After saying their heartfelt goodbyes to—not on, but to—their farewell tour, Accept’s knowledge-passing forefathers Scorpions are back with a new album as well as a live campaign which has them stunning crowds with the most sophisticated use of video this headbanging journo has ever seen (although, let’s be frank, he doesn’t get out much).

Return to Forever is a strange concoction, even unique, in that its songs are part updated rewrites of old non-album material, and part new compositions penned in collaboration with producers Mikael Nord Andersson and Martin Hansen. What’s bonus about the thing is that if you gather up all the tracks spread across the Limited Deluxe, iTunes and Japanese versions, you’ve got 19 songs from hard rock to the balladic, some of it quite experimental, all of it rife with European melody against Western melody, all of it gilded with those rhythm guitar weaves we love from these Germans.

Speaking with tight ball of energy Rudolf Schenker, it seemed fitting to start with this finer point beyond the mechanics of Return to Forever, this idea that, as Uli Jon Roth once told me, the magic of post-Uli Scorpions was in the rhythm guitars.

“Well, first of all, with my brother, Michael, and Uli Jon Roth, we had fantastic guitar players, but not team players,” explains Schenker, no offense intended, if you know what he’s like. “So with Matthias, one guy came in the band and he was ready to be part of the team—which is very important if you want to make a career. And you only can do it when five guys really connect like a puzzle fitting together.”

“And of course, Dieter Dierks, the long-time producer, he was a very important guy as well, because he discovered my energy, my karate kind of rhythm guitar. Because I was also into being a little bit of solo guitar player. But this was interesting. Uli Roth said to me, once, when he saw how I was doing my finger techniques and stuff like this, he said, ‘Rudolf, you know, much better is to be a great rhythm guitar player instead of being an average solo guitar player.’ And I understood that very well, especially by seeing Keith Richards and also Malcolm Young, that the rhythm guitar player can make with the drummer and with the bass player, a solid, solid, solid basic rhythm section.”

“You know, I see a group of rock musicians more like a soccer team,” continues Schenker. “Matthias and Klaus are the guys who are kicking the goals. I’m the guy in the middle, sort of like a Beckenbauer, the bass player is more the striker, kind of, and the goalkeeper is James. So in this case we have a very interesting team. And when we worked with Matthias and me and Dieter Dierks, we tried to really make the rhythms... not that we played the same thing always—no—but we tried to make it like a cluster. That everybody has his role to make a strong, energetic rhythm foundation for Klaus’ beautiful voice. And that’s what Dieter Dierks always tried. He always forced Klaus to sing ver
high, because he found out when Klaus is singing very high, the energy—which is the fuel of rock music—it’s coming even stronger. And that makes the Scorpions sound: great melodies, very, very strong and high vocals, and of course, the great rhythm machine with great solo licks.”

“This record was planned to be a bonus track album,” continues Rudolf, asked about the complicated assemblage of Return to Forever. “After the last tour, we said, well, we promised the fans a bonus track album from the leftovers. Because we went to the leftovers and we saw that we had a lot of fantastic material which didn’t make it to the albums. Especially in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s, when vinyl was still happening. So in this case, we promised in interviews, yeah, we’ll give the fans some bonus stuff and very good stuff, and then we started working on it already in 2012. But I think somehow in the summer and in-between shows and concerts and tours, we found out that we have very good material.”

“But then actually Unplugged came in-between. We thought that maybe we could have some time off in 2013, but no, MTV called us and asked for an MTV Unplugged. Of course we always wanted to do it but we had no time. In this case we said yes, we’re doing it. So we made this MTV Unplugged, made in Greece... and, by the way, it was the first MTV Unplugged under open skies, and in front of 3800 people, instead of 250 in a club or in a studio.”

“Then in 2014, we start working again on this bonus tracks stuff. But by looking for one tape in my office which I couldn’t find—because I thought there was very good stuff on it for the bonus track album—I found a book my mother did, when I started the Scorpions, showing my father gave me money to buy equipment. But my mother said, you know, you have to pay the money back because you have to know what it is, what it’s all about, to really get so much money and then to appreciate maybe, the reason much better. And so in this case, she was doing a book, showing the income in the book, and then I found out this book was started in September in 1965!”

“So I went with the book downstairs in the studio, and said, ‘Look, guys, here, next year is 50 years of the Scorpions.’ And our manager immediately said, ‘Of course, hey guys, that’s fantastic, I will call the promoters around the world and tell them. Because you have to bring that forward, in this case.’ And so we said hey, you know, now we can’t come out with a bonus track album.”

“And we started over-thinking the whole thing,” laughs Rudolf. “We said, okay, there are parts of the old stuff which really has the DNA of the ‘80s and late ‘70s, and we started writing new stuff. So in this case, we have a complete, fantastic kind of bridge between the late ‘80s and the new time. So, classic rock with a twist into today. But in the end, maybe you can’t even tell what comes from the ‘80s and what comes from today, when you go and look at it.”

“So in this case, it was a great kind of inspiration, first of all, to start celebrating 50 years, which we have now—the time is right like crazy—and on the other hand, you have the later stuff. Of course, we changed the choruses a little bit on the older stuff, because I saw that in my songs then, this chorus is not strong enough and I have to rewrite the chorus. And by this way of working on it, which is very important, you always get new inspirations for material.”

As for the interesting title of the record, Rudolf says, “Return to Forever came from the record company, by telling them every second day a new title. But the record company, said, ‘Look, guys, people are always... you did the farewell tour, but what’s happening?’ Anyway, in this case, Return to Forever doesn’t mean that we will be there forever, but that our music will be there forever. And that’s a great situation; that’s a good story. It also created in our band a certain new kind of energy, which gave us the possibility to really make a strong new album.”

As alluded to, perhaps even bigger than the new record is the magnitude of the live presentation executed on this tour. Stage-blanketing video screens paint colours, tell stories, and in the case of one part of James Kottak’s drum solo, splash across huge continuous screens all of the album covers from the band’s catalogue back to 1972, revealed one drum whack at a time.

“Look, we always, from the beginning of our career until now, were trying to use new technology in a new way,” explains a proud Schenker brother. “First of all, having great amplifiers, then having a great stage look, and then later on, more and more, technology came into the whole thing. Also because we went through the video times, you know how very important the whole look is. It’s the same situation with the whole band foundation we talked about. If you’re only looking for one thing, you know, ‘I’m a great guitar player—look how I can play,’ you are losing momentum in what you can give the people.”

“The music and the look fits together, and we really work very hard on it,” concludes Rudolf. “We have production meetings, we found the right people, and we spend time comparing who does this, who does that. And we couldn’t even put the whole show in Toronto. We have lots of more stuff we use in Russia and in Europe. But the problem is sometimes the outdoor amphitheatres or sometimes even inside, they don’t have the possibilities because the production is so big. But on the other hand, we also have to play in smaller places sometimes and we have to fit into these different halls. And so we tailor this production to three different possibilities: small, medium, and big, like in the Los Angeles Forum or in New York, in the Barclay arena and in Chicago now. And so we have the right mix. And the interesting thing is that in the smaller and in the medium and in the big places, the fans are the same, and that’s the very important part. If you have this kind of combination to give them, you’ve hit the spot.”

(Rudolf Schenker live photo courtesy of Joe Kleon / Canadian flag stage shot by Martin Popoff)