Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  “When they asked me to join, I said no,” recalls Hughes. “I did not want to be just a bass player. I just wanted to be the singing bass player from Trapeze, where my heritage was started. And that’s what I am today. I’m the singing bass player/lead singer. But I did think that the Coverdale/Hughes connection, with me being the secondary singer, if you will... I’ve never had a problem in that role, because I always think I’m going to be a student of the voice until the day I die. I think that anybody who thinks that they are the finished article is bullshitting. So I think what Coverdale and Hughes had to offer has never been reproduced by anybody.”

  Coverdale can thank Blackmore for his big break, says Hughes. “Yeah, first of all, he wanted Gillan out, and Gillan left. Definitely he wanted out. Because Gillan was crazy back then; I think he just wanted to be away from the business. And Roger Glover was let go in order for me to come in. Bruce Payne [Purple’s manager] wasn’t involved in that. Ritchie did everything. Ritchie ran that thing with an iron-clad fist.”

  Were the guys worried or, at least, hesitant about David’s abilities? “There was no problem with his voice, but he was very green in the fact that he had never done any arena shows. He had never been on a stage bigger than a club stage. I think the first gig we did with David was maybe in Denmark: 10,000 people. So he jumped in with both feet. David Coverdale is a charismatic guy, even before he was famous. He was perfect for the role.”

  Coverdale explains how he got broken in to the band: “‘Lay Down Stay Down’ was one of the first lyrics I wrote. It was interesting. Obviously I was in awe [of Blackmore], my whole inspiration was Hendrix, that style of guitar playing. And Blackmore was a phenomenal musician. I’d always worked with good players but these guys were something else, and, of course, they had the ego and the sound and equipment to put their money where their mouth was. So working with Ritchie was a marriage made in heaven.

  “And I was learning as I was going. I’m a good sponge and I was soaking it all in. And the more comfortable I felt, the more comfortable I felt providing musical ideas. Because I had been writing for a few years, just with the local bands. And we connected very well. Both of us were fans of medieval music, which is a modal concept similar to Bach, and we both enjoyed similar acts or whatever, and so I would feel more comfortable putting in chord ideas and melodies.

  “We did all the rehearsals at a place called Clearwell Castle in Gloucester in the Forest Of Dean, which is basically our second home. We rehearsed in a crypt and I’d tape a cassette because they had just been developed and I would fashion lyrics out of those things. Stormbringer was written mostly in the studio which was a huge expense, very time-consuming and you kept having to compromise just in order to get it done. But Ritchie had said to me, ‘You know, the Burn album was really successful.’ It re-established them in 1974/1975, we were the most successful selling act in the world, and then there was a collective sigh of relief that we maintained it by making the change from Mark II to Mark III, that they had maintained the success level, so they could put their feet up. Which wasn’t Blackmore’s vibe and it certainly wasn’t mine. So a bit of laziness crept in there in terms of the input into songs.”

  The other problem in Purple besides degenerating personal relationships, was that the brash young upstarts in the band were having the temerity to introduce elements of funk and blues and balladry into the band, for goodness sake. Fast forward a few years and Whitesnake would carry on right where Burn, Stormbringer and David’s third and last with Purple, Come Taste The Band, had left off.

  “With Stormbringer, we toured about a year and we were really at our height,” says Glenn. “Blackmore at the time was thinking of leaving, and I think from the genre of the songs that David and I were writing, like ‘Hold on’ and ‘You Can’t Do It Right’ and ‘Holy Man,’ it was a little more apparent that it was becoming a crossover group. Ritchie always built his songs around the Bach guitar playing, and I really respected Ritchie for that because he was an originator, the first true innovator of that kind of music. I think he had gone as far as he wanted to go in Deep Purple. You know, I think the format of Gillan and Glover and all that stuff was a great metal band, whatever you want to call it.

  “And when David and I came in, the band started to become more, and I’m going to say, soulful. Because we grew up in the North of England, we grew up listening to American R&B. Rather than try replacing Gillan and Glover with two look- and sound-alikes, they replaced them with two totally different commodities, and it showed very strongly on Stormbringer what it was all about. And I like change in music. I don’t want to make Burn II. Led Zeppelin did a really good job in their careers of making different records every time. So that’s how I feel about Stormbringer — it’s a different record.”

