Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage Read Online Free

could afford it. So I was in my own head at that time.”
    “Look, here’s the deal,” explains Hughes
on the making of Come Taste The Band , Coverdale’s third record and the
last for the band before the Mk. II reunion in 1983. “Tommy Bolin joined Deep
Purple in, I think, June of 1975. In June and July we basically rehearsed in
Los Angeles. We wrote a couple in the studio. Then we went to Munich to
Musicland Studios and, you know, Tommy Bolin had moved into my home in Beverly
Hills. There were definitely two camps being set up, maybe three camps being
set up. There was me and Tommy to one side, David alone, and then
Jon and Ian. And, it was very obvious when we went to Germany that it was me
and Tommy hanging out.
    “If you listen to the album, there
is definitely a Tommy and Glenn influence on the one side, and Coverdale is
doing the big voice in the middle. We were the toxic twins of the
band. Tommy and I were young and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing.”
    Was David also a little wild?
     “I wouldn’t like to comment on that,”
says Hughes. “All I can tell you is that David was a weekend warrior. You know,
I got along with David fine. I don’t know if he got along with me very well. As
far as the friendship was concerned, it was deep. As far as the
musicianship was concerned, I think it might have been fragile to say the
least. There’s a song called ‘Dealer’ that I actually sang. And I went to bed
one night and the next morning I came back and David sang it. And I went, ‘What
the fuck?!’ I guess I was voted off the track and I sang it like a motherfucker!
It was brilliant. If you know anything about Purple towards the
end, I think we did an hour and 45 minute show and David was off stage for
about 45 minutes because the band was jamming and I was doing a lot of singing.
And I think he was a bit pissed off about that. I’m just a progressive person
on stage and I like to jam. Tommy and I were doing that, and then
Jon Lord... Ian Paice is a ferocious drummer. And I just think the
David Coverdale thing, although he was the singer, he could have stayed on
stage and banged a tambourine or something but he was off stage.”
    There was definitely a source of
resentment on Coverdale’s part as he explained to Tony Stewart back in 1976, “I’m
not ashamed of any of the shows I did. I worked my bollocks off. No one was
talking about sacking me, I left. We were working for a concept, and then
I got the impression that everybody was trying to inject their little bits of
fiddly-diddly. Then it got disjointed and became too abstract. It went off on
tangents. It wasn’t how Deep Purple should have been anymore. For such a hard
bunch of blokes, though, we got really spineless in the end; just accepting the
situation and not doing anything about it. I wanted out.
    “I refuse to stand on stage with Glenn
while he’s doing his bloody ‘Georgia On My Mind,’” continued David. “And I’m
standing there in the dark saying, ‘C’mon, get it out of your system. Where’s the
band? C’mon, Tommy get it out, c’mon Jon do your classical bits’ — and I’d go
off and have a cigarette. Where’s that at? That ain’t no fucking band. Then Ian
turns round and says, ‘Dave, stop bellowing so much.’ I got that gig on the
strength of my talent. Nobody did me a favour. Those cats wanted me to work.
Like, I’ve got the goods to do it, and up to now people have only heard one
facet of my talent.”
    Piling it on, the band was also grousing
over writing credits, and Tommy’s heroin habit was affecting his playing, most
graphically brought to attention in the UK where he was heckled mercilessly. It
was all too much, and the hero of our story, after a maelstrom of three records
in two years plus white knuckle world tours, felt trained, bold, creatively
excited about the future, and optimistic enough to quit Deep Purple.
     “When I actually left, Glenn wasn’t
told,” explains David. “We would