Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage

by Martin Popoff

  On top of that ultimate heavy metal irony, Ian once again found himself in a band with Jon Lord. “Jon was never one of the guys who conceived riffs or rhythms, because that’s not what he did,” comments Ian, focussing on Lord’s relationship to record-making. “I mean, rock ‘n’ roll is pretty much a guitar-dominated form of music, so guitarists tend to bring in more ideas; that’s just the way it is. In the same way, drummers are the boss of the rhythm department, so they tend to come up with different feels and different rhythm patterns. Jon’s genius was, when somebody had an idea, he’d say, ‘Well, that sounds great, but what if we did this to it?’ And then he’d put a whole different chord inversion there, and what was good, suddenly became magnificent. So Jon’s musical knowledge was where his strengths really where. When the idea was there, he would take it somewhere else.”

  Coverdale now had the band he’d always wished for, given Marsden’s melodic soloing, Moody’s slide work, Murray’s marked blossoming, given his chemistry with Ian Paice, and the power coming out of Jon Lord.

  “Ian Paice comes in, and you move in a different direction purely because of the way he plays,” notes Murray, now suddenly in a rhythm section with one of the monsters of rock. “And the same with Jon Lord joining the year before that. The more powerful it gets, you gain something and then you lose something else. But in terms of being a really powerful live band, the strength side will always win out. You have to have that there, the foundation of a really strong rhythm section. And certainly, the six-piece Whitesnake line-up from, let’s say, 1980, was a really strong and powerful line-up, and an artistic unit. It wasn’t kind of a lead singer with a few guys in his backing band. It was all very much a band of equals. And each of us brought something to the party.”

  “As a side note,” continues Murray, “there were various people suggested, and I suggested Tommy Aldridge for the band at that point. But other people didn’t know him [laughs]. They weren’t aware of him at that time. Anyway, so then we would go out on tour in the fall of ‘79 with Ian Paice, and of course, instantly, the songs sound different.”

  Working out the math, Whitesnake was now six members, with three of them hailing from Mk. III/Mk. IV Purple. One of the band’s guitarists was a blues guy, the other more of a generalist with less of a past to plunder, and its bass player was more of a prog fusion guy. The result? Well, it seemed like the varied experiences of the non-Purple half of the band cancelled themselves out and Whitesnake was, now, very much, making records that would squarely and logically make sense following on from Come Taste The Band.

  Comparisons to Purple would ruffle the feathers of everyone in the band, with the non-alumni amongst them coming up with a t-shirt that from afar said “DEEP PURPLE,” but up close was revealed to read, “No I wasn’t in DEEP fucking PURPLE.” A further annoyance was the periodic chatter that Deep Purple, in some guise, was going to reform and re-take their rightful place. It was no idle threat. The idea was always a possibility, gaining traction, fading, championed by some ex-members (and managers), dismissed by others. And then, of course, a reunion would actually come to pass not far in the future, with real impact on David’s fiery fiefdom.

  In any event, for now, Whitesnake ensconced themselves at the infamous Ridge Farm in late 1979 to lay down what is quietly, and without flash, becoming the band’s timeless milestone; its best serious piece of art. Ready An’ Willing indeed exudes a sense of steadiness, a sense of charm, and logically so, given that it’s nestled enigmatically between the eclectic early work and the stadium roar of the big hair years. It is not so much the cusp album or the crossroads of a shift, but an island state between two foreign worlds.

  Before work could begin at Ridge Farm, however, everybody would have to get back on the same page, back into work mode. David had expressed that he was a little ticked off that Bernie had been on holiday in Africa when he was already rarin’ to go, having returned from vacation in Belize recharged.

  “Ridge Farm was out in the country and Genesis had worked there in the past and we were recommended to the place by a mutual engineer,” explains Marsden. “It was in the middle of winter and freezing cold. And I felt like the boy child, because I slept in a stable; it was a converted stable [laughs]. Come Christmas Eve, I was beginning to think, ‘Hello, what’s going on here?’ It was the first album we did with Ian, so the vibe was really good. And I wrote ‘Fool For Your Loving’ right in that very room, so I always have fond memories of that.”