  “It wasn’t so much David; it was the influence of Glenn,” qualifies drummer Ian Paice. “David was the new kid on the block and he was very malleable. He was just enjoying the vibe of being in a big rock ‘n’ roll band. Glenn’s influences were so different, although on the first album, Burn, they were kept under control. When it came down to getting down to the second one, Stormbringer, I mean, Glenn can’t help it. He likes the music that he likes and that was starting to change it. So it was starting to change from being a hard rock ‘n’ roll band to something that was becoming a little more funky, which Ritchie hated. And Ritchie, being true to himself, just went ‘That’s it, I’m off. I don’t like what’s happening, I don’t think I can get it back to what I wanted it to be.’ And I think he saw the way that, ‘If I have my own band, I can control it.’ And I think that’s why Rainbow was formed.”

  Even if Whitesnake would morph to be a bit more heavy metal by the mid-1980s, Coverdale’s disdain for the term, and genre, underscores where he wanted Purple to go, and where he would take his own band once he had control, just like Ritchie and Rainbow.

  “Oh my God! I wrote two songs which could be termed heavy metal or whatever,” sniffs David. “I’ve never embraced the expression ‘heavy metal’ because all my themes are emotional. But I wrote two songs to keep Ritchie Blackmore happy, which were ‘Burn,’ (which I still think is a classic,) and ‘Stormbringer,’ which basically if you look at the lyrics, they are more or less sci-fi poems. But it never felt comfortable for me to have those. In fact, I think that’s where he got the name Rainbow from, the hook in ‘Stormbringer.’ ‘Burn’ I can enjoy any time of the day but I don’t really go for ‘Stormbringer.’”

  “Look, you know, people have always said when Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale came into Deep Purple,” says Glenn, “it was like, we changed the sound of the band from being a straight hard rock metal group to being a more bluesier, soulful, intelligent sounding music, I thought. When you replace guys like Gillan and Glover, you’ve got a come up... I don’t sound like Roger Glover; of course, Roger doesn’t sing. And I certainly don’t sound like Ian Gillan, and neither does David. I think it was a really bold move to replace those two and have a Top Five record all around the world with Burn. The Burn record stands up for itself; it’s brilliant. But Ritchie, midway through the Stormbringer tour, realized that the end was nigh for him, because the power was being taken from him, in the music. Because it was being written by all of us guys.”

  “By Stormbringer, we were flexing our muscles,” continues the so-deemed Voice Of Rock. “You’ve got to remember, I was the leader of my own band for years before I got to Deep Purple. And when you’re a leader of the band, writing and producing and doing what I was doing at an early age, I was still in that headset. And I must say, as a five-man group, Deep Purple, we were all our own leaders. We were all very, very much strong individuals. But at the end of the day, it was Ritchie’s last call on a lot of the stuff we did, but he was obviously losing his power.”

  “At that time, the whole climate was that you had to progress,” muses Coverdale. “And one of the things that I wanted to bring to Purple was blues. And I loved soul music. The year that I joined Deep Purple, my
most played records were Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Stevie Wonder’s Music Of My Mind and Donny Hathaway’s Live. I mean, nothing to do with rock, but I loved rock, in the sense of the early Allman Brothers, original Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck Group.

  “So, I thought it would be entirely appropriate, without compromising the identity of Purple, to inject more of a blues element, more of an emotional element instead of motorbikes and whatever and planets. I can only write about what I know. But of course the great soul element started to creep in. And that was not really where Ritchie was at all.

  “You know, this song on Stormbringer, he gave me this guitar riff, and I can only respond how I feel instinctively and naturally to a piece of music. And I was motivated to write this thing around ‘You Can’t Do It Right (With The One You Love),’ singing across this riff. And he went, well, it’s great but he was hoping he might give me his kind of influence or inspiration for this particular guitar riff. There’s a song from the Band Of Gypsies called ‘Changes,’ you know, Buddy Miles, and I didn’t get that vibe at all. And I tried messing around with it and I said this feels right. And of course it gave Glenn a perfect opportunity to zip into his Stevie Wonder thing. And all of this stuff alienated Ritchie. Ritchie is very much his own man. So that was fine. There were a lot of positive things I learned from Ritchie and certain things I found disagreeable.”

