Coverdale and Aldrich – Starkers in Munich, Autograph Hunting, Promoting the New Album (2006

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Saturn store / Munich / Germany
Concert date: 11/25/2006
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €0.00 (free admission)

When you don’t know what to do with your money, the best move is to hightail it to Munich and blow it on CDs. And if Mr. David Coverdale – the frontman of hard rock giants Whitesnake, with his sidekick, guitarist Doug Aldrich, happens to drop by too, it can turn into a pretty thrilling event in a rocker’s everyday life.

Saturn department store, first floor, 3:55 PM! Well, damn it! We ended up way, way in the back again… with a lousy view, of course. People had crammed in front of a makeshift little stage with just two bar stools on it. They’d squeezed in between long aisles of shelves stacked to the max with CDs of every kind. What on earth were they waiting for so eagerly?

A few minutes past four in the afternoon the host showed up and, in proper German, laid out the rules of the game. First an hour of chatting with Coverdale, and somewhere in that hour there’d be room for a minute or two of some Whitesnake “unplugged” goodness. Then an hour of signing, with just one signature per head and a strict ban on taking photos.

As the guy wished everyone plenty of fun, Coverdale and Aldrich appeared. As is no longer news, David – a slick, relaxed talker – quickly steered the audience’s undivided attention onto himself. In a good mood, polite and extremely receptive to every joke, he greeted the crowd and explained what this was all about. In short, the release of the new Whitesnake live double CD “Live In The Shadow Of The Blues” was the reason for his visit to Saturn. After a sweet opening spiel, he asked whether we’d be up for a song. Of course we were – that was surely the biggest lure since this event was announced. To warm up the crowd, the Whitesnake elder statesman picked Give Me All Your Love Tonight. Doug on acoustic guitar and his boss, warming up that velvety, whiskey-soaked, charmingly seductive voice, sounded perfectly decent right from the start. People got into it right away.

Basically, the first hour was a kind of press conference where the crowd fired questions at David. The guy spilled plenty of juicy stuff: he had to explain why the whole band isn’t playing in Munich tonight (he wriggled out of it by saying that something like that needs the consensus of all five band members), why the Budapest show was canceled (the only one on the band’s entire tour), that his 10-year-old grandson already plays guitar and sings and totally “kicks ass” for his age, that his daughter, who lives in Munich, is primarily to blame for the evening with David in Munich, and the most important thing of all: that the band is recording a new album, due probably next year, with the working title (meaningful!) “Good To Be Back”.

He mixed songs in among those answers! First came a string of surprises, starting with I Ain’t Gonna Cry No More, which the crowd recognized and welcomed with delight right away. As expected, Coverdale put two brand-new songs on the setlist to promote the double live CD, which has four all-new studio tracks: All I Want Is You, a typical Coverdale – Whitesnake jam with the vocals right where they belong, while the years showed their teeth in the other all-new song, titled Dog, since when going for the higher registers Coverdale’s voice showed signs of a tendency toward a mild magpie-like rasp.

But Coverdale is Coverdale! In the mid and lower registers he remains lord of his fields, and with his unique, instantly recognizable singing approach and tone of voice he easily subjugated the crowd in yet another surprise, Judgement Day, then poured oil on the fire with a short a cappella take on the Deep Purple classic Soldier Of Fortune – which turned out to be a real shame, since Aldrich and Coverdale didn’t play it all the way through in an “unplugged” version. David saved the big Whitesnake hit for last, of course, knowing full well it would make people “lose it”. Here I Go Again. Here we were all very loud, and the get-together hit its concert peak right at the end.

Next came the hour of CD signing. The line was serious, winding like a long snake with surely around 150 heads in it. Coverdale was routinely friendly and, with practiced finesse, dispatched everyone as quickly as possible, as if “wearing surgical gloves”. No wonder. He had his hands full and one thing on his mind: making the kind of impression that would make people snap up the new Whitesnake double live CD. If a cover came up for signing in lighter shades and color combinations, he took a black marker and drew his “scrawl”; otherwise he used a silver one. Doug, pushed a bit into the background, was more talkative, radiating considerably more authenticity in conversation than his marketing-minded boss!

Since Saturn is huge and the shelves are packed with CDs of every imaginable release by every imaginable artist, it would take at least a day to dig through the whole mound of music. So I only quickly skimmed the CDs on sale, where deeply discounted CDs go for under €6.00. I quickly grabbed Eloy “Oceans” (1980) and Barclay James Harvest “Gone To Earth” (1977), which then rode back with me straight to Dr. “prog rock” in Ljubljana. These are remasters, and do you think they were ever imported into Slovenia? What a joke… on top of that, both CDs belong to the labels EMI Records and Polydor. So, giant labels. Ah, this Slovenia. I felt like puking when I remembered the Slovenian CD stalls. E.g., just a “beat-up, worn-out second hand” CD costs from €7.00 to €10.00 (or more) in Slovenia. But let’s not go on about that… Brrr-uh…

The hangout with the Whitesnake duo Coverdale / Aldrich flew by. There was still plenty of time, and after the spending spree at Saturn we trotted off toward some serious feasting at the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown Munich, and kept up our “gluttony” revels late into the night, all the way to Sunday, when we had to gather fresh strength for the Bryan Adams show in Ljubljana. Well, a rocker’s workday is tough!