Tour Notes

Tour notes from Whitesnake Tour 2003

WHITESNAKE TOUR PROGRAMME NOTES
By Mick Wall

CONGRATULATIONS. IF YOU HAVE BOUGHT this tour programme it means one of two things. Either you are a) reading this just before seeing one of the greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world, or b) reading this on the way home having just seen one of the greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world. Either way, baby, this is your night because if there’s one thing Whitesnake know how do, it’s rock’n’roll. Something I have had the unique pleasure of watching them do on many memorable occasions over the past 25 years, in many sometimes strange and exotic places and, yes, in ever more numerous guises. The one constant throughout: David Coverdale, vocalist extraordinaire, writer of fiery gypsy laments and vista-scanning rock anthems, and an artist for whom the term ‘gentleman rocker’ might have been invented, and in fact probably was.


As a young Deep Purple fan, I had wept back in 1973 when I read that the band had enlisted a complete unknown to replace then recently departed singer Ian Gillan. David who? Were they mad? Then I bought the ‘Burn’ album, listened to tracks like ‘Might Just Take Your Life’, ‘Mistreated’ and the tumultuous title track itself, and… oh my god! Spoiled as I was by growing up in an age when singers like Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers and Rod Stewart ruled the roost, at first I don’t think I could quite believe what I was hearing. This David Coverdale guy… he was as good as any of them. Maybe even better… who was this guy?

I began reading about him in the music press. He was 22, they said, had been working in a men’s boutique when he sent his tape off to Purple ? and that was about it. Oh, and he looked like a young Richard Burton ? with really long hair.

It was enough. For the next five years I bought everything that had his name on it, up to and including ‘Come Taste The Band’, his final half-brilliant, half-something else album with Purple in 1976. The band had replaced guitarist Ritchie Blackmore with Tommy Bolin by then and the music had taken on a new spaced-out, funk-oriented edge that left many of their fans confused but demonstrated early on how Coverdale, at least, liked to take chances with his music.

As he says now: “I’ve always had a restless attitude to music. You’re right, you can see it going right back to Deep Purple. But especially since then, I think, with Whitesnake. Although we rarely lost that bottom line of the blues as our base, the music we made, the twists and turns the line-up went through along the way, the strange avenues I found myself walking down as things progressed and things like fame and success started to come into the equation, it meant that we were always having to reinvent ourselves musically. If you played our first album next to our last, you would be astonished at the breadth of the musical journey the band has been on.”

Not that his status as the former Deep Purple front man guaranteed him success when he first formed Whitesnake in 1978. “Quite the opposite, in fact,” he recalls. Releasing the first Whitesnake album, ‘Trouble’, at a time when the advent of new wave music had “everybody telling me that a long-haired rock and rhythm-and-blues band had no chance of success in the current climate,” might have deterred some people. Not Coverdale, though. Born in the north-east of England, where you need more than just a strong voice to back you up, he was, as always, “determined to prove everybody wrong.” It would become a recurring theme throughout his career.

Teaming up with guitarists Micky Moody (ex-Snafu, Zoot Money, and Juicy Lucy) and Bernie Marsden (ex-UFO, Babe Ruth, and Ashton, Lord & Paice), drummer Duck Dowle, and ex-Colosseum II, and Cozy Powell’s Hammer bassist Neil Murray, he knew he still had an audience, he says. “That much was obvious from our very first tour, which was sold out.” But getting their records played on the radio or written about favourably in the press, “was something that just didn’t happen back then. In fact, I’m still waiting for it to happen,” he chuckles.

It wasn’t until the third Whitesnake album, ‘Ready An’ Willing’, that Coverdale broke through to the big time with his new band ? at least, in Europe ? when the first single from it, ‘Fool For Your Loving’, became their first Top 10 hit in the UK. One of the all-time great rock records right up there with ‘Can’t Get Enough’ or ‘Smoke On The Water’, as David says, “‘Fool For Your Loving’ was the song that changed things for us. Suddenly we were on the TV and radio for the first time ? and lo and behold, people liked it. Suddenly good time rock’n’roll was back on the menu…”

Written by Coverdale in conjunction with Moody and Marsden, and originally conceived as a number built for blues legend BB King, “Once we started playing it,” he grins, “I thought, wait a minute, this is too good to give away. I love BB King ? but I love this even more! It felt like a song I was born to sing.”

