Scorpions - where was this hiding?

[ack1961]

I got a phone call today and the voice said "Did you know that the Scorpions have, at one point, put out some decent, relatively non-gay music?"
Of course, I responded with "no way in hell...who is this?"
I was pointed to "Sails of Charon" and the voice was proven to be correct.
In 1977, we were still getting our airwaves filled with disco and KISS - so I turned off the radio forever.

[gweimer]

Scorpions have been through a few iterations and styles.  They got their first recording contract from a little record store on South Archer in Chicago, Billingsgate Records, and Michael was part of Scorpions before he left to join UFO.  They were a little trippy and tended to wander then.  Enter Uli Jon Roth, and the band put out some really intense albums like In Trance and Virgin Killers.

[gweimer]

[ack1961]

Although they're not my cup of tea (I think it's more of the vocals/soft-core-porn-guitar effects that I'm not attracted to in their case), those two songs just posted are a far cry better than the top-40 Scorpions that I hear everywhere.  Unfortunately, I live in an area where our pro hockey team's name is the "hurricanes" and that popular Scorpions song is played at every arena I play at down here - and once that thing gets in your head, it takes several beers and a couple of showers to get it out.

Their older stuff might be worth some investigation.

[godofthunder]

 Fly to the Rainbow my first introduction to the Scorps.

[gweimer]

Fly to the Rainbow my first introduction to the Scorps.

Mine was Lonesome Crow.  It was...different.  Now, In Trance was another story.  Imagine first hearing it on a 1000 watt Yamaha stereo, blasting.  The dynamics really came out that way.

[Basvarken]

My introduction to Scorpions was Blackout





Then I bought the earlier live album Tokyo Tapes. I really wore that one out on my record player!

[uwe]

The Scorpions really had three phases:

- The trippy Krautrock one with Michael Schenker and still keyboards, with Conny Plank (he of Can fame) producing, that was ended when a UFO abducted their still teen blond lead guitarist and took him to the Doctor, Doctor.

- The Uli Roth one with its Hendrixisms (Uli even married Hendrix' last female partner and stayed together with her until her premature death from I believe cancer) and esoteric leanings, but Roth was the last guitar hero/artist on the instrument they had, this Scorpions Mk II was de facto a new band out of the merger of the Roth trio Dawn (he brought the bassist and drummer - later of the classic Eloy line up - in tow) and the Rudolf Schenker/Klaus Meine remnant of the first Scorps line up.

- The conscious move to get with Mathias Jabs someone in, who is a proficient player, but won't raise eyebrows, won't mess with Rudold Schenker's and Klaus Meine's compositional steering of the band (as Uli Roth had done), but will "work out" on a human level.

And this Jabs did- he's been with the band for 32 years now unflinchingly, shouldering the "he's neither Michael nor Uli" chip on his shoulder and even being asked out of the band and then invited back in for the short stint of Michael Schenker returning to the Scorps for Lovedrive. In a way, Jabs (technically no worse than either Michael Schenker or Uli Roth, but lacking the inspiration and idisyncratic handwriting of both) is to the Scorpions what Ronnie Wood is to the Stones. He is never gonna be Mick Taylor, but he does just fine.

The Scorpions doggedly planned on becoming a stadium act, People laughed about it in Germany. Their original producer Conny Plank did and I rember an article in the late seventies in Germany's largest muso mag which said "the Hannover boys have come a long way and are sincere in what they do, but the thought of them filling US stadiums is just laughable, the competiton is too great in the US and let's face it, Klaus Meine can't speak or write English, their plan to crack America in the next few years is doubtful at best".

Well, Ze Scorps persevered, dumbed down their music to stadium usability and have become - bad English or not - the only German band ever successful on the US stadium trek selling more than a 100 million records and CDs which puts them in Deep Purple territory as regards commercial success.

And maybe, just maybe, that unnamed ex-Pretty Things guitarist who auditioned with them after Uli Roth and turned down their offer to join because he "couldn't get over those awful lyrics and the horrific accent" sometimes does wonder whether he didn't make a serious mistake.

I've made my peace with the Scorpions. Yes they can be embarrassing and regularly were. Yes, their music is simplistic, even cardboardish, next to them Golden Earring are The Beatles. But then they write something like Still Loving You which whether you think its corny or not defies all power ballad clichées of the time and becomes an international hit. Or, already beyond the peak of their career, a romantically naive folksong like Winds of Change which touches the hearts of millions in the East. Today I regard them as a German institution. And if you listen closely, their specific sound has not been copied that often and they always had the musical respect of their peers (Deep Purple, Rainbow, Judas Priest, Kiss, Saxon, Van Halen etc). Plus they are also the only German band ever covered by Mammoth in their pre-Van Halen days, so they must have done something right.

