SCORPIONS: FOURTH REICH ROCK!

SCORPIONS: FOURTH REICH ROCK!

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

The oldest military strategy in the manual: the classic pincer movement!

On one flank Herman Rarebell, alias Herman the German; on the other lanky Francis Buchholz. And heading straight towards me, hand extended, the man turned down by the German Army, Klaus Meine. Cunning is called for. Find out their plans for upcoming World Domination. Ask an innocent question. Like what shape will their new “release” (codename World Wide Live) take? Silence. Klaus looks to Herman, Herman looks to Francis, Francis speaks. “The shape? It will be a round disc!” Explosions of laughter. “With a nice label!” guffaws Herman the German.

Darn! Those waggish Germans win again! I wasn’t prepared for something as unexpected as Germans with a sense of humor (let’s face it, Uli Jon Roth’s not exactly David Lee Roth, if you get my drift). But that’s what comes from being what the Scorpions have told us they were all along: an International Band, worldwide melodic-metal superheroes (heck, they even love them in Canada—Lee Aaron was eulogizing them as her favorite band ever, just the other day)! Partly, of course, because they go in for world-wide touring, and a lot of it. When it was asked Ovid why Aegisthus became an adulterer, to quote Rabelais, he made no other answer than this: because he was idle. Such could never be said of the Scorpions! Practically the whole of last year was spent slogging from one continent to the next, legs parted, hair flying, faces contorted in pure, undiluted rock ’n’ roll dementia, bringing us songs from the past 14 years or so that we’ve grown to know and love. Not much time to sit down and write new material. So no great surprise that the next Scorps stuff to land in your record racks will be a live album: World Wide Live.

‘VJe are always walking on the edge, I think. ” -Klaus Meine

“This is a live band,” says Klaus, “and the music is just the best onstage. Live. Some of the songs which sound in the studio pretty good, some of them grow up, you know, on the road, and sound even better on the live album.”

Which cannot be gainsaid. But there’s already, as any self-respecting fan knows, a Scorpions live album: Tokyo Tapes from 78. Why would anyone want to rush out and buy another one/two?

“Well, it’s all new songs on there,” says Herman. “You hear the songs from Love Drive, Animal Magnetism, the Blackout album and Love At First Sting— none of these songs are on the Tokyo Tapes album, and I think that’s a very good reason to buy the new live album!”

“Plus,” says Francis, “there is the party feeling of the tour. We heard, for example, some fantastic tapes from California, San Diego, L.A., and the atmosphere is unbelievable, from the crowd, everything. When I listen back to it it gives me goosebumps, my hair goes like schkkkkkk!"—he pulls it on end in a remarkable impersonation of Rudy’s littie brother. “So we want to capture this whole feeling of the tour on the album. When the people saw this show on the tour, then it will be maybe a good memory.”

“A flashback,” says Herman, “of a good time.”

So they’re telling me stuff you’ve read before, about how they have a good time onstage as well, the interaction with the audience, and I start wondering: what exactly goes through their mind when they’re posing and parting their legs and tossing their hair and grimacing up there?

“I think,” says Klaus with an almostshy grin, “I’m totally out of my mind when I’m onstage! It’s like a big tension, and when you go out onstage it explodes. And for me I’m so much into it and there’s so much happening between the audience and the band, it’s hard to explain but there’s no space to plan something like I want to do this or I want to do that, or to think about what happened last night or something. You’re into it so much, it’s just the spot of the moment, the magic of the moment.”

“You concentrate on every note you play,” says Francis, “and every word you sing; you concentrate so much that it takes everything, so there’s not much left, you won’t want to concentrate on other things.”

After all those gigs you wouldn’t have thought they’d have to concentrate at all.

“Yes,” confesses honest Herman. “We can do the songs in our sleep!” but his colleagues are having none of it.

“For example,” Klaus points out, “when we came to Brazil for the first time for Rock In Rio,” you remember the festival this year, “and you play on a big show with big bands on the bill and it’s a big audience and a lot of people know you already. But there are a lot of people that for them the Scorpions is a new band. You have to go out and fight. And so you must give everything. That’s what we try to do every night anyway, but when you come to a new place like Rio, it’s much more tension—like Rudolf crashed his eye and had to get stitches after the show in his eyebrow; everybody was so wired and everybody was going crazy onstage. But I think it is very hard to stay hungry. You have to stay hungry. You have to have the feeling that you have to fight for something.

“When you hit the stage, the feeling takes over and it’s just, uh, happening. You don’t think, do this move or do that move, you just try to become one with the audience. It’s like,” steady eye contact, “making love.” With all of them? Three heads nod. “That’s why the album was called Love At First Sting,” confides Herman. And every one of them was satisfied and smoking a cigarette afterwards, or “one big boooommmm\\\” as Francis so niftily puts it. Don’t be surprised to see a photo of 50,000 orgasmic punters on the live album sleeve, “Yes, the look!” Klaus likes coming up with cover designs that “describe the music” after all.