Until then, the most popular number of the early Whitesnake shows was their arm-waving version of the old Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland classic, ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City’, which they first recorded for the 1978 ‘Snakebite’ EP.

“No disrespect to Bobby Bland,” says David, “I’ve always adored his version. But that’s a Whitesnake song now.” The first time he realised it, he says, was at a show at the Newcastle City Hall in 1978. He was singing away with his eyes closed when he “suddenly became aware of something going on in the crowd, some strange sound I didn’t recognise. I opened my eyes and saw that it was them singing! I was so surprised I actually stopped singing for a moment and just stood there listening ? and from there they just took over the whole song and sang every last word for me. It was first time anything like that had ever happened to me and I was completely amazed.

“That was the beginning of what I now call the World Famous Whitesnake Choir. That one song ? and the audience’s response to it, particularly at home in Britain ? changed my entire approach to live performance. In Purple, the emphasis had been very much on the virtuosity of the various musicians and singers involved. But Whitesnake was where I began to learn how to actually entertain an audience, to get them involved. And that’s when Whitesnake began to establish an image, a public face, of its own that had nothing to do with the past, or what might have gone on for me or any of the other members back in the seventies. It was about having a good time right here, right now. And by god we had a good time in Whitesnake in those days…”

THEIR COURSE SET, THE WHITESNAKE ship sailed through their next two albums ? ‘Come An’ Get It’, in 1981, and ‘Saints & Sinners’, in ’82. Both were respectable Top 10 hits ? but there was a track on the latter, despite being undernourished by a gruel-thin production, that should have been the song that turned Whitesnake into household names in the UK right up there with Thin Lizzy and Queen. Instead, the track in question, ‘Here I Go Again’, would have to wait another six years ? and a complete musical facelift ? before it would go down in history as perhaps the greatest and best-known Whitesnake song of all time, reaching the Top 10 in the UK in the summer of 1988 and (cue: drum roll) simultaneously becoming their first No.1 American single.

“It was always a song I loved,” says David, “and I always felt heartbroken that we never really did it justice first time around. ‘Saints & Sinners’ was a difficult album to make. Micky Moody left not long after we started, then came back near the end, and various other things happened that meant we really didn’t spend enough time thinking about the music and how best to record it. We simply wanted to get something down and get out on the road again. Don’t forget, they were simpler times, when two albums a year was the norm. You bashed them out. And I don’t think we realised quite what we had with that song. So when the opportunity came to do it again a few years later, on the ‘1987’ album, I grabbed it with both hands.

“For me, it’s still very much the perfect Whitesnake song - dynamically interesting on all levels, starting off relatively soft, then crunch ? the guitars explode! It’s a whisper-to-a-scream vocal, and a lyric that anybody and everybody can identify with, and apparently do.” Lyrics, in fact, inspired by the breakdown of his first marriage. “But people don’t usually know that and it doesn’t matter. It’s one of those songs that has taken on a life of its own. It’s the one everyone knows, and it all means something different to everybody, which is how it should be with all great songs.”

Despite the lack of further hit singles, Whitesnake’s profile was big enough by 1983 for them to headline that year’s prestigious Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. A raucous performance that found 50,000 people all singing and waving their arms (and other things) in unison to ‘Ain’t No Love…’ one moment, then stomping up and down in blissful inebriation the next as the band brought the hammer down on ‘Fool For Loving’, what no one could have guessed was that it would also be the last ever performance by that particular line-up of Whitesnake.

