Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  The White Snake album would feature a complicated cast of characters, half band and half not, but second in creative and historical importance among the dramatis personae would be old buddy Micky Moody.

  “David did two solo albums prior to Whitesnake, which I was involved in,” explains Moody, grappling with Whitesnake’s messy early history. “I go back a long way with David. I come from the same town as David and Paul Rodgers, Middlesbrough [it is the nearest city to Saltburn-by-the-Sea], in the northeast of England, a very working class area where people do steel work. I went to school with Paul. We were in class for four, or five, years in high school — we don’t call it that; we call it secondary school. I grew up with Paul. We were from the same town and were in the same classroom. We put a band together when we were 14 years old. That was the Roadrunners. We then had The Wildflowers. We went to London and Paul Kossoff was working in a music shop and we all became friends. I went back to Middlesbrough to learn some classical guitar and Paul formed a band with Paul Kossoff and the rest is history.”

  “And I knew David in the late ‘60s, and then I went off to London, moved down south, as you do, as you did,” continues Moody. Again, this was the trial-by-fire with his band The Wildflowers, which besides losing Paul Rodgers to Free, would hatch the career of Bruce Thomas (Pete Bardens/Quiver/Elvis Costello & The Attractions).

  “When I went back to my hometown in 1968 there was a young guy who was a student who was called David Coverdale. As I say, we come from the same town. We would be in a coffee bar and David would be sitting there, as he was coming back from art school. I got talking to David and he was in a local band. I was in the top local band called Tramline that was very much influenced by the West Coast thing. I got to know David then.”

  Tramline had actually produced two records for Island, but the material... it would be a running joke inside of Whitesnake, with Bernie Marsden exclaiming with relief that he had no skeletons in his closet like Micky’s early records.

  “A few years later, about 1974, I heard that he’d joined Deep Purple,” continues Moody. “He’d passed an audition. I was very pleased for him. He was working in a boutique and singing like semi-professionally, so I was very pleased about that. And before he went to live in the States, just after that, with Deep Purple, he called up his old mates from the Northeast, of the late ‘60s, including musicians and some guys who had moved to London to become roadies or truck drivers or whatever, and we had a party to send him off to the States. He was going to Malibu to live and he found out where all of his old mates were. We had a big send-off for him where we got drunk and stoned and did all of that stuff we did in the ‘70s.

  “And I never heard from him for about eighteen months after that. He called me up, said he was living in Germany, and asked me if I’d like to be involved in some solo projects he was going to do. He came to my show that I was playing a few days later in Munich. I was playing with a band called Snafu at the time. We had a drink and a month later, I was staying with him for a while. I thought he only wanted me to play on a couple of tracks. He wanted to get away from the hard rock. He had such a fantastic voice that he wanted to do ballads, soulful stuff and acoustic stuff.

  “I ended up doing two albums with him. The first one was White Snake and the second was Northwinds. And from there, on those two albums, he wanted to get away, really, from the heavy rock thing, the Purple thing. But David is a very versatile singer, and had loads of ideas for ballads and soul stuff and funk. He could sing all of that. He used to do cabaret and stuff when he was very young. He could sing all kinds of things. So I think he’d written a lot of different things that he wanted to get off his chest and get down onto disc, and I helped him do that. And then after that, he wanted to put Whitesnake together, but we still didn’t want to go down that Deep Purple road, because, as a guitar player, I never came from that heavy thing.”

  Moody and Coverdale’s first collaboration together, White Snake, would be recorded at Kingsway Studios from August 3rd to the 17th, plus the evening of the 25th, 1976. Vocals would be added at Musicland in Munich from the 26th August until the 30th “after midnight.” Issued in May, 1977, the album’s first single would pair dark R&B ballad “Hole In The Sky” with “Blindman,” another ballad, but this one toward Bad Company.

  Still so much part of the Purple camp, the album would be issued on Purple Records, Roger Glover would be producing, and the studios used... Musicland had been the domain of both Purple with Coverdale as well as Rainbow and the Ian Gillan Band. Additionally, Kingsway is also very much associated with Ian Gillan, through his part ownership and the recording of Ian’s albums there with both Ian Gillan Band and Gillan. One big dysfunctional family, and as Whitesnake slithered forth, much of the family would be reunited.

