Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Whitesnake played live fairly regularly during March 1978, but only sparingly in April through June, making it off the island for the first time on June 17th for a show in the Netherlands. It was a mix of clubs and theatres but soon the band’s fortunes would be improving.

  “To me, it’s basically a different suit,” Coverdale told Mitch Lafon, explaining the mission of those early days. “When I was with Purple I learned to tailor the style of music I was writing for the identity, but within three years that became an ever decreasing circle. So, when I formed Whitesnake I wanted Whitesnake to be able to embrace a plethora of styles under a particular creative umbrella called Whitesnake. I wanted to do hard rock, R&B, blues and, if necessary, with good commercial hooks and I’ve done very well harnessing that.”

  Mission accomplished and Whitesnake had carved out a modest position for themselves with music that was about as unfashionable as could be, given the punk, new wave, post-punk and pre-New Wave Of British Heavy Metal times in which it was birthed. David had built himself a ship of dreams. Now all he had to do was launch it against the aforementioned waves that threatened the seaworthiness of his new venture.

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  Trouble – “The Room Literally Shook”

  David Coverdale, post-Purple, was his own worst enemy. Sure, he could lament his lack of success through a rockscrabble solo career, which then untidily morphed into Whitesnake with compromised band names, confusing album titles and EPs. But facts were staring him in the face: the public did not want funky R&B or blues fusion or whatever it was he was selling, right alongside the flailing Ian Gillan Band and the already failed Paice Ashton Lord. It was up to the strong-willed lead singer and his band of pirates to change that seemingly insurmountable public perception and slowly, toward some measure of success, he would do just that.

  July to August of 1978 would find the band working on their first proper album, to be called Trouble, at Central Recorders on Denmark St, in the heart of London’s Tin Pan Alley off Charing Cross Road. Roger Glover had turned Coverdale onto the place when they had been working together on Northwinds. Cramped and too hot, with the control room upstairs, it nonetheless served its purpose — plus it was cheap.

  With Jon Lord suddenly free, just as they’re finishing up the record, David hauls him into the Whitesnake fold after attempts to poach the talented Colin Towns from Ian Gillan’s band fail, as does an attempt to coax Tony Ashton to enlist. Indeed, it could have gone the other way. Jon and Ian had been lobbying Coverdale to join Paice Ashton Lord, with David wisecracking that it wouldn’t have been a good career move for any of them to be in a band called CLAP! To complicate matters further, Mick Ralphs from Bad Company had been lobbying to get Lord into his band, only to have Paul Rodgers quash the idea (and remember, Rodgers and Moody were in a couple of bands together back in their youth).

  The process of making the Trouble album found Coverdale presenting his mostly piano-based ideas (born in Bavaria!) to Moody and Marsden on a Teac 3300S at what he called a smelly cellar behind the Purple offices at 25 Newman Street, in London’s West End. The album was hammered out in ten days including mixing (and fortifying visits to the Newman Arms, a really cosy little pub), with much of the conclusion of the process consisting of erasing keyboardist Pete Solley’s tracks so that Jon could add his talents.

  “Jon brought to the table what Jon Lord did,” reflects Marsden. “I mean, when he overdubbed the stuff on Trouble, we had already recorded with the previous keyboard player, before Jon joined the band. And literally, when Jon brought his Hammond organ and stuff into the studio, I mean, the room literally shook. And you know, Jon had a presence about him, as a person, and you know what he was like as a musician.”

  Adds Coverdale, “A lot of people don’t realize... they either look at Purple as a collective or particularly Ritchie. But a huge part of Deep Purple’s sound was Jon Lord’s left hand on that customized Hammond organ. My God, it would shake your haemorrhoids when he would hit the bottom end of that Hammond.”

  “Jon Lord is the diplomat, the analyzer,” adds Glenn Hughes, remembering his days with him in Purple. “He was probably the backbone of the group, actually. At the end, when a lot of decisions were made, they were by him, because he was the more stable person, I thought, at the time.”

