Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (7 page)

Closing track to the first Whitesnake
album proper is a proto-metal rocker for the band, “Don’t Mess With Me”
frantically bashing at both Purple and punk, not to mention Priest, with that “sinner”
refrain. Yet, something that will be a Whitesnake trademark often flowing
subconsciously through the tracks, there are blues touches, in chord progressions,
in solos sometimes, here in the stomping preamble bits. Great exclamation point
to the album, leaving the listener opining about how hard rock this band could,
and might, be when they put their minds to it.

Touring for
Trouble
found the
band supported by Magnum, up and down the UK from October 26 to November 23,
1978, with Whitesnake making their first attack of the continent beginning with
an extensive German campaign February 9th of 1979 followed by a one-off benefit
gig back at the Hammersmith Odeon, March 3rd. Ian Paice attended the
Hammersmith show and publicly sang the praises of the band, and threw his lot
in with them before the year was out. Then it was back into Europe through
early April, at which the band took time off the road to cook up a next record,
one that would turn up the jets on the beefy riffing as Whitesnake worked its
way methodically past its origins as something far funkier.

The Deep Purple Appreciation Society,
however, wasn’t too hot on the new band. “For those of you who don’t like bad
reviews, I saw the band before I heard this, and there ain’t no comparison. ‘Take
Me With You’ has a nice opening, synthesised noises and chunky guitar before the
track proper starts, but it kind of tails off after a while. I don’t think
Dowle is right for the band, but not being a drummer I can’t really say why. ‘The
Time Is Right For Love’ is a track which, had it had the time devoted to it
that ‘Northwinds’ had, might have been very good. In case you missed the
news about Lord, they just turn him up as it ends, both on this and other
tracks. Overall it’s very ordinary and two-dimensional.”

Interesting that term “two-dimensional,”
which, in effect, is what Murray is getting at in the following assessment of
Whitesnake’s early attempts at songwriting. “If you listen to the
Trouble
album, it’s got a couple of really fast songs on it, which are
really down to not just me and Dave Dowle, the drummer, but even Bernie, and
probably Micky, you know, their kind of jazz-fusion influences and funk rock
influences. We’re still kind of doing those as like individual songs. Okay,
this would be sort of in that style, and this one will be in that style. When
in fact, you need to kind of squish them all together and come up with
something that is truly a Whitesnake style. And that just takes time.”

Delving further into the
composite style of the band at its birthing, Murray says that, “It was no
conscious attempt anyway. It was purely... well, I suppose it came out of David
Coverdale’s solo albums, which he co-wrote and formed with Micky anyway. So
every band is hopefully a melting pot of everybody’s styles and influences. It
just happened that, certainly me, Bernie and Micky were very much from the
same background in the ‘60s, the blues boom era, I suppose. And David, really, the
same kind of thing, but maybe a year or two younger, not that it matters
particularly. But we all had diverse tastes as well. Although we might play a
certain kind of music, that doesn’t mean that we don’t listen to anything else
or we can’t play anything else. But there were definitely elements of jazz
fusion when Whitesnake started.

“Micky’s playing has probably explored a
wider area, going from jazz fusion influences, Jeff Beck, Larry Carlton to very
traditional country blues, Ry Cooder; he’s a very versatile player. Bernie is
more of the straight-ahead rock guitarist but with a very strong blues
feel. I suppose Bernie is a little bit more aggressive and his personal taste
is probably more poppy in terms of his songwriting. He’s written a lot of pop
stuff whereas Mickey wouldn’t do that at all. It would have more to do with the
feel or something that is more blues-based, or Little Feat-based.”

“Micky’s actually incredibly versatile,”
Murray told me in 2014, speaking more so of Moody in a present-day sense. “It’s
just that most people don’t get to hear him do all the different styles he can
do. If he sat down at home, he would probably be messing around with anything
from bluegrass to jazz and, you know, it’s just that on album and live he tends
to be known for sort of blues rock. But he brings an awful lot of other
stuff into the mix.

 “It would be great for him to showcase
more sides of his playing, but sometimes you have to give it an identity,
closer to what he’s known for, to the wider world, which is, sophisticated
blues playing, I suppose. He’s obviously a consummate slide player, but he
could easily do a concert where he played ten different styles of music and
different styles of guitar playing, and be equally brilliant at all of them.”