  Marsden can’t say enough about Jon Lord and Ian Paice as performers par excellence. “They practically ruin you. Because once you play with these guys, the poor guys who come afterwards are always chasing the dragon [sic], because these guys are so good. I got over it and you find other people. But suddenly, when you’ve been playing with Ian Paice and Jon Lord for six years, and suddenly you’re not – it’s tough, it’s tough.

  “Paice as a drummer, I’ve just seen so many people on the side of the stage; they would come onstage with us in the old days and say ‘Can I stand here and watch Ian?’ and I’ve seen Paice reduce grown men drummers to tears. Because what he does is so easy and yet so impossible. It makes it look like these other guys are just beginning. The guys are great. And they are a very important turn on my career, because when I joined Paice Ashton Lord in 1976, pre-Whitesnake, they kind of put me on the rock map, so to speak. I was suddenly playing with these guys, and they elevated me into a very prominent position.”

  “Paicey was great in those days,” offers Marsden looking at the personal side of the band. “We used to call him The Bank Of Paice, because he was always the one who had some money when we were all broke. He would say, ‘You want $20? Okay, well, next Tuesday, you pay me back $25 [laughs].’ That’s why he’s still a very rich man. Jon Lord, we used to call The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow because we could never get him up. We would be in studios all over the world recording, and we wouldn’t see Jon for days because he wouldn’t come out of his room. That was his way of preparing for the gig. He would walk in and play the most stupendous keyboard parts you’ve ever heard.”

  David Coverdale reiterates the importance of Ian Paice to the band. “Ready An’ Willing… I’ll tell you exactly what happened there. Paicey was involved, the drummer, and that was the first time the band really started to sound like it did in my head. The rhythm section was distinctly shaky before that. Whitesnake was always a live entity, so the songs would not translate very well on record, but it was a great live show. That was the strength of it. But Ready An’ Willing was the first time I started to get it right. And I put a great deal of the onus on the fact that Ian Paice had joined. Because he is a very secure, very dynamic and very powerful drummer. I think the first half of the album is the beginning of what it should have sounded like.”

  “The album took about a month, I think,” continues Marsden, Ready An’ Willing having been constructed in early 1980 with a release date of May 3rd. “It was this tiny old farm place and there was a pub down the road we used to go to when we had a break, and everybody had to bend over double, even myself. I’m only about 5’ 8” and I would have to duck to miss hitting my head on the beams, so everybody would go down to the pub and have a few drinks and come back with black eyes and cuts on their heads from bumping into the beams. It was like an ER unit. And on the album there’s a thing about developing our Rusper stoop or something like that [the credits, in part, read: “The Plough” in Rusper for developing our Quasimodo impressions and Groucho Marx stoop]; people wondered what the hell that meant. But it’s because we would walk around for hours after coming back from the pub, still bent double so we wouldn’t hit our heads on the ceiling.”

  Here’s how bassist Neil Murray recalls constructing the album. “Very easy to record. We were down in a kind of residential, not really a farm, but it’s called Ridge Farm Studios, so we were all kind of set up in a converted barn. There were fields and countryside around; I guess there was a farm next door. The building we actually lived in was
like an old manor house dating back quite a few centuries. So you’ve got big lawns and a tennis court and, I suppose, a swimming pool but not in an incredibly grand manner. It was just sort of relaxed, sitting around, not really having much to do with the outside world, which was the point of being there. But there weren’t that many distractions either. You got up and maybe read the paper and went over to the studio and worked for twelve hours and had a big meal at some point.”

  In fact, most of the early Whitesnake records benefitted from the same process. “Yes, all very much the same thing,” says Murray. “We were there for maybe a couple of weeks doing an album, maybe one or two tracks a day, maybe more even with respect to backing tracks. It was all very unpressurized. You might say, ‘Okay, maybe we need more of an up-tempo song to finish off.’ There would be a certain amount of writing going on at the time of recording, particularly lyrics. David would always be doing those at the last moment.

