David Coverdale on How ‘Whitesnake’ Changed His Life
Whitesnake will be going back in time this fall with deluxe reissues of 1987’s eight-times-platinum Whitesnake album, celebrating the set’s 30th anniversary.
The new collections will include unreleased studio, live and video material, including demos frontman David Coverdale and guitarist John Sykes worked on for the album — which spawned hits such as “Is This Love,” “Give Me All Your Love,” “Here I Go Again” and “Still Of the Night.”
Coverdale tells us that he never takes for granted what the massively successful album meant for his career, and for the band’s:
“My gratitude is beyond words. I’ve only ever, as I do now, go into a studio to try to improve on the last record…There was no, ‘Right, I’m gonna sell 30-odd million f***ing records,’ and it was amazing, just amazing…I was almost $3 million in debt from a lost two years off the road, and within a couple of months I was rather rich, wealthy. So it was like God patted me on the back and said, ‘There you go. There’s some validation for all the work you’ve done.”
The Whitesnake sets will be out on October 6 as the first release of a new worldwide deal for the band’s catalog and new work with Warner Music Group.
For Record Store Black Friday in November Whitesnake will be releasing a live video and coffee table book from its 2015 The Purple Album project, and Coverdale is currently working on material for a new Whitesnake album he hopes to have out next spring.
Gary Graff is an award-winning music journalist who not only covers music but has written books on Bob Seger, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.
