Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Not quite - Come An’ Get It did indeed hit a robust chord at No. 2, but it was kept from No. 1 by Kings Of The Wild Frontier, Adam And The Ants’ second album, demonstrating that despite all the press heavy metal was getting at the time, something called post-punk (in all its flavours) was also running riot up and down the charts.

  Next up was the moodier, yet still poppy, thump of “Don’t Break My Heart Again” which, as David related, he had written about his daughter, Jessica, with Coverdale clanging out the chord sequence throughout the night at Tittenhurst on a piano. Following on was a heavy and slowly funky ballad called “Lonely Days, Lonely Nights,” distinguished by a tight and note-dense bass line from Murray as well as Jon Lord prominent in the mix with Hammond washes.

  Side one of the original vinyl closes with a knees-up boogie rocker called “Wine, Women An’ Song,” a party rocker very much in the Status Quo vein. Jon Lord adjusts his gear and goes for a honky tonk piano sound for this one as the backing vocalists David, Bernie and Micky, A.K.A. “The Three Piece Suite,” exhort the three pleasures named in the title. This is the cut chosen as the one for which the whole band gets a full songwriting credit.

  As for “Child Of Babylon”... “I worked pretty closely with the great Jon Lord on that song,” says Marsden. “I had this idea that I wanted to have the texture that only Jon could come up with, and he did a fantastic job on that, with the synthesizers. The synthesizers in those days, the multi-key ones were quite unusual. So I got this idea, and I tried to explain it, and he was great. He sat down, we worked it out, and he came up with it, and, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ I was very happy with that.”

  “Jon Lord’s biggest strength was Jon Lord,” laughs Marsden, when asked about the big man’s strengths and weaknesses in the studio, given that he was never considered much of a songwriter. “You could just play anything to the man and he was able to go, ‘Well, what about this?’ and ‘What about that?’ And you just go, ‘Yeah.’ And on stage, he was a giant. I think, the best. Tell me anybody better on a Hammond organ in a rock ‘n’ roll band, I’d probably argue with you. I was there every night, I listened to him. He was fantastic. And he was a great guy, great musician. And on the writing side of it, he was very, very gracious. I’d say, ‘You know, Jon, you really helped me on this; I think you should maybe have a piece of this.’ And he’d say, ‘No no, no, I wouldn’t have helped you if you hadn’t have had those ideas. I’m just putting your ideas into music.’ He was that kind of guy.

  “Because he was more technically adept as a musician, he could write notes down. I still can’t do that. He’d write it down. We’d play some things on the guitar, and he’d write it down and then he would do his version of it, and I always remembered that. As the years went by, when people I’d been working with would come up with ideas, they’d just jump on them and say ‘I’ll have a piece of that.’ That wasn’t Jon.”

  “Child Of Babylon” is essentially this side’s “Lonely Days, Lonely Nights,” a bluesy ballad that one could see on a Bad Company or Lynyrd Skynyrd album, although, again, the production is stiff, the playing is stiff... there’s just something not very serious or classic about this record, despite at least a few potentially weighty tracks like this one. Sacrilege perhaps in the utterance, but this one is actually ruined by Martin Birch and Ian Paice, two near unassailable rock icons who should know better.

  Then it’s back into the kind of light-hearted pop metal that proposes Come An’ Get It as one of the unsung stepping stone records toward the hair metal of the mid-1980s. “Would I Lie To You” echoes the simple stacked chords of the title track, so again, we’re into a bit of a thick-headed Foreigner sound, rock for kids, not historians. As for the title, Coverdale says he saw that quip on a pin that a female admirer of the band they’d met in Southampton had given him.

  “‘Would I Lie To You,’ you think, well, that’s a love song,” notes Marsden, “but it’s not — it’s about the manager [laughs]. But that was a real three-way song. That was, I had a piece, and everybody else... David wrote the words. That’s pretty much how we used to work. There wasn’t as much, shall I say, writing competition by then. That I would say. We’d kind of write something, well, there you go, there’s a song. Whereas on Lovehunter, there was a frenzy of songs coming in from everywhere.”

