2008年 09月 6日 土曜日 15:21

Fantastic Friday: Every so often, I choose a cut from an album of which I enjoy every single track (or damn close)!

Scorpions / Pictured Life / Virgin Killer (1) / Oct 1976

At last! With a CD copy of this album as a complement to one which I have only on cherished vinyl, I have now added one more piece to one of the most bothersome incomplete series in my digital collection*: my favorite era of Scorpions, featuring Uli Jon Roth, spanning from Fly to the Rainbow through Tokyo Tapes.

This is their gritty hard rock of the 70s featuring that awesome bluesy/classical guitar work of Roth. After he left in 1978 - and ever since - it's been Rudolf Schenker's more mainstream-oriented style of guitar rock that's dominated the Scorpions sound.

Nothing against Matthias Jabs who replaced Roth, and it's true that the era after Roth from Lovedrive through Crazy World was the most commercially-successful and contributes lots of personal favorite Scorpions tracks to my library (though my own interest waned after World Wide Live and stopped completely after Savage Amusement).

But…what the hell happened to these guys? I detested Crazy World specifically because of Winds of Change (screw whistling your way "down to Gorky Park"…stay home and listen to In Your Park from today's album instead…) and especially Tease Me Please Me. I continued to give them the benefit of the doubt and listened to Face the Heat and Pure Instinct, but found nothing there. I've never even heard Eye II Eye through Acoustica nor care.

I tried again and got my hopes up a little with Unbreakable, finding Love 'Em or Leave 'Em and Deep and Dark to be OK, but Humanity: Hour I?…Meh.

What an ignominious and protracted crumbling of what was a great catalog.

\m/ (ò_ó) \m/

*At this point I should probably forget even buying CDs, especially since a couple of the albums from this era of the band's releases have never been remastered (or perhaps only in Japan), and should just keep listening to the vinyl for home listening and buy digital files. But I only buy 256kbps (or higher) non-DRM MP3s, and I have yet to find them for these albums. Don't know if they're on iTunes, but don't use that. There must be some copyright issues that are holding up remasters and/or legal downloads for these albums, because the hardcore Scorps fans love these albums and would buy in an instant. :(

The weird, proggy (and awesome INHO) debut Lonesome Crow, featuring Michael Schenker before he left to join UFO and whom Roth replaced, is easily found as a 2002 re-release from Hip-O, as are Taken By Force and Tokyo Tapes. The other two albums that make up this era, though, are less easily available. You can buy the late 80s RCA release of Fly to the Rainbow and Virgin Killer (which is what I finally caved and bought), but particularly troublesome is In Trance, which will cost you about US $1 per minute unless you can find a used copy.