Sail Away: Whitesnake's Fantastic Voyage Read Online Free Page B

before the solo career, namely, an approximation of Mk.
III-era Deep Purple.
    The White Snake album would
feature a complicated cast of characters, half band and half not, but second in
creative and historical importance among the dramatis personae would be
old buddy Micky Moody.
    “David did two solo albums prior to
Whitesnake, which I was involved in,” explains Moody, grappling with Whitesnake’s
messy early history. “I go back a long way with David. I come from the
same town as David and Paul Rodgers, Middlesbrough [it is the nearest city to
Saltburn-by-the-Sea], in the northeast of England, a very working class area
where people do steel work. I went to school with Paul. We were in class for
four, or five, years in high school — we don’t call it that; we call it
secondary school. I grew up with Paul. We were from the same town and were in the
same classroom. We put a band together when we were 14 years old. That was the
Roadrunners. We then had The Wildflowers. We went to London and Paul Kossoff
was working in a music shop and we all became friends. I went back to
Middlesbrough to learn some classical guitar and Paul formed a band with Paul
Kossoff and the rest is history.”
    “And I knew David in the
late ‘60s, and then I went off to London, moved down south, as you do, as you
did,” continues Moody. Again, this was the trial-by-fire with his band The
Wildflowers, which besides losing Paul Rodgers to Free, would hatch the
career of Bruce Thomas (Pete Bardens/Quiver/Elvis Costello & The
Attractions).
    “When I went back to my hometown in 1968 there
was a young guy who was a student who was called David Coverdale. As I say, we
come from the same town. We would be in a coffee bar and David would be sitting
there, as he was coming back from art school. I got talking to David and he
was in a local band. I was in the top local band called Tramline that was very
much influenced by the West Coast thing. I got to know David then.”
    Tramline had actually produced two
records for Island, but the material... it would be a running joke inside of
Whitesnake, with Bernie Marsden exclaiming with relief that he had no skeletons
in his closet like Micky’s early records.
    “A few years later, about 1974, I heard
that he’d joined Deep Purple,” continues Moody. “He’d passed an audition. I was
very pleased for him. He was working in a boutique and singing like
semi-professionally, so I was very pleased about that. And before he went to
live in the States, just after that, with Deep Purple, he called up his old
mates from the Northeast, of the late ‘60s, including musicians and some guys
who had moved to London to become roadies or truck drivers or whatever, and we
had a party to send him off to the States. He was going to Malibu to live and
he found out where all of his old mates were. We had a big send-off for him
where we got drunk and stoned and did all of that stuff we did in the
‘70s.
    “And I never heard from him for about
eighteen months after that. He called me up, said he was living in Germany, and
asked me if I’d like to be involved in some solo projects he was going to do. He
came to my show that I was playing a few days later in Munich. I was playing
with a band called Snafu at the time. We had a drink and a month later, I was
staying with him for a while. I thought he only wanted me to play on a couple
of tracks. He wanted to get away from the hard rock. He had such a fantastic
voice that he wanted to do ballads, soulful stuff and acoustic stuff.
    “I ended up doing two albums with him.
The first one was White Snake and the second was Northwinds . And
from there, on those two albums, he wanted to get away, really, from the
heavy rock thing, the Purple thing. But David is a very versatile singer, and
had loads of ideas for ballads and soul stuff and funk. He could sing all of
that. He used to do cabaret and stuff when he was very young. He could sing all
kinds of things. So I think he’d