  Except it’s not really about the manager. Rather, it’s the usual ol’ in/out. “Yes,” laughs Murray, when asked if Coverdale’s one-track mind when it came to the literary side of the band ever got on the rest of the guys’ nerves. “And you know, there’s that stubborn mentality that if you criticize him for it, he’ll do it more. Just to piss you off. Just to say, ‘Well, this is what I do and lots of people like it.’ Plus he had his sex symbol image and the lyrics went along with that. And, you know, he certainly has written deeper lyrics since then. But that was probably another thing that was getting a bit too samey. It’s like, time to move on from that.”

  Coverdale defends himself, in conversation with Gavin Martin, “If you listen to it, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. Of course there’s stuff that is crying out to be lambasted, but I stand by that as much as I stand by the more soul-searching pieces. I’m very casual about some of the things we do and extremely serious about others. I read a lot of mail and I get letters saying, ‘Why do you bother with all the sex stuff when you can write songs with the depth of ‘Blindman’ or ‘Crying In The Rain?’ I get others that say why write miserable blues tunes when we all enjoy your happy-go-lucky stuff like ‘Wine, Women An’ Song?’ Total nudity is a turnoff. I do believe in certain things like being in your underwear; the suggestion of that makes one sweat. No, really, I don’t want to sing fuck me baby ‘til the juice runs down her legs. There’s a lot of tunes where the male is dominant, which the fuckin’ female militant journalists pick up on. Of course, there’s the other angle where a guy is heel ground into the carpet by an over-aggressive woman.”

  “We were very much so Bad Company, Free fans, maybe a bit of Foreigner perhaps,” continues Murray, explaining the band’s knowledge base and motivations, back at the musical end of things. “And then the earlier ‘70s British blues rock bands. Myself, Micky and Bernie came out of that blues explosion, and David was very into the blues singers, Bobby Bland, B.B. King, whoever, so there was always a great streak of standard twelve bar blues running through everything, and then just taking that and applying it to the rock songs.

  “But at that point there was very little influence from typical American rock bands. I mean, we wouldn’t be listening to Kansas and Kiss and Aerosmith and Ted Nugent. Whereas after about five years of the band, certainly I thought we should move more into an American-style direction of the early ‘80s. Because I thought we had kind of gone as far as we could with that style. But that was sort of resisted. David is rather known for doing this. He digs his heels in and then suddenly he changes his mind and goes like, ‘Okay, everything in the past is gone now; now we’re going to do this.’ And later, through pressure from Geffen etc., he did realize it was time to get into more what was happening in the States, Van Halen, whatever. I don’t know, as far as favourites go, it’s hard for me to choose between Ready An’ Willing and Come An’ Get It. I like them both a lot. I also think the 1987 album is very good as well. But for my own enjoyment I would probably choose Come An’ Get It. But I don’t listen to much of my own stuff at all.”

  Okay, the arguably American sound of Come An’ Get It aside, 1981 is very much in the thick of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. For better or worse, voluntarily or not, Whitesnake, like Gillan, like Rainbow, were accepted as ingredients in the pot, pedigrees notwithstanding.

  “No, well, we felt so much older than them,” laughs Murray, “and we felt somewhat paternal. Some of that we thought was rather amateurish and not really our scene. And some of it was kind of — it’s hard to explain — but very white-sounding. There is very little soul or blues or jazz influence in those bands, and most heavy metal bands, until mayb
e more recently with the rap stuff. But in various ways, either the singing or playing wouldn’t be to our taste. Or the kind of songs they were doing were just too straight. And obviously a lot of bands developed and became more sophisticated. I suppose Def Leppard would be about my favourite, but I think a lot of the others deserved to go back to obscurity [laughs].”

  If “Girl” sounds musically a little more sophisticated and rhythmic than the norm, it’s because, as Coverdale has related, the riff originated with Murray, who had still been writing from a fusion perspective. “‘Girl’ was about a girl who appeared on the road,” says Marsden, who was handed the song to work on, once Coverdale had slowed down Murray’s original groove. “We were kind of slowly disguising... ‘pretty little crazy white girl’— she was crazy. And Neil Murray came up with the riff on that, if I remember rightly and then we kind of put the music together, played a bit of it to Dave, who did this ‘pretty little crazy white girl’ and the next thing you know, he’d written all the words for it, which was great.”