Okay, tell us about the album covers. You know them; no need to describe them.

“Some people think they are a bit too much sexy,” says Francis.

“But we like to go a step too far, because that,” says Klaus, “is rock ’n’ roll. Otherwise it would be boring if everything is so safe. So we try to come up with something that fits perfectly with the music—and the music has a certain kick.”

“It’s just like going to an amusement park. ” -Klaus Meine

“Rock ’n’ roll,” Francis continues, “is always a step too far for the normal person who is not into rock ’n’ roll. For them rock ’n’ roll is too naked, too sexual, too aggressive, too pushy.”

“If a normal person goes into a rock show,” says Klaus, “and sees the band going crazy onstage they will go, ‘What the hell is this, are they crazy?’ And of course they are crazy at this moment, but that’s how it is, and to the people who are into rock ’n’ roll it is the most normal thing in the world. We are always walking on the edge, I think.”

Yes, but there’s always a big bundle of cottonwool for them to fall down onto. The Scorpions have got where they are today by not only hard slog but ballads. “Rock You Like A Hurricane” may get your heart pumping and your loins girding and other glorious heavy stuff, but it’s “Still Loving You” that gets them the most widespread attention.

“That’s always been one of the strengths of the band, to have this contrast,” says Herman. “To have the ballads and have the real hard stuff. ‘Still Loving You’ and ‘Rock You Like A Hurricane’—that’s the best example of what the Scorpions is all about, the soft side and the heavy side. I think the only other band that always did it this way was Led Zeppelin —they have songs like ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and then ‘Whole Lotta Love.’”

“Another thing,” says Klaus, “talking about Zeppelin, it’s the music you remember first. You can ask me how I like the songs of this band or that band and the first thing I have in my mind is a video or a picture, you know, their image. But I hear no music.”

And you’ll hear no slaggings. The Scorpions are too nice for that. But some generalities on the matter of stilettos and studs and stockings in heavy metal? “It is amusing,” says Klaus. “It is good to have a good show and a good image, but when the image is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the music is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, it’s just like going to an amusement park, you know, and seeing some nonsense. Some kids maybe like it, but I think it’s nothing which will last.”

“It should be music,” agrees Herman. “Not a circus.”

So what was the last record they bought and why?

“I don’t buy records anymore,” says Herman. “They give them to me! The last one I bought was, I think, the Honeydrippers.”

“Me too!” pipes up Klaus. Wouldn’t mind having a point or two on that album.

“I bought a couple of CD records because,” says Francis, “I bought a CD player!”

What did they think of the Honeydrippers?

“I’ve always liked Robert Plant,” says Herman. “I just wanted to see what he was up to. There’s only one song I really like on that album. Don’t tell him!” he laughs. OK. They still claim to be big music fans. When they’re in the States— as they were just the other day, a stopover on the way to Japan, Klaus has the car radio on “the whole time—it’s fantastic,” and Herman has MTV on “24 hours, even at night; I fall asleep with it.” Hell, I used to fall asleep with it during the day! “I listen to music all the time.” So when do they find the time to write songs?

“Of course we have to switch off the other music then,” says Francis.

Silly me!

“After touring, normally we go into writing—that’s the best time to do it,” says Klaus. “We put down ideas sometimes on the road,” jot things down on tape recorders, "but mainly the writing starts after the tour. We roll back the film—you know, on tour, all the things you remember, and then you go and write the songs.” They’re not denying that doing a live album gives them some breathing space to write more material for the next studio album, which you won’t be seeing until the beginning of '86, in all likelihood.

I shan’t ask them what shape that record will take! Anyway, Klaus tells me they never sit down like businessmen and plan anything. “That would be horrible! We do what comes out natural. There will always be ballads on Scorpions albums, I think—//we have a good one. But we will always be a heavy rock band with really hard rockers, because that’s the stuff that gives us the most fun to play onstage and brings us alive. Songs. Not just riffs— songs. ”

If they were—heaven forbid—rock critics and not rock ’n’ rollers, what would they write about the Scorpions?

“That we don’t play heavy metal,” says Francis. “We play Hard Rock. And mainly that we concentrate on music.”

“And we are not into it for the fashion,” adds Klaus, “we are into it for the music and the feeling that’s all.”

What is the feeling?

“We have fun, we enjoy our life,” says Francis.

“Nobody tells us what to do,” says Herman.

“What we do now,” says Klaus, “is exactly what we’ve always wanted to do. When I think back 10 years ago, it’s exactly what I was dreaming about.

“Of course today there’s more pressure on you, the higher you get, but success doesn’t make this band crazy, because we know how we made it to this point and we know where we want to go, and it’s a great experience to do all this together. When you was fighting like a gang through all the bad times and you saw people laughing at you because nobody believed in you—we always believed in ourself and our music.

“It is fantastic after years that you have a situation where we can play all over the world and have finally world-wide success. We’re into it for the music and for the adventure. Rock ’n’ roll is an adventure; and we love it.”