Come Taste the Band Purple in 1984. When Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple in 1975, there was uncertainty over whether the band would continue, as they did when Ian Gillan and Roger Glover left in 1973. It was David Coverdale who asked Jon Lord to keep the band together, and Coverdale was also a major factor in recruiting Tommy Bolin to take the guitar slot after hearing Bolin's work on the Billy Cobham solo album "Spectrum". Rehearsals for the album were recorded by Robert Simon, who was originally engineering the album. But after a dispute with the band over scheduling, the band left Simon's
David Coverdale part, the problem had been the comparison to Robert Plant who had fronted Led Zeppelin, as vocalist, with Jimmy Page. Some of their audience criticised Coverdale, feeling he was merely a Plant clone; Plant himself referred to the team-up as ‘David Cover-version’. Others felt the short-lived collaboration only served to inspire Page to once again hook up with Plant, a year later. In 1994 Coverdale assembled a new line-up of Whitesnake (with the exception of Coverdale's musical partner, guitarist Adrian Vandenberg and bassist Rudy Sarzo, both of whom had been in Whitesnake since 1987) to tour for the release of