Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  Like Restless Heart, David produced this one himself. “I have always done it,” notes Coverdale. “It’s just that I’ve never taken the title. Difference circumstances, all the engineers I’ve wanted to work with in terms of the big rock sound, the big rhythm section sound, they all suddenly found themselves managers and all these managers said, well, you should be a producer. So suddenly you had all of these engineers who now have the title producer and if I wanted to work with them, of course that’s fine. No big whoop. Everybody I’ve always worked with has always brought something to the party.”

  Any trouble with the voice? “No, none at all, other than the fact that I’ve had a sinus infection for all of March and then I was on so many antibiotics, and I took a fast to clean up my system. And then I ended up getting every kind of flu, cold, and right now, I don’t know if you can hear, I’ve got every kind of allergy going into spring. I live at Lake Tahoe surrounded by pine trees so they are dumping big time. We’re actually getting snow sprinkles. Mother Nature can’t make her mind up what she wants to do.”

  “I don’t know about these players,” continued Coverdale, seemingly adrift, and more than a little unsure what to do with his career, at this point, frankly. “We had a handshake agreement and of course things didn’t work out as everybody would have hoped. Everybody has to make a living so they are free to do whatever they want. In a perfect world, that would have been the band. We’ll have to see, when the timing is right and the climate is more appropriate, if indeed any of them still want to be involved. Normally, if you are familiar with my work, I use a United Nations of rock players. But most of these people are in Los Angeles. My dear friend and favourite drummer Denny Carmassi is in the Bay area, San Francisco, so he’s about three hours away. But it’s never really been that important. I’ve always been an international artist so I’ve always enjoyed looking at musicians from Europe or whatever and putting them together. It’s an interesting vitality mix.

  And so it wasn’t looking like there was much reason to try touring Into The Light. “Personally, I would love to,” says Coverdale, “but it’s cost me so much money to go indie after all this time. What I normally would spend on putting together an extraordinary collective of musicians I’ve actually been spending on this record company. It’s hard. Let me give you a basic example. If you want a soft drink and you go to the supermarket, the first thing you will see when you go to the supermarket is Coca-Cola because they pay for that shelf space. So, of course, trying to get shelf space in some of the major record stores is very difficult. Initially, a lot of people would have been more comfortable with me embracing the name Whitesnake. It’s a great brand name and it’s globally recognized but I really felt that it is appropriate for me to move on.

  “So there’s been a lot of stuff I had to deal with in terms of overcoming corporate power, and so it’s proved extraordinarily expensive. And it’s compromised the idea of me actually being able to tour in the normal sense. Whereas the perfect promotional premise is for me to tour, for people to be able to see and hear what I do. So I have been for the last couple of months trying to extricate myself from certain contracts that haven’t been positive in terms of my moving forward. In fact I’m talking to a couple of entities in terms of partnerships in order for me to try and get out there in terms of marketing and promotion. It’s tough stuff, certainly when you are familiar with the kind of success I’ve seen, you know, to look at the small potato.

  “The analogy I’ve been using, is that hopefully from little acorns, oak trees grow. You know, it’s quite a baptism of fire. I haven’t lost faith at all dealing with a lot of negatives. A lot of people I am divorcing in parentheses [laughs] really didn’t do the kind of research that is necessary in order to inform people how hard this particular road would be. Does that make sense? So, before I can feel comfortable moving forward I’ve got to get rid of some elements of the past which I don’t think are serving me well.”

  “Well, I’m working!” qualified David, when I asked him if he was writing new material for a follow-up. “It’s a personality characteristic of mine to try to turn negatives into positives. But if you look at it, I’ve had a 30-year career, which a lot of people can’t really testify to. Because I’ve acknowledged if you make music your mistress, you’ve got to accept the mood swings. And, of course, in the last 50 years there’s been a significantly more fashion-oriented approach by the corporate music industry than ever before. And I’m not 19 and I can’t sing and play that way. And there’s a huge teenage market at the moment. Knocking on 50’s door isn’t exactly a bonus to certain people. But the circumstance is, whenever I have those peaks and valleys, whenever I’m going through this kind of period, when I’m actually not in the public doing anything, I’m actually working and preparing for the next step. I’ve actually got a lot of material.