  “Bernie didn’t get there for a few days because he was still on vacation so we came up with, for example, the track ‘Ready An’ Willing’ without him. We had kind of been finding our sound up until that point. And that was the first album that Ian Paice had been involved in and he was very much responsible for taking Whitesnake to a higher level. Somehow, the band really found its sound of that era on that record and then Come An’ Get It kind of consolidated it.

  “You’ve got a real mixture on there, obviously a really Free-influenced track, ‘Carry Your Load’, and typical boogie woogie type things. Ian has a great feel. He’s very influenced by jazz and funk and all sorts of different styles, not just heavy metal bashing. He’s a kind of groove player and it gives you a lot more to play live. And he’ll do some very startling things that you’re not expecting, particularly on stage. He really keeps you on your toes. It’s hard to explain. His sense of time is great, a great sound; he just generally plays the right thing and makes it very easy to play.”

  Marsden offers a slightly different take on the album’s title track, a sinister heavy metal whack that stood out as a forbearer of things to come. “Well, ‘Ready An’ Willing’, it’s a bit of a mystery for everybody because it doesn’t have my name on it. And that’s because we had a policy at the time of having one track on the album we would kind of split between all members of the band. And then Ian Paice came into the band, and Ian Paice, because of him being The Bank Of Paice – and him knowing what it was like to sell millions of records because of Purple – when it came time to do the credits, Paicey said, ‘Well, Bernie shouldn’t be on it.’ ‘Well, he wrote most of the song.’ ‘Well, he wrote the last two songs, and nobody wrote anything else, but it was divided between the band.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, if this album sells a million, that means I make £2000 less,’ because he was very money-sorted, whereas the rest of us were just getting on the road and playing rock ‘n’ roll. But that’s Ian all over. That’s why my name doesn’t appear on it, even though I’m kind of a part of it.”

  Coverdale, however, sided with Paice on this one, saying that the track was being cooked up primarily by himself and Moody, precisely because Marsden was still in Africa. One would surmise the missing credit is a dig at the irksome situation. After all, this was indeed the track designated by Coverdale to be the one on which the entire band gets credited. The slight adjustment to that policy... well, Bernie was supposed to be back from vacation and working.

  “‘Sweet Talker’ was written just before we went to the session,” continues Marsden. “I more or less had the idea for the song, David wrote the words, and ‘Fool For Your Loving’ was a classic Coverdale/Marsden/Moody. I kind of had the riff, and the riff goes through the song to the bridge part. And Micky had a kind of really cool piece to join them together, which is from another song of his. I said, ‘Well, why don’t we put that in this?’ and it all made sense, and David wrote the words. And it took about, I should think, maybe about an hour-and-a-half. ‘Love Man’, I thought was a great modern blues at the time.

  “David got a lot of stick for sexist lyrics and I thought that was quite amusing that he wrote that. I mean, some of the words later on did get a bit explicit but we always used to just laugh about it, really. It was kind of good, that was. We were under a bit of pressure because we were due on the road after Christmas when the album was done. So there wasn’t a great deal of craziness going down when we did it.”

  Neil Murray adds to the tale of “Fool For Your Loving,” the record’s rich and majestic, but oddly despondent opening track, the only tune that was something of a hit single from the record, reaching No. 13 on the UK charts and No. 53 in the US. The track would be re-recorded and re-attain hit status in 1989, but its rightful karmic place was in the here and now anchoring Ready An’ Willing.

  “I could tell it was going to be a fairly commercial song with a fairly good hook, so I went back and re-did my bass on it and put in as much as I thought I could get away with, really,” remembers Murray. “And then when it came to mix, I think Ian had a lot of say. I think they started mixing that one first, and I came in to listen and the bass was pretty much in the background and I said, ‘Look, that’s not really how it’s supposed to be. I put all these new bass lines to it in order that it was going to be heard. Why didn’t you turn it up?’ or whatever.

