Whitesnake founder David Coverdale says it's 'time for me to call it a day' after five-decade career

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Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale had an important announcement to make: He’s quitting.Actually, retiring is more like it.

And in classy fashion.“After 50 years-plus of an incredible journey with you, with Deep Purple, with Whitesnake, Jimmy Page, the last few years it’s been very evident to me that it’s time, really, for me to hang up my rock ‘n’ roll platform shoes and my skin-tight jeans,” the 74-year-old singer said while holding a highball glass, in a video posted Thursday on YouTube.

Music The English guitarist co-wrote Whitesnake’s ‘Is This Love,’ one of the defining power ballads of late-’80s hard rock.“And, as you can see,” he said, ruffling the chin-length gray hair that has replaced his well-known long locks, “we’ve taken care of the lion’s wig.”After a few years with local bands in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, including a band that opened for Deep Purple, Coverdale stepped into the rock ‘n’ roll public’s eye when he took over as that band’s frontman in 1973.He would go on to found Whitesnake five years later.

Coverdale hung it up temporarily once before, after wrapping a Whitesnake world tour at the end of 1990, only to find himself “in an appalling, confused state across the board ...privately and professionally.” He was married to actor Tawny Kitaen — who had starred in a host of Whitesnake videos in the MTV-dominated late ‘80s — from 1989 to 1991 and remembered that entire time in an interview with The Times a couple of years later as his “mousse abuse” period.

The band’s popularity had exploded.“I just had to stop everything ...

this whole circus.I had never gone into [music] for the image thing at all ...

and I really couldn’t do it anymore.” Music The official cause of death for guitarist and Kiss founding member Ace Frehley has been released and supports information provided by his fam...