Indeed, over the course of the next six months, in which the sixth Whitesnake album, ‘Slide It In’, was also somehow recorded and new American record deal with Geffen (the rock label of the 80s) signed, the Whitesnake of old broke up completely and a brand new, hastily assembled line-up replaced it. With the exception of former Trapeze guitarist, Mel Galley, who injured his left hand so badly in a freak accident that he was forced to retire from the band, the rest had all jumped ship. Dismayed by what he saw as Coverdale’s “betrayal” of the band’s blues roots, Bernie Marsden had left (to be replaced by Galley) in 1983 and Micky Moody had quit for good a few months later for much the same reasons. “Micky was a purist,” David shrugs. “I was an adventurer. I wanted to keep the blues but I also wanted to explore other areas as well.”

Former Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice had replaced Duck Dowle in 1980, joining up again with both David and former Purple keyboardist Jon Lord, who had arrived in time for the second Whitesnake album, ‘Love Hunter’, in 1979. When they were both then tempted back, however, into a reformed line-up of the Gillan-era Deep Purple in 1984, Coverdale suddenly found himself without a band. With the lone exception of Neil Murray, the rest had all gone.

“On the one hand, it was kind of a shock to the system,” he says. “Certainly in terms of what happened to Mel. He had co-written at least half the next album with me and to suddenly lose him like that was a blow. But most of all I felt for Mel. It was a tragedy what happened to him.

“Ian and Jon leaving was just one of those things. It wasn’t the best news I’d had all day but I could at least see where they were coming from. It was just too tempting for them to turn down. Purple had always been more Jon and Ian’s band than Whitesnake was. Whitesnake was my band.

“In terms of Bernie and Micky, however, that was more of a 50-50 situation. They wanted to leave ? and I wanted them to leave. Great players though they undoubtedly are, neither one of them ever commanded the stage in the magisterial way Ritchie Blackmore had in Deep Purple, or Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin. And I wanted to take the band to the next level. They were happy to chug along with the success we had in Britain and Europe, but I’d seen the other side of the coin with Purple in their heyday in America, and I wanted to be able to say I was able to match that with my own band.”

After recruiting former Jeff Beck and Rainbow drummer Cozy Powell and former Thin Lizzy guitarist, John Sykes, whom he had first spotted when Whitesnake toured with Lizzy in 1982, and remarkably, against the odds, Coverdale managed to pull together a line-up of Whitesnake that, while relatively short-lived, proved to be the catalyst to the most prolific and successful era of the band.

The subsequent world tour was their biggest yet, including their first major tour of America where ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger’, their breakthrough MTV hit, helped send ‘Slide It In’ into the US album charts, the first Whitesnake album ever to do so.

“It’s been a great year for the band,” Coverdale told me the night before the final show of the tour, at the Rock In Rio festival, in Brazil, in January 1985. “Considering where we started from, we’ve ended up with a great band and our biggest album so far. Some people were already writing our epitaphs when the old line-up broke-up. But as usual they underestimated me, underestimated the Whitesnake audience. They didn’t realise the strength of the bond between us, and that as long as I’m there to conduct the orchestra, as they say, there will always be a Whitesnake.” 

Prophetic words. For by the time the next Whitesnake album, ‘1987’, had been released two years later, the wily old gambler had shuffled the cards again. Cozy had left to join Black Sabbath before ‘1987’had even been recorded, and was replaced in the studio by top session drummer Aynsley Dunbar. But while Murray and Sykes did play on the album ? indeed, Sykes co-wrote most of the album with Coverdale ? neither one of them was still in the band by the time the album was released.

As for Sykes, he said at the time, “That’s a whole other story ? and one I’m sure neither John nor I would wish to get into too deeply in public. Suffice to say, John is a fabulous guitarist and when we worked together and things were cooking, they were really cooking. It was when we weren’t playing together, the other 22 hours of the day, that we had problems. Although I must say it was very enjoyable experience  for me to reconnect with John last year after not speaking for close to 17 years. We did talk about getting back together, but, I felt that old negative issues could have raised their unwelcome heads and at this point in my life, I wasn’t prepared to take that chance. But, who knows…I do have some positive ideas to discuss with John about a possible short term scenario, so, we will see what unfolds.”