  Marsden may not have remembered rightly, or, more likely, the lyric is a pastiche. “Most of the songs are about my old lady,” said Coverdale, speaking to NME. “She’s a great source of inspiration. A lot of the songs that have been called blatantly sexist are about my daughter. I did a song called ‘Girl’ which went, ‘You treat me like a dog and I shake my tail for you’ because she’s the only girl who’s ever had me on all fours doing impressions of horses. I know what I mean and my daughter knows, which is the main thing.”

  “Well, the riff from ‘Girl’ was mine, but that doesn’t really necessarily show off my bass playing,” notes Murray, when asked about favourite bass moments on the Come An’ Get It album. “‘Lonely Days, Lonely Nights’ has got a lot of improvising on the bass. I was always kind of proud of ‘Fool For Your Loving’ on Ready An’ Willing. I would take quite a lot of trouble working on parts and there’s some interesting moving lines on that one. But yeah, overall, I think I like Come An’ Get It best of all the albums. But it’s hard to assess.

  “You know, generally speaking, you would play three or four songs on a new album when you went out live, and then when you’re playing some of those songs, you know, 30, 35 years later, you play a couple of those that you might’ve done so long ago, and all the others, when you revisit them, sometimes you think, well, ‘I can see why we didn’t actually play that one live.’ Sometimes you think, ‘Wow, that was great,’ where such and such’s playing is really fantastic on that song. Because you get to hear albums so much when you’re doing them, you tend not to listen to them very much afterwards. But I think David Coverdale is different. Because he always used to play his own records, his own albums, to vibe himself up before a show [laughs]. He used to know all the songs inside out and backwards, whereas I would be, ‘Oh, I haven’t heard that in years.’”

  The swirling, slippery, slide-guitar-charged “Hit An’ Run” would have to be one of the highlights of Come An’ Get It, and perhaps the album’s heaviest rocker. Also key to its authority is the consummate tight bass work and inventive runs of Neil Murray. In the spirit of everything but the kitchen sink, this note-dense rocker also includes a return of Bernie’s talk box. Marsden says: “Yeah, well I used it before, and I used one on Trouble, on the Beatles song, ‘Day Tripper.’ I used to use it on stage and it was always very popular. So we just put that on ‘Hit An’ Run,’ and I still play ‘Hit An’ Run’ every once in a while to this day. It’s a great song to play. The voice box is always a bit of fun anyway. It’s not hard to do; it’s an easy technique.”

  Come An’ Get It closes with the Zeppelin-esque “Till The Day I Die,” the opening sequence being acoustic before bursting into a southern rocky vibe, again Paice, very surprisingly, stifling the groove, and not helped by the cardboard production job. There’s a bit of Led Zeppelin III’s “Gallows Pole” about this one so it’s doubly distressing that the record didn’t sound more organic.

  Touring for Come An’ Get It proved to be an intensive campaign, the band beginning their European leg in Germany, a stronghold for them, on April 14th of 1981 and winding up at the Hammersmith Odeon on June 9th. A second Japanese tour for the band saw them playing eight dates in late June, followed by the aforementioned short US leg in July, where Whitesnake were sandwiched between opener Iron Maiden and headliner Judas Priest. A point to make on this: sure, Priest and Maiden were heavier acts than Whitesnake, but the band could have used more of this kind of trial by fire. It was really only the metalheads Whitesnake were going to attract, and there’s no shame in being the band that was the bluesiest, the most melodic, the least dungeons and dragons inside of that scene — someone had to be, so why not Whitesnake? In any event, scattered dates in the ensuing months saw the band play Monsters Of Rock, Donington (yes, a great fit, a home, as it were) plus, to close out the year, a fairly involved assault, yet again, on Germany.

