Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage Page 4

  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.

  “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.
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  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.”