  Ever the swashbuckler and scallywag, Dave writes on the back cover of White Snake, rock star punctuation included, “The music on this Album was conceived and given the ol’ once over at Deutschland. (Somewhere in Europe). The happy songs were written in my new home and also the Familie Ritzers fine residence – the moody ones were more or less the result of a three month sojourn in a hotel in Munich. Anyway without Micky Moody an’ Roger, I would have had to do it on me own, GOD BLESS EM. Thanks to everyone, particularly Jools, Dembreigh und John, and me mother – who forgave me the day I was born. This Album is dedicated to all in NEVER-NEVERLAND; for whom one day it will all surely happen…”

  No one in the ragtag gathering that was called upon to make this record was as important to the process as Micky Moody. It is with Micky that the Whitesnake sound is born, right here on this record, along, of course, with David leading the charge and singing up a blues rock storm.

  “Well, funnily enough, just to give you a short history,” says Moody, on winding up in this place stylistically, “I started playing in ‘63, and at that time, of course, you had new bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones coming up, and I particularly liked the Yardbirds. I liked the blues thing, Spencer Davis, The Animals, this kind of thing, and that was the direction I followed for a while. And then Eric Clapton joining John Mayall, Jeff Beck, and all this kind of thing. We were so lucky to actually be around at that time, especially as teenagers, to absorb all that music. It was fantastic, really. So it went from there, really, Jimi Hendrix... it all happened in the ‘60s. I don’t know that that would ever happen again. We were just very, very lucky.”

  Duane Eddy mattered as well, Moody told Jeb Wright. “Yes, he was an influence on me when I started playing guitar in 1963, when I was a kid. I used to love ‘(Dance With The) Guitar Man’ and all of that; in 1987, there was a TV program to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. I was in the house band and Duane came on and played ‘Love Me Tender’ and I got to back him. He was a very quiet and deep sort of guy. I did shake his hand and tell him he was an influence on me. I also got to play with Eric Clapton. I played live with him in a charity situation. I have never been in his band. I played a charity show with him two years ago and he was great. It was a thrill for me, as I have loved him since the Yardbirds.”

  With the way players in Purple’s orbit seemed to be part of a revolving door scenario of projects and sessions, I asked Micky if he’d ever been part of any high profile audition processes in the 1970s.

  “I didn’t. I mean, to be quite honest, I was very shy and retiring as a kid, when I was starting. I was in Tramline and, after that, I joined a soul band playing James Brown stuff and Sam and Dave and all that, which I really like, and Booker T & The MGs. And from that, the singer with Juicy Lucy asked me to join. He’d seen me playing with Zoot Money, and he offered me to join Juicy Lucy. So, I didn’t do anything. I never chased anything, to be quite honest. Maybe I was just lazy. But I just seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and it wasn’t until Snafu, sort of ‘73, that I involved myself in actually putting a band together.”

  “I wanted to play something that wasn’t as hard rock as Juicy Lucy,” continues Moody. �
�Juicy Lucy, I enjoyed, and it was playing with one of my favourite guitarists, Glen Ross Campbell, steel guitarist; I used to like him from The Misunderstood, in the early ‘60s; I used to hear him on the radio. And so with Snafu, I got more into Ry Cooder and more authentic stuff, and Little Feat, this kind of thing. I was really playing hard rock for a few years, and it was only when David got in touch with me to help him with the solo albums that I thought Hey, I better get myself a Les Paul here’ [laughs], and start getting the Marshall cranked up, because it looks like I’m going to need to be a bit heavier. I was a big fan of the Allman Brothers, but I was never a great fan of Deep Purple. I liked some of the early Led Zeppelin stuff, because I liked Jimmy Page and the Yardbirds. But really, I’d drifted away from that. It was more sort of a funky, lazier, bluesy style, like Little Feat — I used to love their stuff. That really was my cup of tea for a while. And it was really David that got me back into rocking for the early Whitesnake. So I think some of his influence was the funky stuff, on some of the stuff I’d been playing.”

