“Cars, girls, fast and
loud – those elements
were starting to gel.”
Billy Gibbons
work in the girl theme. Cars, girls, fast and loud- those elements were starting to gel.”
Even when the material seemed traditional, the
band took risks. All three members blew
saxophone on Hi Fi Mama and She Loves My
Automobile (Gibbons: “We learned how to create
our own three-horn back line, like Little Richard”),
and for I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide – a song that was
ostensibly route-one boogie-blues – the band
announced their musical curiosity with vocal
effects and left-field instruments. “Joey Long
[bluesman] loaned me a multi-stringed mandolin-
like instrument from Mexico, and I put it to good
use on Nationwide,” Gibbons told Guitar World. “If
you listen closely you can hear close-mic’d
mandolin-sounding rhythm accompaniment. The
track’s tail end alternates between three distinct
effects created by an Echoplex doubler and
a Maestro octave box.”
While the lyrics for live favourite Cheap Sunglasses
were knocked out during a road trip, the band took
their time to flavour its funky strut with pedal-
board exotica. “I played it through a Marshall
Major, a short-lived two-hundred-watt beast,
which had one blown tube,” noted Gibbons.
“Hence the rather bulbous, rotund sound. There’s
also a little bit of digital delay for that Bo Diddley
impersonation at the tail out, and a Maestro Ring
Modulator, which produces the strange tag to each
verse. It appears three times, and it’s a pretty funny
sound. That is one insane effect put to good use.”
But perhaps the defining addition on Degüello
was the Hohner Clavinet keyboard that was
sprinkled on the tracks and set up the band’s synth-
heavy 80s output.
“By this time, Memphis had made its mark with
us in a really positive way,” Gibbons said. “I don’t
think anyone can go there and not be affected by
all of the great music, especially stuff from the
Stax/Volt era. Before we left, the song I Thank You
came on the car radio. Isaac Hayes played this
badass clavinet part that made the Sam & Dave
version so distinctive. I was in the studio, talking to
the engineer, and I remarked about how magical
the sound of the clavinet was on that song, and he
said: ‘Well, lo and behold, that very same clavinet
is right out there in the other room’. We put it on
I Thank You, Cheap Sunglasses – it started showing up
on a lot of tracks.”
“It’s such an interesting sound,” added Gibbons in
a separate interview, “that it ignited Dusty’s interest in
learning some keyboard skills, and it was he who
subsequently handled all the tickling of the ivories.”
Chalking up platinum sales and spitting out at
least three tunes that still figure in ZZ Top’s set-
lists, Degüello was one of rock’s most graceful gear-
shifts, finding an apparently washed-up band
retooling themselves for the decade ahead, while
reconciling their founding boogie with broader
horizons. “Sometimes change is hard to take for
some people,” Gibbons considered, “but we knew
how far we could push things.”
G
iven the ubiquitous daily multi-
play of Rock You Like A Hurricane in
grocery stores, airports and
amateur wrestling matches the
world over, we sometimes forget that the
Scorpions were at one time both a hungry
and decidedly edgy band. They spent a good
portion of the 1970s meandering around
proggy canyons, but even with the
aggressively cosmic guitarist Uli Jon Roth in
the band they still managed to tighten up and
develop into a storming hard rock band by
1975’s In Trance. A year later they followed
that with Virgin Killer, an insanely
controversial record thanks to its cover that
featured a naked 10-year-old girl. Both of
these developments would
ultimately dovetail into
1979’s landmark Lovedrive
album, their most focused
and groundbreaking work
of the decade.
But it took a lot of jarring
twists and turns to get there.
Lead headband Roth left the
band in 1977, citing musical
differences, and was
replaced by Matthias Jabs.
Then Michael Schenker, exhausted from road
work with UFO, rejoined the Scorpions,
leaving them with three guitarists: Jabs and
Schenker brothers Michael and Rudolf.
Then again, nothing exceeds like excess.
The returning Michael mostly threw in a few
leads here and there, but what monumental,
brain-rattling leads they were: witness the
sleazy, ballsy swing of Another Piece Of Meat
or the melodic crunch of Loving You Sunday
Morning. Hard rock had not transitioned fully
into the feral teenage beast that was heavy
metal at this point, but Michael was certainly
there already, and if anything his work on
Lovedrive is practically ground zero for all theinsane shredding that was soon to come from
all corners of the globe.
It would be disingenuous to say Lovedrive
sounds like the future – the title track is as
mid-70s denim tuxedo chariot choogling as
you can get – but there were enough
tantalising glimpses to hint at much bigger,
wilder and heavier things to come. Lighter
things, too. Lovedrive has two ballads: the
six-minute lighter-waver Holiday, and the
slightly perkier Always Somewhere. While
they poke a lot of the air out of the album- Lovedrive is practically a speed-metal record
without the syrupy, poppy side-bars –
shameless, mawkish power-balladry would
soon become an essential chunk of the
Scorpions’ success and most
certainly helped to define
their style in the next decade.
For many, Lovecdrive is the
band’s best album, the
perfect amalgamation of
melody and power. They
nearly blew it all by choosing
to go with Storm
Thorgerson’s pleasantly
ridiculous ‘bubblegum
boobs’ cover (although it
seems almost prudish compared to the cover
of the now shocking Virgin Killer), but
somehow or another we all survived it. If
anything, it presaged a decade of rampant
visual sexism that seemed perfectly
reasonable in the haze of cocaine binges and
long-haired millionaire boy-kings.
That year the Scorpions toured the US with
AC/DC and Ted Nugent; conquering
America was always their target. And they
did it. Global fame was still five years away,
but this was plenty for 1979. They were in the
arenas, and whether any of us knew it or not,
these unlikely German riff rockers were about
to rule the 80s. And Lovedrive got them there.
Words:Ken McIntyreSCORPIONS
LOVEDRIVE
GET
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