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Coverdale’s guitar up for sale
David Coverdale has donated his 1974 Yamaha FG-160 acoustic guitar to the Download 20 Auction for Heavy Metal Truants to be auctioned for charity.
It is claimed to be the very guitar used to write nearly every song ever written by DC for Deep Purple and Whitesnake. The minimum bid is £1,000.
The auction will be going live on Thursday 29th June at 10am BST and will close on Thursday 6th July at 23.50 BST.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Yeah, he played that for ages. His first two solo albums were certainly basically written on it or electric piano, I remember pics of him in Munich hotel rooms composing for his solo albums post-split Mk IV.
He would play other acoustic guitars later on – Gibson and Taylor if I’m not mistaken -, but there is a good chance that he always went back to his old trusted Yamaha. You sometimes do that for whatever reason. When I play acoustic, I almost always play my old Washburn AB-20 even though I have long acquired other, much better-sounding acoustic basses. But the AB-20 feels like a pair of old comfortable worn-in sneakers.
June 28th, 2023 at 23:00What a thoughtful gift from DC, especially after owning it for so long & its history.
No doubt it will fetch quite a few Lb’s for charities, especially since it’s been owned & played by DC for likely over 50-years.
And Yamaha imo make far better musical instruments than motorcycles lol !
Peace !
June 29th, 2023 at 02:18I think the pair of shoes he wore for the California jam concert has to be next for auction.
June 29th, 2023 at 07:20Peace ✌️
Soon ..that “female song” “Is This love” over 200 million clicks, the song most in DP families, ahead of “male songs” “Child In Time”, “Smoke on the Water”, “Here I Go Again”,” Perfect Strangers,” Highway Star”, “Still of the Night”, “Stargazer” etc etc…
June 30th, 2023 at 05:42ah … that guitar, like a relic
@3
July 2nd, 2023 at 00:55David still has the shirt he wore at cal jam ’74 and he STILL can wear it!
I’m often critical of David’s work beyond the Marsden/Moody line-up, but here I have to give credit where credit is due: DC, Sykes, Murray & Powell (+ very audibly Richard Bailey on keyboards though he is hidden to the Tokyo audience sideways to the far-left) really let rip (without hammering or – Cozy! – speeding things to death). Cozy’s drumming on Crying In The Rain is a-ma-zzzing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uB_ciVq978
Coverdale is in great voice and and Neil is so much more expressive with Cozy than Colin Hodgkinson ever was/could be. Gary Moore never looked as good as he does here … ooops, that’s John Sykes! The band has even learned some proper backing vocals!
This is not the wonderfully bluesy Whitesnake of yore, but they were admittedly an ace hard rock outfit.
July 13th, 2023 at 23:51@ 6 – I am confused, bewildered & almost lost for words Uwe. Or am I hallucinating regarding the Cozy is a-ma-zzzing comment. Or are you being sarcastic I don’t know. Please help to put stop to my conundrum. Cheers.
July 15th, 2023 at 12:08I avoid sarcasm at all times!
I’m just being objective. Most of the time, Cozy was a heavy-handed barbarian on the drums who sped up too much, but he was also a brutish-handsome, deadpan-humorous and likable guy with more charisma than all other Rainbow drummers combined. But on this particular instance it really worked, perhaps because he and Neil Murray had really tightened as a unit as WS decreased from a full-blown six-piece to a four-man-band + “augmented keyboarder”.
I never saw this particular line-up live:
– I saw WS in early 1984 last for a long time with Lord and Galley still in the band, but also already with Sykes and Murray (returned), that was at least an energetic gig compared to the previous Moody/Hodgkinson line-up ones where the rift between them and the rest of the band had begun to increasingly show, you could feel the discomfort of both on stage.
– Next time I saw WS again was 1990 with Steve Vai, I don’t believe the line-up with Vivian Campbell ever toured Europe. Nor the reduced Sykes-Powell-Murray one the above vid shows.
You do wonder what would have happened had Coverdale been smart enough (reined in his ego) to keep this specific line-up together. WS’ imprint on the US market might have lasted longer than just one enormously successful album presented live by musicians that had nothing whatsoever to do with its recording. I believe eventually people realized that.
July 15th, 2023 at 22:59Since we’re talking Cozy, I found this here interesting:
https://brianmay.com/brian-news/1999/04/the-mavericks-cozy-powell/
So now I’ve learned that Cozy drummed on this track (not in the vid, just the audio), the mind boggles. You can perhaps hear it a bit in the hi-hat work which sounds Cozy’ish to me, but Herr MacGregor is the expert on all things percussion …
https://youtu.be/rTELjv4_7f0
July 16th, 2023 at 14:05Thanks for the Cozy article, absolutely wonderful to read that. I have always fondly remembered the Keith Emerson story about Cozy wanting to make some drum sticks from a tree or whatever vegetation it was. That always brings a smile for me, bless him. Cheers.
July 17th, 2023 at 00:38I actually thought that Cozy’s CinemaScope/larger-than-life bombastic drumming fitted well into ELP(owell) and that the one album they released wasn’t too shabby either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3HBq4K8NP8
(It was hard to get it as a CD!)
I guess for his style of drumming, music could never be too dramatic!
July 17th, 2023 at 22:34Just rediscovered this little gem, Cozy romps in his unmistakable style through Little Eva’s signature song …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI8YcmatVHE
July 18th, 2023 at 12:28