Classic Rock Revisited founder Jeb Wright recently caught up with bassist Neil Murray (WHITESNAKE, BLACK SABBATH, GARY MOORE). An excerpt from the interview is available below.

Jeb: You jammed with (drummer) Cozy Powell’s band and even joined the band. Don Airey and Bernie Marsden were in Cozy’s band as well.

Neil: "It pretty much led to everything I have ever done. The way I got into Cozy’s band was through the bass player, Clive Chaman, who was in THE JEFF BECK GROUP with Cozy. Clive was West Indian but he was the British version o f Motown. He mentored me and recommended me for bands. After Cozy had a couple of hits singles, he put the band together called Hammer. I was Clive’s substitute bass player. I never was the actual bass player but I would fill in for Clive for a week or two as needed.

Don went on to play with Gary Moore in Coliseum II and I followed him into that band for about eighteen months. After that, I went back to doing something I did before I turned professional and that is playing extremely complicated jazz fusion in a band called NATIONAL HEALTH. Bill Bruford played in that band and that led to me playing on some of his solo stuff. When I got to the end of that period of being completely broke—it was so totally uncommercial. The fashion for fusion music died when punk was born.

Whitesnake formed at the end of 1977. I got that gig because I knew Bernie. He asked me to come along and help them audition a drummer because the bass player they had could not be there. A couple of weeks later, that bass player decided to go back and play with another band, so they called me up and asked me if I wanted the gig. Most of the guys in that version of Whitesnake were very influenced by the fusion thing that had been going on and that is why the first Whitesnake album has jazzy and funky bits on it. A couple of albums later, by Ready & Willing, we found our direction. It was partly to do with Jon Lord and Ian Paice joining the band. We also got that part of showing off on our instruments out of the way, we were able to write some good rock songs."

Jeb: Did you know David Coverdale before you joined?

Neil: "I had heard of him. I had heard the song 'Burn'. I didn’t know him, though. I was blown away from his charisma and his commitment to the music. I had never had a singer perform in rehearsal as he would on stage. Other singers don’t have that same frontman persona that he really has. Vocally, he was very much along the lines of Paul Rodgers, who is one of my favorite singers. David was also influenced by the blues stuff of the sixties that the rest of the band was into. We would name check people like Eric Clapton and Miles Davis. David, throughout his time in Whitesnake, really grew his musical vocabulary."

Go to this location for the complete interview.