So, once again, to tour behind the success of the 87 album, Coverdale introduced a brand new, far more glamorous and exciting chapter of Whitesnake  to the world featuring guitarist Adrian Vandenberg (then star of his own eponymously named band) and Vivian Campbell (ex-Dio and future Del Leppard member), bassist Rudy Sarzo (ex-Ozzy) and drummer Tommy Aldridge (ex-Ozzy, Pat Travers, and Black Oak Arkansas). “For me, the ‘1987’ road band was absolutely right for the time, right for MTV and right for people that wanted quality rock songs,” he says now. “I listen back to things like ‘Still Of The Night’ now and I think: wow, that was a kick-arse band, but, to be honest, I believe we would have self-imploded had we tried to take the studio band on tour.”

I saw that line-up perform in both America and England and, no question, both times it was the best I had ever seen the band perform. Coverdale himself was at his magnificent peak, basking in the new-found glory that the astonishing, multi-million success of ‘1987’, which went to No.1 in both Britain and America that year, and the four mammoth hit singles from it: the Zeppelin-esque ‘Still Of The Night’; the gorgeous ballad ‘Is This Love’ (originally written for Tina Turner but snatched back at the last moment because “it was simply too personal to give away, though I would still love to hear Tina sing it”); the new, revamped ‘Here I Go Again’; and the jaunty ‘Give Me All Your Love’

“People say now, what was it like? Finally getting there on my own after all that time. But the truth is the whole thing sped by so quickly you didn’t have time to really think about it. When you reach  that level of success, you don’t have time to reflect. It’s just up, up and away, Mate!”

So things might have continued had the line-up not changed again. But Campbell left at the end of the tour and Coverdale wrote the material for the next album with Vandenberg. But when the guitarist badly strained some muscles in his left wrist it was months before he was able to play again. With an album to finish, Coverdale pulled off “a remarkable coup, at least that’s what everybody thought at the time,” when he persuaded former Frank Zappa, Alcatrazz, and David Lee Roth guitarist Steve Vai to join the band.

However, the resulting album, ‘Slip Of The Tongue’, while another million-seller, was something of a disappointment to Coverdale and many of Whitesnake’s hard core supporters. Despite some fine moments like the wistful ‘Sailing Ships’ or the monolithic ‘Judgement Day’, the general feeling was that Steve Vai’s tendency to over-embellish the songs with his wanton virtuosity had diminished what, in lighter hands, might have been a real and raunchy record to rival its illustrious predecessor. As David laughingly remarked when I broached the subject, “You’d have to be Kiri Te Kanawa to whistle a Steve Vai solo!”

“I had such a great, creative time writing the songs with Adrian and I believe the overall tone of the album would have been very different had Ol’ Dutch had the opportunity to be featured instead of just Steven on his own. The musicality is excellent but the bottom line of the rock, the blues, was compromised by over-flamboyance.”

Nevertheless, the tour ended on a triumphant note when the band headlined Donington again for a record third time in August 1990. After that though, Coverdale seemed to lose heart for a while and nothing more was heard from him for three years.

“It wasn’t anything to do with being down hearted,” he told me not long after he had emerged into public view again, in 1993. “I was simply exhausted. After the last show in Japan, I told the band I was taking a year off to sort myself, and my life out…I really needed time for myself. So Steve Vai went off to pursue his solo thing as we had agreed he would do at the end of the tour,  and the rest of the guys went home to their own thing. I’d been either on the road or in the studio, first with Purple and then Whitesnake, non-stop for over 15 years. It was time for to take a step back and think about what next I wanted to do, where I wanted to go…”

Initially, that search took him away from Whitesnake and into a wonderfully creative if sadly short-lived collaboration with former Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. The resulting album, ‘Coverdale Page’, was a superb return to form for both men, and another Top 10 platinum-selling hit for Coverdale in America.