  Neil Murray makes a good point, however, that even though Pete Solley’s tracks were replaced by Jon’s, Solley’s input can be felt through the record’s jazz fusion touches. “You’ve got to remember, Pete Solley was the keyboard player on Trouble, and recorded the whole album. So his influence, keyboard-wise — which wouldn’t be Hammond organ and more traditional kind of rock band keyboards — it was more sort of synthesizers and stuff. But then Jon Lord came in and replayed all of the keyboards on Trouble, having not been involved in the writing or the rehearsing of it at all.”

  Murray can’t remember if that meant that Lord more or less played to Solley’s parts or not, but he asserts that the rushed process would have resulted in Jon not really being Jon. “I wasn’t there in the studio when he was doing it. I would’ve thought he brought his own thing to it, he wouldn’t have had enough time to really be familiar with the songs. And also, you know, you play differently if you’re on your own, overdubbing on recordings than when you’re playing all together as a band. You’re so under the spotlight in the studio that anything you try out almost has to be right the first time. Whereas if you’re just rehearsing away all together, you can make a mess of things and try stuff out. You know, it doesn’t matter so much.

  “And then you actually hone it down to what is really required or what works the best. And the trouble is, really, you should go out on the road and play all the songs twenty times before you go in the studio. But generally speaking, that’s not possible. And that’s the frustrating thing about any album. That you could do it so much better, where the performances or even the arrangements could be a lot better if you were able to play them live first and try them out.”

  “We would all do solo spots and we would hang out together,” muses Moody, on the band as gang in the formative years. “We would have a lot of fun and we were all mates. It was like being in school again. It was the best camaraderie I have ever experienced in my entire musical life. Of course, we never made much money. Bands don’t, unless they sell lots of records. We never cracked the States and we never even came there. Unless you crack the States you don’t make much money. In those days, the record companies had money to put in the bands.”

  On the subject of money, David recalls that he had begun the process of sharing the publishing rights on one song per album. He hoped that would assuage some of the misgivings about how low the wages were that he had to pay the guys back then.

  The cover art of the record, at least in the UK, mimicked the indie NWOBHM look of the EP, using only black and red ink on white and minimal imagery. Like Snakebite, however, the art would be wisely shelved for something that popped a bit better, in Trouble’s case, an angry white snake being hatched from a levitating egg.

  “This album is going to give you nothing but trouble,” read one full-page ad for the record, which included a full slate of UK tour dates. “Trouble is the new album from Whitesnake that has ten potent tracks including the current single, ‘Lie Down (A Modern Love Song).’ ‘Lie Down’ is the first single since Jon Lord joined David Coverdale’s Whitesnake to complete the band’s line-up. Listen to Whitesnake and get into Trouble.”

  Trouble opens with a squarely heavy metal rocker called “Take Me With You,” distinguished as much by Neil Murray’s tight bass line as David’s lascivious lyric. It’s a fast one, missing any trace of the blues, and it turns on an odd time signature — Neil calls it “a big and exciting work-out with lots of solos in it.” Most definitely, armed with this track, Whitesnake is indeed exploding out of the gates. Next, the band take it way down for a light-hearted lope of funk called “Love To Keep You Warm,” which is followed up by “Lie Down (A Modern Love Song)” which coul
d be described as a typical Whitesnake rocker from the early 1980s but with more pure pop than the band would dare utilize, at least through the course of the next two albums.

  Next the band apply their slow-burn funk rock ethic to a cover of The Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” chopping it up with pregnant pauses and then further overhauling the song (sacrilegiously) during the chorus. There’s copious talk box too, just in case we didn’t think the band had a sense of humour!

