Scorpions guitarist Rudolf Schenker recntly spoke to Steve Smith of The Boston Globeabout the band’s 50th Anniversary, their new album Return To Forever, and a farewell tour that was set initially set to conclude at the end of 2012; an excerpt follows:
Return To Forever started out with the band digging through old material abandoned during the peak of your radio, TV, and chart success. How did things change when you realized that your 50th anniversary was at hand?
“We were working on the old DNA of the Scorpions, so we were really into this vibe. Because we’d worked with our producer team from Sweden, Mikael “Nord” Andersson and Martin Hansen — Mikael is a great guitar player, and growing up in Sweden, one of the first albums he bought was In Trance, and he became a Scorpions fan — he gave us, with his partner, this feeling of the possibility of making this album very fresh. By thinking about this new album for our 50th anniversary, we thought we had to do the stuff from the bonus-tracks album even better — here and there a new chorus where the old chorus was not strong enough — and then we said we had to have some new songs.”
This tour runs through the end of 2016. What’s next for you, then?
“My brother (guitarist Michael Schenker) is already very angry at me, because I said to him when we were on the farewell tour, let’s make a Schenker Brothers album. I haven’t played with my brother for a long time — maybe here and there on a Scorpions stage, like in Wacken, but not in the studio. I think it would be a great thing to do, and there’s a lot of people waiting for it.”