  “The album’s in certain stores and there is a relationship with certain chains, but distribution has been difficult. It’s just getting exposure. I’ve been asked to do some cameos on VH1; they are doing years now, and I’m involved with 1987, Coverdale’s little boy. And I think there’s been a bit of promotion on the side. But it’s getting people aware of it, Martin. It’s the most over-saturated market that it’s ever, ever been. And one of the things I’m trying to learn — which is very hard — is patience.”

  Still, fighting valiantly, wanting to learn, and not giving up, David reflects that, “The sad thing for me is that the corporates have gotten so familiar with doing cheap deals. Many years ago, there was an article, maybe nine years ago, in Billboard, featuring Val Azzoli, an old friend of mine, who runs Atlantic Records. And he said, why should we pay an established name a million dollars, when we can sign ten college bands for the same amount of money, you know, $100,000 a piece, and if one makes it, one has a hit record, something like Hootie & The Blowfish, and we’re in money? And there was just no mention of art. And what about the poor bastards who are hopelessly in debt, the other nine bands whose whole dream and aspiration was to have a musical career? And I knew that was sounding the death knell. With the Internet and a lot of the recording facilities available now, you can do an album in your garage and start your own label and put in out there. But as you can see now, the corporates are starting to take over the digital deliveries. The whole corporate aspect is control and power.”

  But there will always be the old songs, always an albatross for heritage acts, but of course, a mixed blessing. “I would be inevitably driving to the radio station and I would tune in to the station that we’re going to, and they would be playing ‘Slide It In’ or ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger.’ You have no idea how many DJs lost their cherry to ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger.’ But stations would realize that I’m a good interview and they would have me on for that reason.”

  And there goes a decade post-glory years for David, roughly spanning all of the 1990s. A little quiet to be sure, but to keep him warm, there was a platinum album with Coverdale Page and a platinum album with Greatest Hits, for which he toured, alongside Adrian Vandenberg, Denny Carmassi, Rudy Sarzo, keyboardist Paul Mirkovich and —steak and sizzle — Ratt’s Warren DeMartini on second banana guitar.

  As well, there was a solo album and a half-solo album both quite creditable, both demonstrating the deep wells of talent behind all the flash of the band circa the late 1980s. In effect, Restless Heart and Into The Light served as beacons for the deep fan to go back and listen to the first two solo records and the work of the original English Whitesnake band. As well, touchstones along Restless Heart (also toured, but with more of a pick-up band versus the 1994 situation) reminded the listener of Whitesnake and Slip Of The Tongue pleasures that were now guilty, sinful even, and especially sinful if we were consuming these songs through the videos — now archived for convenient gawking on YouTube — made by Marty Callner, who created a fantasy world for us we could never attain for our less fabulous selves.

  The next time I spoke to David, it was on the road to the inevitable, n
amely, the building of another band of pirate rogues that would play the old hits with purpose, and then, maybe, write some new material that would eschew today’s music trends and give “Still Of The Night” a run for its stacks of paper — creatively that is, for no one was foolish enough to expect multi-platinum ever again.

  “The agreement that I made with the Scorps is that we are co-headlining, and I’m going to work an hour in the middle so it will be good for me to rebuild my stamina after so many years,” said David in 2003, back in the hockey barns where he figures he belongs.

  The previous Whitesnake campaign, the “Restless Heart Farewell Tour,” had ended in South America in December of 1997. The start of the 2003 “25th Anniversary Tour” in January of that year would mark the longest gap between tours in the history of the band. Previous to this, the longest time away from the stage would have been between the end of the Slip Of The Tongue tour (officially called the Liquor And Poker World Tour) and the start of 1994’s Greatest Hits tour.