  “I thought it would be good to do a funky version of it,” recalls Marsden. “And then David Dowle, the original drummer, he was a really good funk drummer in that vein — he’d been with Brian Auger’s band — and we were in rehearsal one afternoon, and I just said to him, ‘Let’s try this.’ And it was a jam in the rehearsal room, to be honest with you. And then we kind of crafted it down a little when we got into the studio. The studio, by the way, was about eight feet square. Yeah, by the time they put Jon Lord’s equipment in there, we could hardly move [laughs]. But ‘Day Tripper’ was a big success; it got a lot of people talking about it. The first Whitesnake hit ever was a Beatles song, and we played it live sometimes; it was quite fun.”

  “Nighthawk (Vampire Blues)” gets its title from Coverdale’s beloved mum’s name for David, who’s not afraid to bring up the good woman from time to time in interviews. Notes Marsden, “I just had the idea for that, and then David came up with that kind of dark lyric, which turned it into a vampire song. But I just had the music ready for that one, ready to go, and he came up with all the words on that one, which was brilliant.” This one’s a maelstrom of blues fusion mixed with hard rock, on which Marsden and Moody get their work out. “Nighthawk” is scattered Whitesnake, but Whitesnake nonetheless.

  “The Time Is Right For Love” plays to a brisk shuffle more the signature of Uriah Heep, although Coverdale’s got his own version of “Easy Livin’” [from Heep’s Demons & Wizards album] and it’s called “Breakdown.” Jazzy chord changes belie the bench depth of David’s band of brothers, as does the percolating bass line, while the Lizzy-esque opening sequence speaks to the twin guitar comfort of Moody with Marsden.

  Next up, is Trouble’s title track, which in a normal world, might have been the Lieber/Stoller classic. But that was left to Coverdale doppelganger Ian Gillan to cover, with his band Gillan, working very much the same UK-centric career path as David with a lag of a year or two. Whitesnake’s “Trouble” was actually a reclined hard rocker, in the pocket, a bit funky but not particularly bluesy.

  Weirdly, the two bands never crossed paths. “No, not really,” recalls Moody. “I don’t even know Ian Gillan. I only met him once. So we never ran across each other, and we never played any gigs or festivals together, so that didn’t even come into the equation, for me. Maybe for David it did — of course obviously, he was following on from Ian. But for me, you know, I didn’t even give it a thought, to be quite honest.”

  Following “Trouble” is “Belgian Tom’s Hat Trick,” another funky shuffle, but an instrumental. It is of note that Coverdale, who fancies himself as a bit of a guitarist, says he had taken a shot at a solo for it, but cooler heads prevailed and his take was wiped. Marsden is full-on sceptical of the story but nonetheless affirms, “He’s quite a good guitar player, David Coverdale, but he never did add any guitar, I mean, not even rhythm guitar. No, he was quite happy to let us do our job. In rehearsals and stuff like that, he would play. His ideas were always pretty good on guitar. And he’s a pretty good soloist as well. In rehearsals... I wish we’d recorded some solos, I’d have some unique takes, wouldn’t I? In rehearsals, he was always playing the guitar. He was always picking up my Les Paul and playing it [laughs].”

  “Belgian Tom” gives way to the progressive hard rock of “Free Flight,” sung more than capably by Marsden, who gives the track a James Gang vibe through his high, strong pipes and the song’s circular riffing. “Absolutely, there may well have been a bit of that Joe Walsh era in that. Yeah, that’s a good spot [laughs]. Big Joe Walsh fan. But that just shows you from the early days, how the band was. Dave had never wanted his name on it. You know, the record company put his name on it. And he says, ‘I want you to sing this’ and I’m like, ‘Well, you’re the singer.’ He says, ‘No, you can sing, get on with it.’ There was no egos involved. I think he wanted to get out of that whole Deep Purple scenario, where there were tremendous egos involved. I think he found it a fresh air kind of thing once he was into the new band. But ‘Outlaw,’ on Lovehunter, that was the last one I sang, I think. Because I didn’t sing anything on Ready An’ Willing. And that was probably more down to me than him. He’d probably say, ‘Are you going to sing one?’ I’d say, ‘Nah, you do it.’ [laughs].”

  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.”