Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage (9 page)

Why on earth was Bernie making a solo
album, at the same time Whitesnake were crafting
Lovehunter
? “I was
approached by the Japanese record company after the Whitesnake tour of Japan,
and they got straight onto my management people at the time, and they
said they wanted to do an album with me. That was the reason. Sounds most
unlikely to me, but there you go.”

Suddenly, Bernie found himself working
with a number of rock greats including Ian Paice and Cream legend Jack Bruce,
who was an intimidating presence to a young and unproven Marsden. “Totally!” he
laughs. “I was just like, there is me, Jack Bruce and Ian Paice in the
studio, or with Simon Phillips, and I’m just looking thinking, ‘Wow, this is
Jack Bruce’ and how many times I queued up in the wind and rain to see him, as
a kid. Always admired him as a musician, suddenly playing my music on my
record.

“I was totally intimidated for like the
first hour, to the point where Jack — and I love him forever for it — put his
hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Look, I’m here because I want to be here,
because I like what you’re doing. I like the way you play.’ But I kept making
mistakes, because I was kind of freaked-out because Jack Bruce was playing on
it. And then you’ve got these other guys involved. I always used to say that I
was the least famous guy on the album, and people laugh about it now, but it’s
true.”

Flash forward to 2014, and Bernie has
shown up on a Jack Bruce solo album. “Yeah, I’m on two tracks. In fact, Jack
has just been on the BBC, on the radio this afternoon here saying some very
nice things about me. He said, ‘Bernie is the best blues guitar player that
no-one knows’ [
laughs
]. He’s a very nice guy, Jack Bruce. He said, ‘It’s
taken me 30 years, but I’ve returned the favour.’”

As for picking which songs to put on the
solo album, and which to demonstrate to his Whitesnake mates: “There was never
any conflict. That was the great thing about the Whitesnake set-up. Bear in
mind, by
Lovehunter
, we still hadn’t become the world-famous group. So there
was never any problem. But what I was conscious of, I wanted to do something
different from Whitesnake. I thought, what’s the point of doing a solo album
with me singing, when I’ve got one of the best singers in the
world, you know, in my real job? Plus I was writing melodic songs — I was kind
of into American music — and it shows on both the solo albums.”

“
Look At Me Now
[his second solo
effort] was strange,” continues Marsden, when asked to divine the
separate personalities of his two solo albums. “The other one was kind of
worked out in advance. Suddenly, I was No. 1 in the import charts in the
UK, and it was selling for probably the best part of $20, which was a hell of a
lot of money in those days, and it had been No. 1 for, I don’t know, five or
six weeks in the import charts. So EMI in England, they picked up the
option to release it for the rest of the world, but by that time I was ready to
do another one. And it just happened that I had to do it very quickly, after the
first one came out. I think we had five weeks off, so I went to Britannia Row,
which was the Pink Floyd studio, and did
Look At Me Now
, but that was a
pretty rushed job, really. That was all written and recorded in three weeks.”

How would Bernie contrast what Cozy
Powell and Simon Phillips brought to those situations?

“Well,
Look At Me Now
and
And
About Time Too
, I think more drummers bought those albums than any other
people, because the people on them were pretty great. The second time around,
it’s almost like a Whitesnake album really, without David, you know. I think I
brought in a couple of mates to play, but Cozy played on a couple tracks, which
was great.

“And it was just done very quickly. But I
like the album now. I don’t know, there’s some kind of vibe about it that it
shouldn’t really have, because it was done fairly quickly. But maybe that’s the
secret — in and out. I like the song ‘Look At Me Now;’ should have been a
Whitesnake song. I was naïve enough to think, no, I’ll keep that one for me,
but Dave would’ve done a great job on that. And I would’ve sold a lot more
copies. David had expressed some interest in that one, and I said no, that’s the
title of the album, need to keep that one. I’m the big loser in that one,
really [
laughs
].”

But we digress. Over to side two of
Lovehunter
and there’s a third track in that heavy metal zone, “Mean Business” in fact
being the most modern and un-blues-based on the record, further
grist for the band’s placement and participation in the UK metal explosion of the
day.

Explains Marsden, “‘Mean Business,’ it’s
funny, that was the only time in the early days where David and I had a
disagreement in the studio. I thought it was too heavy metal, and he did a lot
of work on it, and we did all these great harmonies, and we kind went to the
control room and listened to it, and he said, ‘What do you think of it?’ I
said, ‘Well, I think you did a really good job on it, but I just don’t know if
it’s the way the band should be sounding.’ I just thought it was more heavy
metal than rock. And over the years, I decided that he was completely right and
I was probably wrong and a bit too sensitive to the situation. Because ‘Mean
Business’ is a pretty decent track and it just stands out, to me. And the
combination between something like ‘Mean Business’ and then ‘Help Me Thro’ The
Day,’ it could definitely be two different groups. But there’s something that
holds it together, and that’s the unknown magic of Whitesnake in the
early days.”