  Perhaps this writer is in the minority, but the ire that seems to be heaped upon the fragmented follow-up to Come An’ Get It, namely Saints & Sinners, I feel belongs here and not there. Nonetheless the former is a bit of fun pop confection, solid enough, and, as Marsden reminds us all, it was a successful step up for this band of Englishmen rumbling down the tracks at a fair clip, even if the extent of the rail system... well, you can’t lay track across the Atlantic.

  Was it just getting too damn easy to be Whitesnake? Apparently that’s the party line. The next record would be a chore to produce, resulting in enough bad vibes for Coverdale to blow the whole thing up for the first time, although certainly not the last time.

  -8-

  Saints & Sinners – “Are You Thinking It As Well?”

  The operative word as David Coverdale and his ‘Snakes pondered their next move would be “stagnation.” Sure, in October, 1981, Ready An’ Willing and Come An’ Get It would be declared gold records in the UK. But continued frustration at not breaking America — nothing wrong with the band’s standing in Germany and Japan — was an itch Coverdale couldn’t scratch, soon prompting the preparation for sailing away in an earnest search of the American dream.

  Much would be said in the press, along with an airing of a host of other gripes, some real but some imagined. Explains Marsden. “There was a lot of stuff where people would say to me, ‘What do you think of David Coverdale?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, he can be very difficult, but I love him, he’s great.’ Well of course they’d leave off the last two bits. Because I was naïve enough, in those days, to say stuff. Nowadays, I tend to stay more quiet.

  “But there was a lot of stuff said about the end of the first band, and the classic line-up as they called it. But to be honest with you, it was a non-event, the end of it. There was no big deal about it. We just kind of walked away from it all. And then the record came out [Saints & Sinners.] You look on the cover, and it looks like a David Coverdale album. But, of course, people would know it wasn’t once you got on to the inside sleeve and you saw, ‘Oh no, it’s actually them.’”

  “With Come An’ Get It, we were probably at our peak creatively, I would’ve thought,” continues Marsden. “Saints & Sinners, contrary to what you may have read, when we began there were no real problems. It’s only as it went on and on that the problems kicked in at the end when all the tracks had been recorded. It ended up with David and I, more or less just the two of us in the studio, doing overdubs. And we’re looking at each other, and I remember saying to him one day, when a couple things didn’t happen that were meant to happen, ‘We may as well just knock this on the head.’ And he said, ‘Are you thinking it as well?’

  “There was no fight, there was no row, and we did have a very bad managerial deal, which didn’t help. Yeah, it was very, very poor. What we should’ve done, I guess in retrospect we could’ve done, was do what Queen used to do, just walk away from each other for six months, eight months, get stuff together, and then come back and make an album. But that didn’t happen. David moved to America, and that was pretty much it.”


  “That was the beginning of the end, in a way,” says Marsden, when asked about the fragmented recording situation to what would become Saints & Sinners, issued November 20, 1982. “We were probably the biggest band, certainly in Britain at the time, for a rock band, and in Europe and Japan, and yet we were being pushed around to save money here, there and everywhere by the management. They wanted to say, ‘Oh, you don’t need to go there. Let’s go to Abbey Road.’ They would say, ‘Oh no, no, no, you don’t need to go there.’ And you know, let’s do this, let’s do that. But we all kind of went along with it. But most of Saints & Sinners was recorded at Clearwell Castle, same as Lovehunter. So even though there’s lots of studios mentioned on it, we ended up at Britannia Row, which was Pink Floyd’s place. And that’s a really good studio. That’s where I did Look At Me Now, and Cozy Powell did some stuff there as well. And all those other studios are just where they did backing vocals, and where David may have added a vocal. But Martin Birch wasn’t involved by then, you see. Because Martin wouldn’t have stood for all that. He would’ve said, ‘No, we’re going here, and that’s it.’ That’s really what happened.”

  For the record, the credits read, “The backing trax were recorded at Rock City, Shepperton; The Truck Mobile at Clearwell Castle, Gloucestershire and Britannia Row, London, by Guy Bidmead. The vocal trax were recorded at Battery Studios, London by Martin Birch assisted by Bryan New. All backing vocals by D.C., Mel Galley and Micky Moody A.K.A. ‘The Paratroopers.’ Mixed at Battery Studios by Martin Birch Sept/Oct 1982.”