Adds Marsden on the Moody/Marsden
chemistry, “I think we have a wonderful understanding of each other that a lot
of guys, especially our contemporaries, envied. Phil Lynott used to come to
gigs and see us and he would say, ‘Man, I wish my guys played with the
same feeling that your guys do.’ Because there’s never really any of that,
‘Well, I’m really going to blow him away this night.’ We played together,
in all senses of the word, yet we had totally different styles, really. But we
just kind of come together and we have a very healthy respect for each other.
We don’t slap each other’s back and say how great each other is, because you
know how good you are, or whatever. You don’t have to go around telling people
all the time. People can make their own minds up. We just happened to have a
good relationship and it worked well in the studio and we wrote well together
as well, which is an added bonus.”

“Oh, we could do a whole interview about
that,” sighs Marsden, when asked about his relationship with Phil Lynott. “I
mean, Phil, I knew him a long time, right back to when we were kids together.
I met Gary Moore (another one we’ve lost) when we were both 17. So, once you
bonded as kids... and suddenly we’re all rock stars [
laughs
].

“We would always sit together
and say, ‘Well, we all made it.’ Yeah, but what did we make? We’re all sitting
here complaining about this and complaining about that. But we’re all
world-famous musicians. But Phil wasn’t like that. What was sad — that’s the
word I would use — you could see that he had problems, because we were not that
close as people, just as musicians. You want to say ‘Hey, is anybody looking
out for him?’ And there didn’t seem to be. At the end of the day, you have to
look out for yourself, but it seemed like he needed a bit of looking after.
Towards the end of his life, I saw him a couple of times, and he wasn’t the
guy that I had met at 22 years old. He was another person. But what a talent,
what a great writer, what a great musician.”

Did you ever get close to making music
with him?

“No, no, we talked about it through many
beers, we should do something, but that’s one of the things I never did. That’s
why I was so knocked out to do the Jack Bruce thing, because in your wildest
dreams, when I was 17, 18 years old, you know Jack Bruce! I didn’t think I’d
ever make an album with him. I could say the same thing about Jon Lord and
David Coverdale and Cozy Powell. When your heroes become your friends...”
Sadly, Jack Bruce passed away in October 2014.

“I think the re-master made it look
pretty good,” muses Marsden, in a modern-day assessment of the
Trouble
album. “It would be great to find the masters for that and maybe
go back in and remix the whole thing. But then again, that’s the
essence of the early days. Birch was pretty much in control anyway. But there
was a lot of energy involved, and I think that shows on the album. For example,
‘Don’t Mess With Me’ was a groove in the studio really; that’s how that came
about. We just started playing. Really,
Trouble
and the
EP should be one record, because we did it in the same place and it was just a
continuation. So really, the first album should’ve been
Trouble
and the
other four tracks. Or maybe in that case something like ‘Day Tripper’ wouldn’t
have made the cut. But everything is relative. When you look back on it, it’s
always easy to re-plan, isn’t it?”

Put in context, Rainbow had, by this
point, been accepted by the hardcore punters as a worthy enough replacement for
the lapsed and collapsed Deep Purple. But given the size of the
shoes to fill, there was always room for more pretenders, especially if they
were pedigreed and from the same palette. Most splinter bands, thus far, had
been hard to like, but Whitesnake, with
Trouble
, was proving to have enough
fire to gain a degree of acceptance second only to that afforded Rainbow. In other
words, Whitesnake was, with some difficulty, working its way into the
hearts and minds of the Purple minions of millions.

Over the page:
David Coverdale fronting Deep Purple. A physical and
sartorial make-over is in progress (
Rich Galbraith
)

Above:
Whitesnake circa 1978. L-R sitting: Pete
Solley, Bernie Marsden, Dave Dowle, Neil Murray. Standing: David Coverdale and
Micky Moody. Dowle is holding a clapperboard as a video was being made at the
time. (
Fin Costello/Staff
)

Above:
An old-school bluesman tries to make it in
a London gone post-punk. (
Martin Popoff collection
).