time signature — Neil calls it “a big and exciting work-out with lots of solos
in it.” Most definitely, armed with this track, Whitesnake is indeed exploding
out of the gates. Next, the band take it way down for a light-hearted lope of funk
called “Love To Keep You Warm,” which is followed up by “Lie Down (A Modern
Love Song)” which could be described as a typical Whitesnake rocker from the
early 1980s but with more pure pop than the band would dare utilize, at least
through the course of the next two albums.

Next the band apply their
slow-burn funk rock ethic to a cover of The Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” chopping it
up with pregnant pauses and then further overhauling the song (sacrilegiously)
during the chorus. There’s copious talk box too, just in case we didn’t think the
band had a sense of humour!

“I thought it would be good to do a funky
version of it,” recalls Marsden. “And then David Dowle, the original drummer,
he was a really good funk drummer in that vein — he’d been with Brian Auger’s
band — and we were in rehearsal one afternoon, and I just said to him, ‘Let’s
try this.’ And it was a jam in the rehearsal room, to be honest with you. And then
we kind of crafted it down a little when we got into the studio. The studio, by
the way, was about eight feet square. Yeah, by the time they put Jon Lord’s
equipment in there, we could hardly move [
laughs
]. But ‘Day Tripper’ was
a big success; it got a lot of people talking about it. The first Whitesnake
hit ever was a Beatles song, and we played it live sometimes; it was quite fun.”

“Nighthawk (Vampire Blues)” gets its
title from Coverdale’s beloved mum’s name for David, who’s not afraid to bring
up the good woman from time to time in interviews. Notes Marsden, “I just had the
idea for that, and then David came up with that kind of dark lyric, which
turned it into a vampire song. But I just had the music ready for that one,
ready to go, and he came up with all the words on that one, which was
brilliant.” This one’s a maelstrom of blues fusion mixed with hard rock, on
which Marsden and Moody get their work out. “Nighthawk” is scattered
Whitesnake, but Whitesnake nonetheless.

“The Time Is Right For Love” plays to a
brisk shuffle more the signature of Uriah Heep, although Coverdale’s got his
own version of “Easy Livin’” [from Heep’s
Demons & Wizards
album] and
it’s called “Breakdown.” Jazzy chord changes belie the bench depth of David’s
band of brothers, as does the percolating bass line, while the
Lizzy-esque opening sequence speaks to the twin guitar comfort of Moody with
Marsden.

Next up, is
Trouble
’s title track,
which in a normal world, might have been the Lieber/Stoller classic. But that
was left to Coverdale doppelganger Ian Gillan to cover, with his band Gillan,
working very much the same UK-centric career path as David with a lag of a year
or two. Whitesnake’s “Trouble” was actually a reclined hard rocker, in the
pocket, a bit funky but not particularly bluesy.

Weirdly, the two bands never crossed
paths. “No, not really,” recalls Moody. “I don’t even know Ian Gillan. I only
met him once. So we never ran across each other, and we never played any gigs
or festivals together, so that didn’t even come into the equation, for me.
Maybe for David it did — of course obviously, he was following on from Ian. But
for me, you know, I didn’t even give it a thought, to be quite honest.”

Following “Trouble” is “Belgian Tom’s Hat
Trick,” another funky shuffle, but an instrumental. It is of note that
Coverdale, who fancies himself as a bit of a guitarist, says he had taken a
shot at a solo for it, but cooler heads prevailed and his take was wiped.
Marsden is full-on sceptical of the story but nonetheless affirms, “He’s quite
a good guitar player, David Coverdale, but he never did add any guitar, I mean,
not even rhythm guitar. No, he was quite happy to let us do our job. In
rehearsals and stuff like that, he would play. His ideas were always pretty
good on guitar. And he’s a pretty good soloist as well. In rehearsals... I wish
we’d recorded some solos, I’d have some unique takes, wouldn’t I? In rehearsals,
he was always playing the guitar. He was always picking up my Les Paul and
playing it [
laughs
].”

“Belgian Tom” gives way to the
progressive hard rock of “Free Flight,” sung more than capably by Marsden, who
gives the track a James Gang vibe through his high, strong pipes and the
song’s circular riffing. “Absolutely, there may well have been a bit of that
Joe Walsh era in that. Yeah, that’s a good spot [
laughs
]. Big Joe Walsh
fan. But that just shows you from the early days, how the band was. Dave had
never wanted his name on it. You know, the record company put his name on it.
And he says, ‘I want you to sing this’ and I’m like, ‘Well, you’re the
singer.’ He says, ‘No, you can sing, get on with it.’ There was no egos
involved. I think he wanted to get out of that whole Deep Purple scenario,
where there were tremendous egos involved. I think he found it a fresh air kind
of thing once he was into the new band. But ‘Outlaw,’ on
Lovehunter
,
that was the last one I sang, I think. Because I didn’t sing anything on
Ready
An’ Willing
. And that was probably more down to me than him. He’d probably
say, ‘Are you going to sing one?’ I’d say, ‘Nah, you do it.’ [
laughs
].”