Sounds that the drummer was “unable to take
constructive criticism”, elaborating with:
“Whitesnake was getting to be a like a Spanish
hotel – it looked good from the outside, but the
foundations were a bit shaky.”
However, the way that Marsden remembers
events, Dowle wasn’t fired, and in fact might even
have elected to walk away from the job, effectively
stepping aside for his replacement, former Purple
drummer Ian Paice.
“Jon [Lord] had let it be known that Ian was
available, and David Dowle was becoming
pretty unhappy within the set-up,” Marsden
explains. “He was a Londoner who didn’t like
being away from his family, so being at Clearwell
for around a month completely did him in. But
[the split] was nothing musical. Listen to the
record. If, as David claims, the foundations were
becoming unreliable, then I certainly don’t hear
that, not at all.”
Bringing in Paice, the “more primitive”
drummer sought by Coverdale, served to reunite
three-fifths of Deep Purple’s Mk III line-up in
Whitesnake. This fact was not lost on the press,
who began to suggest that Whitesnake’s line-up
changes were nothing more than a shift towards
Purple getting back together. Marsden became so
infuriated that he had a run of T-shirts made.
“They had the Deep Purple logo on the front,
plus the words: ‘No I wasn’t in...’,” he says with
a laugh now. “Because of that, some of the press
said: ‘Oh look, the first chink in the armour. Bernie
Marden kicks back.’ But everyone in the band
laughed their heads off.”
In the months leading up to the release of
Lovehunter, Whitesnake had been one of the
bands of the weekend at 1979’s Reading Festival.
“We went down an absolute storm, and that
made a big difference,” Marsden recalls fondly.
“We sold a lot of records when it came out. Ian
was yet to come, but Jon had already joined and
it made us think: ‘Maybe we’re a bigger band
than we thought.’”
Released in October ’79, Lovehunter became the
band’s first Top 30 album in the UK. When it was
released in Argentina, a chain-mail bikini bottom
was airbrushed on to the female star of its sleeve,
while for the US market a sticker was applied to
conceal her posterior.
Although Lovehunter represented a massive step
up from Trouble, talking in an interview years later
Coverdale made the rather perplexing statement
that Lovehunter would have made a very good EP.
“David really said that?!” Marsden says
disbelievingly, before adding with a chuckle:
“I don’t know which of its six tracks he would
have taken off to make it happen. But albums are
like your children – nothing is perfect. And once
you’d made them, you can never go back.
However, back in those days Whitesnake really
was a collective. Now David does exactly what
he likes. But back then we argued about things
because they really mattered. It was a good,
healthy, positive thing.
“And because of that the band got better and
more successful with Ready An’ Willing [1980]
and Come An’ Get It [’81],” Marsden concludes.
“But Trouble and Lovehunter were still really good
records, and for David to say that he doesn’t like
his first and second born children... well, I think
that’s a bit disrespectful, really.”T
hey got off to a flying start. When
British guitarist Mick Jones put
Foreigner together in New York City
in 1976, he knew exactly what he
was doing. With an Anglo-American line-up,
including singer Lou Gramm, from Rochester,
250 miles from New York, having a rich,
soulful voice reminiscent of Paul Rodgers, this
was a hard rock band made for radio.
Their debut album, titled simply Foreigner,
released in 1977, sold four million copies in
the US. The following year’s Double Vision
did a million more. Foreigner even found an
unlikely fan in John Lydon, the former Sex
Pistols singer, who said that Hot Blooded, the
muscular hit from Double Vision, made him
“jump around like a lunatic”.
But still, there was
something needling Mick
Jones. “We’d been getting
a battering in the press about
how polished the albums
sounded,” he said. “So we
started to search for a little
more earthiness.”
As a result, the directive for
Head Games was, in Jones’s
words, “more of a ‘street-
sounding’ album”. And while it was another
big hit, it also turned out to be the most
controversial record of Foreigner’s career.
There were two new guys on the team.
After original bassist Ed Gagliardi was fired,
in came Rick Wills, who had played for David
Gilmour, Roxy Music and Peter Frampton. The
other new face was the producer, Roy Thomas
Baker, who had worked with Queen on
landmark albums such as Sheer Heart Attack
and A Night At The Opera. More significant,
for Jones, were two records Baker had
produced in 1978: Queen’s Jazz, on which
the band’s flamboyance was channelled into
tighter, punchier songs, and The Cars’ self-titled debut, a perfect synthesis of hard rock
and new wave.
With Baker as co-producer on Head Games,
alongside Jones and second guitarist/
keyboard player Ian McDonald, there was now
a different edge to the Foreigner sound. They
played it pretty straight on the album’s title
track, an anthem typical of what Jones called
“that guitar/synth power rock that we
developed”, but the opening track and lead
single Dirty White Boy, a fast-paced, lean and
mean rock’n’roll number, had the grittiness
that Jones was looking for. “It’s just riffs and
a great lyric from Lou,” Jones said. “Lou could
provide that Americana/street thing.” And in
Women there was a frantic energy – a spiky
new-wave feel in the music,
and toughness in how
Gramm portrayed his subject:
’Women that stab you in the
back with a switchblade knife.’
It was the album’s cover
that sparked controversy:
a provocative image of
a teenage girl, in a skimpy
top, mini-skirt and heels,
scrawling graffiti in a men’s
toilet. “In the Midwest, record
distributors decided they didn’t want to carry
the album,” Jones recalled. “But it kind of felt
good. We were the bad boys all of a sudden.”
But that feeling would not last. Head Games,
released on September 11, 1979, made No.5
in the US after Dirty White Boy had blasted to
No.12. But when the album sold two million- disappointing by Foreigner’s high standards
- Jones knew it was time to push on again.
What followed with 4 , co-produced by
Mutt Lange, was the sophisticated sound that
made Foreigner one of the biggest rock acts
of the next decade. The raw ‘street’ vibe of
Head Games was a one-off for Foreigner. So
too, wisely, was that dreadful cover.
Words: Paul ElliottFOREIGNER
HEAD GAMES
GET
TY
Singer Lou Gramm
brought what Mick
Jones described as an
“Americana/street
thing” to Foreigner.CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 41