“It’s still one of my favourite albums,” David says. “I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with some of the greatest guitarists around ? from Ritchie Blackmore, to Tommy Bolin, John Sykes, Steve Vai and the rest. But working with Jimmy was something else. It was a real treat for me to work with one of my heroes and what made it even better was that we agreed on just about everything and got on very well. Certainly on an artistic level, it was a fine collaboration and one of the most fun times of my career.”

It also allowed him to “really start to spread my wings again. I had been a rock’n’roll screamer for most of my life and now I wanted to do prove I could do something different again, that allowed me just to sing.”

The years have since have seen him branching out even further, from the last Whitesnake album, ‘Restless Heart’, in 1995, which hinted at a return to the more earthy roots of earlier Whitesnake), to the immodestly titled ‘Starkers in Tokyo’, in 1997, the live all-acoustic set recorded in Japan, with just Vandenberg to accompany him on acoustic guitar.

“In their different ways, they were all attempts to try something new,” he says now. “None of those albums were like the others; they all said something different about me as a singer, a performer.”

Most recently, there was the sublime solo album he released in 2000, ‘Into The LIGHT’. Reminiscent on tracks like the pounding ‘Slave’ of everything he’s ever done, and yet totally unlike anything he’s ever done before in something like the epic title track. “A lot of the musical ideas on ‘Into The Light’ had actually begun as ideas I’d had for the second Coverdale Page album. When that didn’t happen I carried on working on them on my own. I put together some excellent musicians, rented a house not far from my home at Lake Tahoe, and proceeded to have one the best creative times of my life! It was grand! Making the album was very creatively liberating for me but, if you listen carefully, you can still hear how potentially ‘Whitesnake’ they all are.”

Indeed. Which brings us to now, to tonight ? and the first all-new Whitesnake tour for nearly a decade. Starting the band again from scratch, as he has done so many times before, Coverdale has surrounded himself this time with some of the best musicians out there, both new and old. With drummer Tommy Aldridge back in the saddle, the rest of the line-up is completed by guitarists Doug Aldrich (ex-Dio, Lion, and Burning Rain) and Reb Beach (ex-Alice Cooper, Dokken, and Winger); plus keyboardist Timothy Drury (ex-Eagles, and Don Henley); and last but hardly least bassist Marco Mendoza (ex-Ted Nugent, and Thin Lizzy).

“It’s strange,” David smiles, “playing with these guys is like another musical reinvention. On the one hand we’ve got all the balls and flash of the ‘1987’ band, but we’ve also got all the subtlety and good-time feel of the earliest line-ups. Finally, after all this time, I’ve got a band that can do it all! Doug and Reb are such dextrous players they can tackle early classics like ‘Walking In The Shadow Of The Blues’ as easily as they can kick the living daylights out of ‘Still Of The Night’!” he laughs.

As a result, the Whitesnake show today is “a fair reflection of all the different eras of the band. I wanted the band to be able to show the history of Whitesnake, to really entertain those fans who have been with us right the way through as well as those who might only have come in with songs like ‘Here I Go Again’. It’s so difficult to choose the tunes, though. If it was up to me, and I had the energy, we’d be doing five-hour sets each night!”

As if to prove the point, a brand new Whitesnake compilation is about to hit the shops. Entitled ‘The 25th Anniversary Collection’, this double-CD brings together 36 of the best Whitesnake tracks including a smattering of tracks from both ‘Coverdale Page’ and ‘Into The LIGHT’.

“It was such a rewarding experience for me to reconnect with a lot of the earlier material after so long. To hear Bernie Marsden’s exceptionally melodic solos, for instance. Or Neil Murray’s extraordinary bass playing. Then to move on to some of the more outrageous things we did with Sykesy and Vai, right up to my involvement with Pagey… It all brought back seriously great memories, and I hope it does for everyone else when they hear it.”

So there you have it. Whatever your entry point into the Whitesnake story, the show this tour programme commemorates should have something for everyone.

Now for God’s sake stop being such a nerd and put this down. The talking stops when Whitesnake walk on stage. You know what I’m talking about.

Enjoy the show ...

From Whitesnake 2003 Tourbook
Thanks, David Coverdale & Poor Albert!