“So, it was one of the hardest tracks to
record,” says Marsden, meaning from the entire catalogue, in fact. “That was
tough, because, as I say, it was a very heavy thing at the time, and I kind of
felt it was heavier than we needed to do. So I had a few problems personally
with it, yet I actually do really like the track now. Dave and I had, shall we
say, a bit of a misunderstanding on a couple of things, and I was quite
vehement at the time, and so was he, and he won, and I’m glad he did, because I
can see now exactly what it was.”

But really, says Bernie, there
was no real clear product champion for the harder rock within the
band: “No, nobody, really. From ‘Mean Business’ to ‘Love Man’ on
Ready An’
Willing
, the point I was trying to make with ‘Mean Business’ is kind of
apparent. I’d say that things like ‘Ain’t Gonna Cry,’ which is still one of my
favourite Whitesnake songs, I didn’t see the relative relation of things like
that to ‘Mean Business.’ I don’t think there’s really that much material that
is heavier, from
Ready An’ Willing
on, right up until the
1987
album, which of course, doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Mean Business” has a bit of a propulsive
military snare drum drive not unlike Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” but also
like a modern double bass metal song, a mild proto-thrash. It is the
work of Dave “Duck” Dowle, who would soon make way for the illustrious Ian
Paice to join the band for a nice run.

“Dave was a great drummer,” says Marsden,
“and he still is. And we’re still in contact although not so much. He was in
Brian Auger’s band, and Brian never hired anybody who couldn’t play. In
Streetwalkers and stuff like that. He was a really good player, and the
combination of him leaving the band and getting Ian in... well, it was a combination
of things happening.”

The timing of Paice joining Whitesnake
was actually such that Coverdale had wanted to have the drums for
Lovehunter
re-recorded, with a proposed Paice performance replacing the one from Dowle. Of
course, given the times (and even now), this would have been quite an engineering
feat, and the idea was scotched by management due to cost.

“It wasn’t possible,” shrugs Murray. “I
think we had probably deadlines and stuff. But it was more that the
experience of recording the album with Dave Dowle brought it home to everybody
that we needed more of a, I don’t know, powerful, strong, rock drummer, whereas
Dave was more a little bit light and funky, in the way he plays.”

Onto the title track, and Whitesnake get
back to work building that thumping blues rock legacy more the
domain of songs from the next record through
Slide It In
. “Love Hunter”
(two words) is a camp but high-volume swamp rocker with a bit of a Kiss vibe
down Gene Simmons’ side of the stage. “‘Love Hunter’ was probably a combination
of the three of us, a classic Coverdale/Marsden/Moody,” recalls Marsden. “I
think I had the verses, the kind of riff thing, and Micky came up with the
slide parts. I think I had an idea for a chorus, you know, ‘Looking out for
you, babe’ or something, and David went away and of course came up with some
better lyrics. We recorded that pretty quickly. That was always a stage
favourite, always.”

With “Outlaw,” we’re most definitely back
to a fusion vibe, circa
Trouble
or Coverdale solo or Ian Gillan Band.
Enclosed are some sweet twin leads, no surprise given that David has been known
to call The Allman Brothers’ first record his blueprint for Whitesnake.

Says Marsden: “‘Outlaw’ was one where
David asked me... he said, ‘I think you should do it’. It was basically my
song, and the much lamented Jon Lord added some really nice parts, which he
didn’t even want to take credit for, and I insisted in the end, because he made
such a difference to them. That’s Jon all over. That’s how he was.

“And David just said, ‘I think you should
sing this.’ You know, I sing a track on the first album as well, and he said, ‘Oh,
this would be your track on this album.’ I said, ‘Well, Okay.’ Again, kind of a
light song, but melodically there’s maybe a little bit of Thin Lizzy in there;
I was always a big fan of Phil as a writer.”

“Rock ‘n’ Roll Women” is another
knees-up rocker like “You ‘n’ Me” and “Love Hunter,” with Bernie suspecting he
doesn’t even play on it. Did that happen often? “Sometimes. Sometimes we would
do the guitar parts alone. Pretty much, writing-wise, the solo would be from the
person who wrote the song. There was never any problem. It was like, ‘No, this
is your tune, you play guitar on it.’ Or sometimes we would track together,
the solos, the harmony parts obviously. But backing tracks... I think ‘Fool
For Your Loving’ is me; that’s nearly all my guitar on that, and I played the
solo on that one as well. But there was never any need to throw on double
guitars every time. It didn’t make any sense.”

Lovehunter
closes with a poignant yet brief piano-based goodbye called “We Wish You Well,”
on which David’s voice sounds weary and gospel-tinged like Gregg Allman. “Dave
still closes his shows with that,” says Marsden. “At the end of every
Whitesnake show, there’s my guitar solo ringing out [
laughs
]. It’s a
lovely little piece of music.”