By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

WHITESNAKE – LOVE HUNTER (1979)

“I love the blues, they tell my story. If you can’t feel it you can never understand.”

That line, from the song “Walking in the Shadow of the Blues”, is a drop-dead awesome introductory lyric and while it may not sum up any kind of description of me, it does loom large for me when I talk about that song.

But we’ll get to that in a bit. First off, it’s been just over four years since I first wrote about a Whitesnake album for The Cassette Chronicles series. Truth be told, despite having multiple albums on cassette from the band, I hadn’t really even thought about writing about another one. There’s no great rhyme or reason to that, it just hadn’t come to pass.

But then a couple days back, I watched a video on YouTube with a ranking of Whitesnake’s studio album catalog and suddenly, I just felt like the time was right to talk about another album. Oddly enough, I have yet to broach the idea of writing about the band’s breakthrough albums of the 1980’s. There’s not a whole hell of a lot new to say but maybe down the line I’ll have a piece on one of those huge releases.

No, instead I’m once again focusing on the first incarnation of Whitesnake. The blues rock driven 1970s version. The one that would basically become a home for ex-Deep Purple members (with keyboardist Jon Lord already on board for this album).

As I wrote when I talked about the Whitesnake album Come and Get It four years ago, this version of the band was something I only discovered after the band went supernova with the self-titled 1987 album.

It is a case of better late than never because I found out just how much I loved this version of the band. I’ve listened to Love Hunter any number of times over the years so most of the album isn’t much of a “discovery” to me. In fact, I rather appreciate and love the album quite a lot. But as I listened to the album for this article, it was pretty cool to find myself once again rocking out to early David Coverdale and crew!

One of the earliest things that stands out in particular with this album is that David Coverdale is not the only singer who gets to shine in the vocal spotlight. In fact, guitarist Bernie Marsden shares lead vocal duties with Coverdale on the album’s opening track “Long Way From Home”. That song has no preamble to it at all. When you hear the first notes of the song, it is already in full rocking form from those first moments. It’s a quick and lively rocker and it is just the start of some incredible rock and roll moments throughout the album.

Whitesnake isn’t really known for doing cover songs but the first side of the cassette does feature the song “Help Me Thro’ the Day”. The song title is ever so slightly altered from the original “Help Me Through the Day” which was written by Leon Russell.

Whitesnake’s version is pretty decent, slower in tempo for sure. It has what I wrote in my notes as a kind of “hazy” delivery. Originally, I was going to say “sleepy” but that not only seemed inaccurate, I thought it might seem a bit insulting which is definitely not what I would say about the track.

The song “Medicine Man” was written by Coverdale alone and it is one hell of a kicking rocker. The side closing “You ‘n’ Me” has a fiery delivery to it that gives the song a nice bit of charm to it.

And getting back to that quote at the start of the article, the song “Walking in the Shadow of the Blues” isn’t just one of my favorite Whitesnake songs, it is a song that I would list as one of my all-time favorite tracks, period. The funny thing is, I didn’t discover this version of the song first. Instead, it was the live rendition on the 1980 Whitesnake live release Live…in the Heart of the City where I first heard the track. And I was just blown away by it. The song was co-written by Coverdale and guitarist Bernie Marsden. It’s got a killer amped up guitar sound powering the track and the vocal performance of what seems like an autobiographical set of lyrics is superb.

I can’t exactly explain why this song hit home with me so much but when I first heard the studio version of the song, it only served to further deepen my love of the track.

When you flip the cassette over to Side Two of the album, you start off with the song “Mean Business” and there’s no doubt that the song and the band live up to the song’s title. It bursts out of the speakers right from the start. The song’s fast paced and electrically charged delivery never relents or relaxes all the way through its running time. Just a killer track!

The album’s title track and the song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Women” are both pretty damn rocking tracks as well. The title cut has a nice solid thump to it while the latter tracks has a quick stepping groove to it.

The most interesting song on Side Two is the song “Outlaw”. It’s a good song, hard charging throughout, but what makes this particularly interesting to me is that Bernie Marsden is the one singing on it, not David Coverdale. Imagine that happening now? I can’t remember if I knew that Marsden was singing and just forgot or if I never realized it even though I’ve listened to the album so many times and read the liner notes probably just as often. But for some reason, when I read the liner notes this time, there was Bernie Marsden credited with the lead vocal and I felt surprised for reasons passing understanding.

The album is chock full of bluesy hard rock, but to close out the album, you get a really brief (just over 90 seconds long) slow moving track called “We Wish You Well”. The song serves not only as the band basically saying so long to the listeners but you could say that it could serve as a way for them to say goodbye altogether when Whitesnake officially ends their run. The song is at first the vocal track and the keyboards of Jon Lord, but then quick as you can, you get the whole band (including guitarist Micky Moody and bassist Neil Murray) joining to give the song a final flourish before it and the Love Hunter album as a whole comes to an end.

As you can clearly see, I love this album. Love Hunter was the second studio release from Whitesnake and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that they didn’t have some really great material. I know that the band will always have the two sides to them but I’ll never have anything overtly bad to say about the early days of the band because every time I listen to the early albums, I wish that I’d seen them during that time. And as you listen to Love Hunter for yourself, you’ll see why I say that.

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Love Hunter album was the last one to feature drummer Dave Dowle. The album was reissued in 2006 with an addition four bonus tracks.

Of the nine original songs on the album, each member of the band had at least one co-writing credit to their name.

The artwork, which is of course considered controversial (both then and now), was done by fantasy artist Chris Achilleos. Oddly enough, it was this piece that had the artist refuse to work with bands again until 2003 when he did an album cover for the Gary Hughe album Once and Future King Part 1. The original Love Hunter artwork was stolen from the artist in the 1980’s. Chris Achilleos had his art featured in magazines such as Heavy Metal and Radio Times. It also appeared on the covers of books featuring Conan the Barbarian, Doctor Who and Star Trek amongst his numerous credits.