  “I didn’t know what to expect when I released White Snake, but now I feel comfortable,” enthused David. “The album’s doing really well in Europe and it’s picked up well in England. I suppose I can attribute some of that acceptance to Deep Purple. We always were big in Europe. I didn’t want the album to be an extension of Deep Purple. Hard rock isn’t everything. I still love hard rock but with White Snake, I wanted to experiment with the different colours and textures of music. Some of the songs like ‘Blind Man’ and ‘Time On My Side’ were written before Deep Purple. There is also a ballad on the album and a few funky-type songs. I’ve tried to explore the white funk style a bit. I’m just happy to play with a good bunch of musicians. Before Purple, the most I’d ever earned from a gig was a chicken sandwich and a bottle of Coke.”

  That’s an accurate survey of the record from David. One must remember, this type of music was quite unfashionable within the crucible of English music at the time, for mid-1977 represented the peak of punk mania. In the press, Dave was a combination of defiant, cocky, self-deprecating and appreciative that he had been allowed to make this kind of record. He has said that at 26 years old they were calling him a dinosaur. In essence, what he was doing was launching an odd sociological experiment, testing his assertion that there was a market for blues rock somewhere within a world gone punk.

  What is remarkable, and amusing, is that Glenn Hughes, the Ian Gillan Band and Paice Ashton Lord all issued albums within months of Coverdale’s launch, and all of them, generally, were in and around a proggy, bluesy, funky, fusion-y, softer rock spectrum, with only Rainbow, also with a record in 1977, addressing head-on a metallic Purple vibe. As an additional note, David had already recorded his second record by this point, working on Northwinds at Air Studios in London, April 10th to 19th.

  “We started recording the album in London in August last year,” Coverdale told Melody Maker in May of 1977, “and there were no rehearsals, nothing. The musicians did me proud. There are no all-star famous names among them, although they’re well-known enough in the business. I got them together through word-of-mouth, recommendations, old friendships, admiration. They played together superbly. I had enough confidence within myself not to get into that star-name trip. We did the album in about two weeks, with the vocals being put down in Musicland. Apart from the music we created, it also happened to be one of the nicest times I’ve ever had socially. The best of it was that the musicians were guys playing for the love of it rather than on a business basis. It was very spontaneous.”

  As for second in command, Micky Moody, Coverdale was fulsome in his praise... “The man is a genius, and I’m sure that within the next year he’ll be recognized as a real guitar star. Looking at White Snake at the moment, I have to say that it’s an album that doesn’t really have a definite direction. It’s like a transitional period between me as a part of the Deep Purple and me the solo guy. I left Purple in March last year, and I had a lot of songs which I had written but which couldn’t really be played by Purple. I knew they wouldn’t fit into the concept of the band because we were, basically, a concept band, playing dance music. It was very frustrating writing within that concept for so long. So when the split came, and I decided to make an album, I had plenty of songs in hand. It was odd after Purple, because I spent so much time just sitting on my ass doing nothing. You tend to fall into this terrible state of apathy, but once I started working I began to thrive on it. Now I keep telling myself that I have to be patient! There are business considerations and politics that dictate what pace you can go at, and I’m finding it hard holding myself back.”

  In later years, Coverdale has gone so far as to say that Moody was an early hero of his in and around Teesside, recalling even his Gibson pick-ups and cream-coloured Fender Telecaster, rumoured to have once been owned by Jeff Beck.

  Wrote Kerrang!’s Mark Putterford in a retrospective evaluation of White Snake, “David Codpiece didn’t have a lot to smile about in August, 1976. His lolly-loaded lodgings with Purple had just collapsed in a dishevelled heap around his (ridiculous) stack heels and frustrating legal bullshit threatened to stunt his golden career, temporarily at least. As The Voice itself explains in the small print, ‘The happy songs were written in my new home... the moody ones were more or less the results of a three-month sojourn in a hotel in Munich.’ But there’s little of the former and enough of the latter to brew an aura of melancholy, disillusionment and downright dejectedness. Despite the soberness throughout, White Snake is an album of latent attraction. I was initially disappointed, foolishly expecting a Purple paraphrase, but affection grew with acquaintance of the emotion-sodden songs and their relation to Coverdale’s plight.”

