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.”
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.”
Wrote Trouser Press’ Jon Young, reviewing the album, “When a heavy-duty macho band starts to slow down, or exhibits less than blind certainty about what it’s doing, expect trouble. The problem isn’t that Whitesnake is engaged in a rehash of boogie/Bad Co. riffs (though that is certainly the case); the fatal flaw is they sound like they’ve heard it all before. How many ways can you thump your chest and grunt?”
Indeed, among the metalhead classes — virtually the only people giving a damn — the record came off as a bit underwhelming, certainly against the promise of the album cover.
“I think Lovehunter became the transition album, really,” reflects Marsden, summing up the record. “Without Lovehunter, I don’t think Whitesnake would’ve become... maybe we wouldn’t have gotten to Ready An’ Willing. Because Lovehunter was where we started to blossom in terms of songs and performances. Before Ian Paice joined the band, we were still a pretty strong outfit, but you look back on those first two albums now, the direction is kind of low. The effort was 100%, but the direction was kind of like 5%.
“We were all trying to do everything at one time, and by that third record we settled down a little bit more. With Lovehunter, we became a band a bit more. So Lovehunter, when I look back on it now, was probably more important than we all considered it to be at the time. Because when Ian Paice joined the band, it became a different animal, really. I’m very keen on Lovehunter.”
Similarly putting the record in context, Moody explains that, “The first two albums, I suppose we were on — especially the first album — more of a limited budget, so that went quite easy. I think, to be quite honest, we didn’t have much of a direction when we first started. When I think of it, the first two albums, Trouble and Lovehunter, with the original drummer... Dave Dowle came from the jazz rock fusion drumming field, and I think some of that showed through. And Neil played a lot of that kind of stuff as well, before Whitesnake. He did a lot of fusion stuff, whereas myself and Bernie and David and Jon, you know, we more or less stuck to the rock, R&B kind of thing.
“So when we went in to do the first album, I don’t think we really knew what we were going to do. David obviously was a bit more in control. We just threw in what we had. Even on Lovehunter, there a couple of tracks on there where I listen to them and say, well, they’re very good, but they would’ve been better off on one of these sort of LA-type fusion records. It wasn’t until Ready An’ Willing that we found our niche. That was the album that really represented what for me was Whitesnake.”
“Yeah, by the time Ian came in, we were up and running,” agrees Marsden. “Ian made such a tremendous impact — I wouldn’t say difference — but his impact is all round. As people say, ‘God damn Ian Paice,’ and now you’ve got Paice and Lord, and you just happen to have one of the greatest front men you could ever wish for out front. And the other three of us, we were like what they call journeymen, and we were suddenly thrust into this limelight that none of us had ever really been in before. And yet we happened to be the creative force of it as well, which was nice.”
Touring for Lovehunter took the band, as Marsden recalls, “pretty much ‘round the UK [with Marseille as support, 23 dates beginning October 11th,] and Europe, which was opening up for us. But we did the UK straightaway, and that was, as we’d say, we were always building. And always playing the usual places. We weren’t very fashionable, they told us, until they realized that all the venues were selling out. And so we said, ‘Well, let’s carry on being unfashionable.’”
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Ready An’ Willing / Live... In The Heart Of The City – “I’ve Seen Paice Reduce Grown Men Drummers To Tears.”
David Coverdale’s blues metal machine, Whitesnake, seemed to be making only modest inroads as the 1970s creaked to a close. Metal was coming back big, but then again, this was not a metal band. But if metal wasn’t yet on the cards, it was time to get classic. Aiding and abetting that cause was the acquisition of “light touch” Ian Paice to the fold, the band now including three ex-Purple partners amongst a total army of six Snakes.
“Ian came to see the band on a couple of gigs,” recalls Marsden, “and I saw him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘Nothing. I’d like to do this.’ And that’s it, really. You know, if the best rock drummer in the world is available, you do it. There was never a question. The odd thing was, David Dowle, our current drummer, wasn’t really fired; he was kind of not getting along. We get along fine now, but at the time he was very much a London city boy and the rest of us were quite happy to be out in the wilds of the country recording. He didn’t like it very much so he wasn’t all that happy anyway, so, in the end it, was kind of a mutual thing. So David went out and Ian came in. There was never any question of getting anyone else.”
With the demise of PAL, Paice found himself at a crossroads. He had weighed his options, namely starting a new band (hard graft, he admitted to himself, knowing full well he was no leader), joining some established band and playing material he didn’t feel much ownership to, or getting on with Whitesnake, which fell somewhere in the middle, and quite intriguing, given the presence of Messrs Lord and Coverdale in the ranks. For his part, Paice said he was stagnating, sitting at home out in the country, having played only sparingly for going on three years. Eventually, after drunkenly and off-handedly asking for the gig, Paice said yes a couple of days after Coverdale had phoned him up to offer him the job.
“I don’t even try and analyze it,” says Paice, asked about his particular style, one distinguished by a grace, finesse, a lightness of touch as opposed to a Bonham bash. “You know why? I’ve always thought, if I know too much about it, that might screw it up by trying to do something different. People say I have a different way of playing, a different style of playing rock ‘n’ roll, than a lot of other players. Well, then that’s good enough for me, and I never really query it. When you have something that people treat as slightly individual, it’s a very fragile thing.
“And you ask most people who have that, let’s call it a gift, if they know what they’re doing, they’ll tell y
ou they haven’t got a clue. They’ll tell you it’s the only way they can do it. And if you start trying to break things down, you might say, well, if I don’t do that anymore, and if I played this, making it a little better, then all of a sudden, you’re not yourself anymore. You start losing the magic. Or you take the chance of losing the magic. If you play instinctively and you don’t think about it, then every night, within certain percentages, there’s a little surprise for you and the audience. And I don’t have the musical ability to actually do the same thing every night and to choreograph it in a way that some musicians can. That’s not the way it works for me. It starts, I start playing, and then whatever happens happens. And I’d hate to lose that.”
“Whitesnake was the funniest band I’ve ever been in,” continues Ian, who is distinguished (so far) as the only Deep Purple member to be on every album, drumming for every “Mk.” “I never laughed so much in my life; it was great. The band was totally irreverent toward David, but not in a nasty way. Just seeing the funny side of everything. I mean, my debut for instance. I think we were playing Hammersmith Odeon, or one of the big London theatres anyway. I looked across, and Micky Moody and Bernie were basically holding each other up back-to-back laughing so hard. If they hadn’t been there, they would have fallen over.
“And I couldn’t work it out, until Bernie looked at me, and he sort of motioned to me to look at David. And David’s at the front of the stage there throwing all these wonderful shapes and thrusting the pelvis and extending the mic stand as part of his personage, and doing this whole repertoire. And I looked at the audience, and the first fifteen rows, it’s just pubescent young men. There’s not a chick there to be seen [laughs]. And Bernie and Micky had hooked onto this and it just made them laugh. And within two minutes, I’d gone, Neil had gone. And David never knew. I mean, throwing all these sexual suggestions to a bunch of 15-year-old boys, which was... well, it was funny.”
Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage Page 7