  Two strong singers who were also strong personalities; griping amongst the old guard and the new; a struggle between the blues and the Bach-inspired modern metal of the day... then Ritchie leaves the band and a new problem emerges in the guise of a new guitarist, unknown, American, and, worse, considerably into chemicals.

  “Tommy Bolin, he lived with me for three months before he joined the band,” explains Hughes. “Tommy Bolin was a very sweet, kind, philosophical, hippie-ish, generous, loving person. There wasn’t a bad bone in his body. The only thing was, Tommy was riddled with drug addiction. I had no idea he was into the morphines and the other stuff at all. And we talked about it and he joked about it, but I hadn’t realized my friend was actually getting to be hooked on the stuff. But Tommy and I also have stuff we wrote together. He was a great guy. I mean, I was sort of into my disease as well. The cocaine was definitely drug of choice in the ‘70s, for people who could afford it. So I was in my own head at that time.”

  “Look, here’s the deal,” explains Hughes on the making of Come Taste The Band, Coverdale’s third record and the last for the band before the Mk. II reunion in 1983. “Tommy Bolin joined Deep Purple in, I think, June of 1975. In June and July we basically rehearsed in Los Angeles. We wrote a couple in the studio. Then we went to Munich to Musicland Studios and, you know, Tommy Bolin had moved into my home in Beverly Hills. There were definitely two camps being set up, maybe three camps being set up. There was me and Tommy to one side, David alone, and then Jon and Ian. And, it was very obvious when we went to Germany that it was me and Tommy hanging out.

  “If you listen to the album, there is definitely a Tommy and Glenn influence on the one side, and Coverdale is doing the big voice in the middle. We were the toxic twins of the band. Tommy and I were young and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”

  Was David also a little wild?

  “I wouldn’t like to comment on that,” says Hughes. “All I can tell you is that David was a weekend warrior. You know, I got along with David fine. I don’t know if he got along with me very well. As far as the friendship was concerned, it was deep. As far as the musicianship was concerned, I think it might have been fragile to say the least. There’s a song called ‘Dealer’ that I actually sang. And I went to bed one night and the next morning I came back and David sang it. And I went, ‘What the fuck?!’ I guess I was voted off the track and I sang it like a motherfucker! It was brilliant. If you know anything about Purple towards the end, I think we did an hour and 45 minute show and David was off stage for about 45 minutes because the band was jamming and I was doing a lot of singing. And I think he was a bit pissed off about that. I’m just a progressive person on stage and I like to jam. Tommy and I were doing that, and then Jon Lord... Ian Paice is a ferocious drummer. And I just think the David Coverdale thing, although he was the singer, he could have stayed on stage and banged a tambourine or something but he was off stage.”

  There was definitely a source of resentment on Coverdale’s part as he explained to Tony Stewart back in 1976, “I’m not ashamed of any of the shows I did. I worked my bollocks off. No one was talking about sacking me, I left. We were working for a concept, and then I got the impression that everybody was trying to inject their little bits of fiddly-diddly. Then it got disjointed and became too abstract. It went off on tangents. It wasn’t how Deep Purple should have been anymore. For such a hard bunch of blokes, though, we got really spineless in the end; just accepting the situation and not doing anything about it. I wanted out.

  “I refuse to stand on stage with Glenn while he’s doing his bloody ‘Georgia On My Mind,’” continued David. “And I’m standing there in the dark saying, ‘C’mon, get it out of your system. Where’s the band? C’mon, Tommy get it out, c’mon Jon do your classical bits’ — and I’d go off and have a cigarette. Where’s that at? That ain’t no fucking band. Then Ian turns round and says, ‘Dave, stop bellowing so much.’ I got that gig on the strength of my talent. Nobody did me a favour. Those cats wanted me to work. Like, I’ve got the goods to do it, and up to now people have only heard one facet of my talent.”