  “So I was very, very happy to agree to be the meat in this particular sandwich,” continues David. “And looking at an hour, obviously there’s going to be no messing around. We’re not going to be doing twenty minute drums solos. Well, unless anything really disastrous happens. So I want to pack it up. And I’m also recording a greatest hits live, which I’ve never done. I have a website. whitesnake.com. and my board members are most forthcoming with me about what they want and are desirous of, and one is a live record. I haven’t made a live album since 1980, and certainly there’s nothing other than bootlegs which have ‘Still Of The Night,’ ‘Is This Love,’ ‘Here I Go Again,’ all that stuff, ‘Slow An’ Easy.’ So basically my feeling was, when I went out many years ago as a kind of farewell tour to the rest of the world, it was a lot of the early songs that I thought I would enjoy doing, the very early Whitesnake stuff, and they got old immediately. And I definitely agree with you with a statement you made that these weren’t me anymore. That was a particular chapter in my life that was best left as it was.”

  “The circumstances, you’ve got to remember, this is the House Of Whitesnake,” figures David, now squarely a heritage act despite game protestations. “I’m just redecorating it. Not only redecorating it but putting a whole new bunch of interior decorators in there. You know, the bottom line with these musicians, they’re extraordinary players. I said, I want you to look at the songs. I do not want to just simply re-create the songs, as long as the essence is secure. My whole feeling is, I don’t want to be a retro/cabaret act, going through the motions. Otherwise I’ll just go back to Tahoe right now! Basically I said, I want you to approach the songs as if you had been involved in the original, how you would have done it. And now, ten, twelve years later, how would you contemporize those songs so it’s not just a time capsule? So yeah, the songs are going to be very familiar, but the fire these guys are playing with, it’s very powerful.”

  The band of which David speaks was consisting at the time of himself plus Doug Aldrich and Reb Beach on guitars, Marco Mendoza on bass, Tim Drury on keyboards and back on the drums, the southern and stoic Tommy Aldridge.

  “Well, actually, both of them yesterday started to tease each other with blues licks; very refreshing,” laughs David, referring to Reb and Doug. “I’m an old blues guitar fan. I keep saying to people, for instance with Reb, (ex-Winger), although I felt Winger was an excellent collection of musicians, they didn’t have a great deal of rock credibility. So a couple of people came on my board saying, ‘Oh my God! What’s this going to be like?!’ And I’m going, ‘Hey, if you don’t trust me, don’t even bother coming here!’ I don’t listen to what musicians did with other line-ups. I listen to how they play and what I feel they can bring to Whitesnake and what I feel I can bring to them to take it further. I’m going to make sure there are no limitations on this. I mean for instance, we’re doing ‘Crying In The Rain’ and Doug Aldrich is on fire on it; Martin, he’s on fire! It is way cool. We have great players and they’re lovely people. For God’s sake, man, the two guitarists are actually going out to dinner with each other! I mean, that, I’ve never known. It’s always been bullshit for the camera, the camaraderie.”

  “Power. Passion. People spoke about it,” continues David, ever charming, turning attention to Tommy Aldridge, a welcome spot of loyalty and continuity, part of a pair of two old warhorses getting along and getting a pay check. “I very rarely go back, but I found when I was researching drummers, I was actually looking for Tommy Aldridge Jr. or Tommy Aldridge II. And one of the great things is, the bass player I’ve wanted to work with for many years, Marco Mendoza, he’s actually worked for Tommy on and off for five years. Musically it’s really hard to get a rhythm section that communicates with each other. Because that’s what I build on, you know? And that could’ve taken God knows how long to actually get a rhythm section that was hooked into each other. And this, I’ve got to tell you, the first days rehearsal, when we plugged in, some of these guys had never even met each other and it was as if they had been playing together for five years. It was really, really happening. But Tommy, I’ll tell you man, we sat down and discussed how, near the end, Whitesnake had lost that blues base entirely and was just overtly flamboyant. It wasn’t just the clothes. We looked like Christmas trees. Over-decorated. And that was actually carrying into the music which was unfortunate. Because I write very emotional, primitive music and if it’s over-embellished, you miss the whole point.”