  Ten months later, in March of 1978, David would be back with Northwinds, without any sort of touring having taken place in the interim, due to contractual hang-ups with the Purple camp. The album, like its predecessor, came out on Purple Records, further underscoring the degree to which David was tangled up with his old band’s business. “Yes, another scam,” laughs Coverdale. “It’s funny, when I joined Purple, I was going, my God, telling my friends they’ve got their own record company! But it was just a scam by the management. They would go get the advance, they would take their hefty percentage of the main advance, and they would take advantage of being the Purple record executives, and then they would give the band less percentages than they would have gotten from Warner Brothers or EMI, right? And the band would go, ‘Look, we’ve got our own record company.’ I’m sitting here in my office which is loaded with platinum albums and I’m looking at these records, Purple Records, purple with the big white P on it? So we had our own record company, big deal [laughs].”

  A similarly odd assortment of contributors as the last record, also with Roger Glover producing, one intriguing touch was the inclusion of Ronnie James Dio and his new wife Wendy providing back-up vocals for opening track “Keep On Giving Me Love,” a funky hard rocker that serves as an early blueprint for a room in the Whitesnake manse.

  And now it was time for Coverdale to get his live act in gear. Besides the clear-cut choice of pal from home Micky Moody, David hired on a second guitarist by the name of Bernie Marsden, who had been playing for Paice Ashton Lord.

  “What happened was, Dave and I had met in Germany,” begins Marsden. “I was doing the Paice Ashton Lord album. He lived about an hour away from Munich. So he came over to see the guys, where I met him for the first time, and we got on really well. But he didn’t really know what I did. And he’d heard some tracks. This was the Paice Ashton Lord album, which is a very fine record, but guitar-wise, I’m very much in Steely Dan mode on it, just playing kind of click solos and those kinds of guitar parts, rather than trying to be Ritchie Blackmore or something. So he didn’t know what I did.

  “And then I bumped into him in London, and I said, ‘What are you up to?’ And he said, ‘I’m here to put a band together.’ And he said to me, ‘Would you come down? Because
I’m auditioning drummers tomorrow.’ He says, ‘And your background with Cozy [Powell] and Ian Paice would be valuable for me.’ And I said ‘Okay, yeah,’ and he said, ‘Bring a guitar with you.’ So that was the idea. So we got in there and when we started playing, along with these drummers and bass players, he was at the back, and I didn’t know he came in. He wasn’t there when I got there. And he said, ‘Can I have a word with you?’ I said ‘Yeah.’ We were playing this kind of Allman Brothers type-stuff, funnily enough, and he said, ‘I had no idea you played like that.’

  “He said, ‘What’s this rumour I hear about you joining McCartney’s band?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a rumour. Nothing’s happened at the moment.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t think I can match his kind of offer, but I’d really like you to be in this band.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s no conflict there because I haven’t had an offer, and it’s been a few weeks now.’ A few days after that, we had our first writing session and it was pretty obvious that we were going to write very well together.

  “‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was No. 1 at the time and I thought, hmm, Okay. It wasn’t that hard. If it would’ve been something like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’ I might’ve been more inclined to hang around [laughs]. So that was it, really. It was quite simple. It was a no-brainer, really. I knew it was going to be a really good rock ‘n’ roll band.” [Note: “Maybe I’m Amazed” is generally regarded as one of McCartney’s finest songs, whereas “Mull Of Kintyre”, to put it mildly, maybe isn’t, thus vindicating Marsden’s decision to sign on the dotted line for Coverdale.]

  “David wanted to put a band together,” remarks Moody, offering his side of the story, “and he wanted me to help him put it together, which I did. I was the first ever Snake back in ‘77. I helped put Whitesnake together. At first, it was called David Coverdale’s Whitesnake but he didn’t want that. He wanted it just to be called Whitesnake. I was the one who said that we should have two guitar players. Like I say, I wasn’t into hard rock; I was playing Little Feat and The Allman Brothers and that kind of stuff, which is really my cup of tea.”