  “I went home dejected and at three o’clock in the morning I got woken up by the phone. Martin Birch said, ‘Yeah, we put it back your way; it sounds much better.’ It could have sounded quite different. And I think the version on Ready An’ Willing is much better than the version on Slip Of The Tongue and I think some of it has to do with the way the bass line runs through it, very much from my point of view. But I thought it was a strong song. Others on there… ‘Sweet Talker’ is just a straight rocker. Generally we would play together as a band, and some things would be replaced. Certainly the vocals would be redone again. I think all of the early Whitesnake albums were done like that; probably Slide It In as well.”

  Murray is dead correct about “Fool For Your Loving.” The bass line is magnificent, forceful, fluid and thankfully, loud and clear. A crucial element of this regal, timeless track. Marsden indeed calls “Fool For Your Loving” his favourite Whitesnake track of all time, because it “encapsulated what Whitesnake was all about at the time.”

  Curiously, Coverdale said that the idea was to write a song for B.B. King, when B.B. had been working with The Crusaders. Sounds magazine had Marsden doing a few interviews with older artists and he got to talking with B.B., and B.B. suggested Bernie come up with something for him. But after taking a listen to the acoustic demo, Coverdale and Martin Birch had decided that they couldn’t let it escape.

  More from Murray on producer Birch: “The sound pretty much seemed to be a refinement of what had been happening on the previous album and it sort of continued on inasmuch as the guitars are not really heavy, heavy guitars, really in-your-face. The bass is quite featured, which is great for me. The whole thing is quite dry sounding and Martin had the same kind of basic idea for Iron Maiden when he went to work for them, which is not really using loads of overdubbing and studio effects. Just get a good solid representation of how the band really is and don’t work it to death doing hundreds of takes. He’s very much an engineer producer, not a producer producer, where they’re telling you what to do. He’s just trying to capture the sound. And he’s pretty much in charge of how the final mix sounds. And it certainly was to my benefit.”

  And Murray seconds Marsden’s opinion that work on the album was more or less, all business. “No, no wild parties, not really on that album. I mean, we’re fairly self-contained. There might be the occasional wives or girlfriends popping in, but we were not really a big party band. But we always had a great laugh and the whole early period of Whitesnake was constant amusement. For example, Bernie and Micky individually can be very funny, but put them together and they’re hilarious. Sometimes it’s silly pranks, and others it’s general fooling around, drawing caricatures of people, fairly chil
dish. But we would never get really out of our heads doing destructive things. It was more just having a laugh.”

  Another great track on the album was the Zeppelin-esque “Ain’t Gonna Cry No More,” which Murray recalls this way. “That would have started as an acoustic number and then we would all get together and say, ‘Okay, what can we do with it now?’ and then we would go into the band part. But I’m so used to hearing it done acoustically with Micky and Bernie because they tend to do that in the Company Of Snakes show; I’ve almost forgotten that it does go to that up-tempo band part in the middle. I wasn’t involved in the writing of the songs but we would all just kind of take something that was bare bones and make something out of it.”

  As with “Ain’t Gonna Cry No More,” nearly everything Whitesnake did touched down at some point on the blues rock idiom. “Carry Your Load” and “Blindman” were down-tempo, desperado-type tunes celebrated by the likes of Bad Company, whereas “Black And Blue” and “She’s A Woman” were up-tempo and boogie-based, the latter, very much in the hard rock world but still framed like a rock ‘n’ roll song.

  David Coverdale clearly understood the band’s place within this framework, telling Hit Parader’s Charley Crespo at the time, “We’d like to think of Whitesnake as a progressive R&B band, what the Yardbirds would’ve been if it had stayed together. First and foremost, the influence of the band is very blues-based. But instead of going back and playing the old twelve bar sequences, we try to take the blues into a more modern structure in terms of music and make the themes more identifiable with today rather than 40 years ago. Also, our music is physical, which I think has been missing for a long time.”

  This idea of making the blues interesting, is what the British blues boom needed to do not to die a death. It did, indeed, die a death quite quickly by the end of the 1960s, but a few bands got the message, most notably Led Zeppelin. Others like Deep Purple and Black Sabbath completely burned the playbook. Which, of course, is another reason there’s a Whitesnake.