  Interesting that David would say, “I very rarely go back.” It’s a statement that opens doors to Coverdale’s psyche. First, that’s a sentiment of which the premiere example in rock is Robert Plant, nemesis to, and always the smarty-pants in, the Coverdale/Plant dance. Second, he could have meant that as a statement of fact, a detached observation. Third, and likely telling, is an interpretation we might have divined through the process of this book, namely that once David is crossed or double-crossed or disagreed with, he doesn’t look back, he doesn’t change his mind, he goes with the new decision and the new reality and wants to believe he’s been right.

  In any event, Coverdale would prove to be sufficiently fired up to begin thinking about a new record under the Whitesnake banner. “As a matter of fact, yes. Doug Aldrich was playing around the other day. It’s interesting, because I have no desire to make what one would call a corporate record. But I love to write, I always have. I have tons of music, but right now of course, the obvious thing is to get these guys all greased on the songs we’re going to be performing. But, of course, like anybody else, when they plug their instrument in, they’ll play some chords and I’ll go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s that, what’s that?’ And we started to mess around with something the other day which was pretty cool. Oh, I have no doubts we’ll end up doing something, and, God willing, I’ll be able to maintain some kind of independent scenario, maybe through whitesnake.com or some little indie label. I just don’t want to go the other way, Martin. I’ve had enough of the other thing. I cannot work in an industry where people don’t care about music. Oh, it’s terrible! An artist like Tom Petty comes out with a theme album for God’s sake.”

  Meanwhile, classic-era Whitesnake members Neil Murray, Bernie Marsden and Micky Moody had formed a band called Company Of Snakes (evolved from The Snakes), first issuing in 2001 a live album of vintage Whitesnake material called Here We Go Again, and then in 2002, Burst The Bubble, a solid old school hard rock album of originals, proposing, as it were an alternative Whitesnake universe.

  “It includes quite a few tracks that Bernie and Micky recorded with the band when they were called The Snakes,” explains Neil Murray, with respect to Burst The Bubble, “which was with the Norwegian singer and rhythm section. That album only came out in Japan so it was kind of a good opportunity to take those songs and rearrange them and re-record them. This is what we’re working toward, rather than be some kind of tribute band to ourselves. And Stefan Berggren is singing on it. It’s straight-ahead, rather bluesy rock. It certain
ly sounds like it is descended from Whitesnake as it were, certainly not radically different.”

  “It’s what I would like to call a classic British rock album,” adds Marsden. “It’s got overtones of pretty much everything we’ve always done, but we also haven’t tried to stay exactly as we were before. I can only write a certain way because that’s the way I write songs, but I’ve tried to include some of the feelings that people would have today. But at the end of the day I’ve always been a bit of a songsmith in that I’m always interested in how good a song is, rather than how good you can make a song with production. We’ve tried to work that way. There’s not many of what we would call unnatural overdubs on the album. It’s basically the guitar solos which we work out, and we try to reproduce those on stage. The last thing in the world you want to do, as far as I’m concerned, is make a fantastic studio sound you can’t take on the road with you. So I like to think that we are in our own way, a traditional British rock outfit.”

  The band once was working with Jørn Lande, but as Marsden explains, that was unhealthy for their sense of legitimacy. “Jørn is a fine singer. You know, here’s the situation, and I’ve got no axe to grind with him whatsoever. We did a couple of albums, a live album and a studio album. The studio album was only made for Japan. It was only released in Japan, and he sings fine. The problem I have with Jørn is that he’s a David Coverdale clone. And it got to the point where at first it was kind of fun, but then it became almost embarrassing. Because instead of having the band doing Whitesnake material, we had almost a copy situation. It’s impossible for me and Micky Moody to be in a band copying Whitesnake, because we were the originators. And I would try to argue this with people like yourselves who put this point to me, and I couldn’t argue, because you had a lead singer who was impersonating David.”