  Piling it on, the band was also grousing over writing credits, and Tommy’s heroin habit was affecting his playing, most graphically brought to attention in the UK where he was heckled mercilessly. It was all too much, and the hero of our story, after a maelstrom of three records in two years plus white knuckle world tours, felt trained, bold, creatively excited about the future, and optimistic enough to quit Deep Purple.

  “When I actually left, Glenn wasn’t told,” explains David. “We would stand together; that’s when I first came up with the expression ‘The Unrighteous Brothers.’ So, I’d flown over to England for Ian Paice’s wedding, and Glenn was going, ‘Oh Dave, I’ve got all these great ideas; we’ve got to use our voices more’ and all of this, and I go, ‘Glenn, hasn’t anybody told you? I’m out.’ And he was utterly shocked. And I was like, ‘We blew it. It could have been incredible, but we blew it.’ Which is one of the reasons now, if I feel that kind of negative energy creeping into any scenario – even private ones, let alone professionally – I change it. If I can’t see the light, I change it because there is too much compromise. It really is a difficult pill to swallow.”

  “Initially it went very well and then it tended to go south somewhat the more peripheral indulgence that went on,” sighs Coverdale. “It was actually a very, very tough time. I left Deep Purple, which was pretty much a well-kept secret out of respect for Jon Lord and Ian Paice, but it was really degenerating very badly in terms of the shows and attitude. A lot of drugs and alcohol were rearing their ugly heads. And there was a great deal of disrespect for the legacy of Deep Purple, which I still maintain.”

  And then, says Coverdale, well, there might not have been a Whitesnake had David joined... Rainbow!

  “I think what alienated Ritchie from me is that I didn’t do Rainbow,” says Coverdale, a pretty unlikely candidate for the role given the baggage of the previous three years. “Initially, he presented me with these songs. And I said, these seem like Machine Head songs. You know, if you listen to, other than Ronnie’s vocals, they are very Machine Head songs that could have easily been Gillan-era, Mk. II as it’s called, and I felt it was going back. Like I said, the climate at the time was about moving forward. And, of course, I was getting me licks, in doing the blues and soul elements. It wouldn’t have worked.”

  -2-

  White Snake/Northwinds – “I’m Not Sure You’re The Right Bass Player To Play With Cozy”

  When Deep Purple imploded, David Coverdale found himself taking sto
ck. Married in 1974 to German Julie Borkowski, a child on the way, having been living in what he described as “a beautiful big cuckoo clock of a house in Bavaria,” all he wanted to do now was his Wilson Pickett-styled songs, as he dubbed them, but louder. By his own admittance, he went from a “boy” in awe of Purple to a classic case of LSD – Lead Singer’s Disease. And not to be negative about it, the point is that David Coverdale had grown into rock star britches, with the confidence and resources to establish an act based on himself as its centre.

  The naming of all this would be a mess. Coverdale has said that he’d always wanted his new thing to be a band situation, and the name of the first record, White Snake, seemed to lean that way. Think about it. It’s a debut solo album, and yet you give it a provocative flashy name, and one that could be a band name. And yet talk about fence-sitting: it’s debatable or arguable from both the logo and the spine of the original vinyl whether that title is supposed to be one word or two.

  Second record, Northwinds, is credited again to David Coverdale, even if debate still rages deep into the night whether it’s called Northwinds or North Winds! Then there’s a four-track EP called Snakebite, credited to David Coverdale’s Whitesnake, which, to confuse matters further, becomes a hodgepodge of an LP (for outside the UK) credited to Whitesnake called Snakebite — the four tracks of the EP combined with four tracks from Northwinds.

  Finally, there’s a “first” LP called Trouble, and the neat freaks can all relax. Musically speaking, there’s a direct line through all of them from lots of funk and blues and balladry and experimentation at the beginning, to something up into Trouble that might be described as closer to what came before the solo career, namely, an approximation of Mk. III-era Deep Purple.