From the Uli days, the (again Hendrixy) Your Light is one of my favorites, here at 23.44:



PS: But I never thought any of The Scorps' music "gay", they are way too heavy-handed and workmanlike, if anything their music is mindnumbingly hetero, I fail to hear anything effeminate in it!

[gweimer]

When Scorps first broke out big, one thing that they did well was to take a simple idea and make it work.  Their albums, like Lovedrive, were filled with songs that made every musician ask, "Why didn't I think of that?"  They made it seem easy.

I saw the band on the first tour with Jabs, whom I recall was an unknown and a farm boy when he joined.  I think he was so green that he was actually using Michael Schencker's amps.  I saw them at B'Ginnings in Chicago, and the lead amps were all stamped with MS and UFO all over them.

[uwe]

I don't know whether poor Mathias came from a farm, but prior to the Scorpions he was with German melodic rock band Lady



who were largely unknown even in their home country and whose solitary claim to fame was making the music to a weekly children's TV show - sort of Wombles without fur - which paid well, but left musical egos unsatisfied. Reputedly, he was picked among "a thousand guitarists" in a grueling three day session in London and got the job because he could play whatever was technically needed. Certainly, the stability of the lead guitar position for the next 30 years within the Scorpions has justified Klaus Meine's and Rudolf Schenker's choice at the time. I saw him with The Scorpions comparatively recently, he's a competent hard rock guitaris with a wealth of styles, but no headturner like Schenker and Roth were in their best of days. With Jabs, the Scorps are a tight unit and someone plays solos when needed. With Roth, whenever he started soloing it was musically on another level and immediately turned the others into his backing band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vds0t5DVssw&feature=related

[gearHed289]

I was turned on to Scorps JUST before they started to break big with Lovedrive. Tokyo Tapes is a great 70s live album. I really like the Ulrich Roth phase of the band. They quickly became very "Scorpions brand" generic after they hit it big. Blackout was the last one I was particularly interested in.

[uwe]

In 1975 the Scorps were near broke. So in order to generate some money they did German language covers of  The Sweet's Fox on the Run and Action (both no 1 or 2 hits in the German charts) under the adopted moniker of "The Hunters" (shouldn't that have been "The Huns"?) playing on the fact that as the law was back then even the writing of only the German lyrics would give them 50% of the royalties. It was a mediocre success and did wash some badly needed Deutschmarks into the bands ailing treasury. Needless to say, Uli Roth aped those Andy Scott solos just enough to get by and added his own flourish.

[ack1961]

Thanks for all the great information and historical data on these guys.
Going backwards in time through their catalog is not an option for me - their later stuff makes me violently ill, however, starting with Lonesome Crow is the way to go.
There's some real good stuff (Fly to the Rainbow) that I'm working through right now.  Some of it really rocks has has nary a hint of that stadium blather...yet.

Funny, but my family grew up with UFO, but I don't recall Scorpions ever being played very much.  turns out that my brothers didn't know everything, as they often told me.

[TBird1958]

"Loving you Sunday Morning" was my intro to the Scorps...........

So my interest in them comes forward from that, cerebral.......... Probably not, but as a young 'un I liked them a lot. 

[uwe]

Ah Mark, you hopeless romantic!



I even dug out an unplugged version for you, sweetie!  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AeCmS89rEA&feature=related

My first album of the Scorps was Fly to the Rainbow. They were like an insider tip back then, but already getting some good press (in fact, the Scorpions made inroads in the French and Benelux markets first before becoming local heroes). With its many ballads/drawn out slow songs, Fly to the Rainbow reminded me much of Wishbone Ash, but that wasn't a bad thing in my book, but I did not really consider them hard rock, many of the tracks were more of the spheric type, sort of like Rainbow's Catch the Raimbow Über-ballad.  About a year later, a classmate loaned me In Trance, already a much harder hitting album(and a lot more songs around the 3 minite mark) with Uli Roth having in the meantime listned extensively to some Brian May I believe:



Rudolf Schenker at that point in time still played a lot more dual lead guitar (probably at the instigation of Roth), something he would shun away from in later years. The roles for Schenker's rhythm guuitar and Jab's lead guitar are with The Scorpions more firmly set than with other bands: Rudolf plays all the tradenmark riffs and Jabs either solos or is more or less chugging eights on the E string.

In Trance was already the beginning of the end, Schenker and Meine opting for the shorter and more simplistic stuff while Roth went for the esoteric/outlandish.