Scorpions
The Band That Opened the Door to Heavy Metal
Image: Scorpians. Source: Jazzsoul
I am a metalhead.
I listen to all kinds of rock ’n’ roll. I love melodic rock. Hard rock. Glam. Progressive rock. Arena rock. All the strange little branches and tributaries that have grown out of rock music over the decades.
But if you ask me where I live?
Heavy metal.
Give me Iron Maiden. Give me Judas Priest. Give me Megadeth. Bring me all the way forward to Five Finger Death Punch.
That is Rock ’n’ Roll Angel.
But here's the thing.
You don't go to bed listening to Queen and wake up the next morning listening to Megadeth.
At least I didn't.
There was an entryway.
A door.
And standing in that doorway for me was a German rock band called Scorpions.
I Was Afraid of Metal
This is going to sound funny considering the music I listen to today, but when I was young, heavy metal scared me a little.
You have to remember what the culture surrounding metal looked like then.
The people I saw who were into the really heavy stuff looked different. Leather. Tattoos, which weren't nearly as commonplace as they are today. Piercings. Wild hair. Mohawks. Everything looked harder and more dangerous.
Then there were the stories.
Heavy metal was evil.
Heavy metal was Satanic.
Ozzy Osbourne was doing God knows what.
Black Sabbath was probably opening a portal to hell somewhere.
You know.
The usual.
And I bought some of it.
I was a good kid. A little weird, perhaps, but a good kid. So when something looked like it belonged in the scary part of rock ’n’ roll, I generally stayed over on my side of the street.
Then the radio played “No One Like You.”
Wait.
What is this?
There were big guitars, certainly, but there was also melody. The guy singing had this incredible voice. And the song was romantic.
Oh, I can do this.
This wasn't scary.
This was a man singing about desperately wanting somebody.
Young Angel understood the assignment.
Then I discovered something else.
They were German.
Oh, come on.
I had taken German throughout high school. I was vice president of the German Club for two years and eventually took German in college.
Now I really needed to know who these guys were.
It was time to go hunting.
Enter Blackout
Image: Blackout. Source: Scorpions Official Website
Back then, discovering a band required work.
There was no Spotify waiting to hand you the complete discography. You heard something on the radio, and then you went looking.
I went to the record store and found the album.
Blackout.
And that cover was INSANE.
There was a man screaming with forks bent over his eyes, bursting through glass.
Okay.
Apparently we were back in the scary part of rock ’n’ roll.
I bought it anyway.
Then I hid the album from my mother because I wasn't entirely convinced she would appreciate my latest musical discovery.
When I finally had the opportunity, I pulled the record out.
We had a good turntable in our house, and back then a good turntable meant a good needle. Those things weren't something you casually bounced around a record looking for your favorite song.
You put the needle down.
And you let the album play.
I wasn't even trying to listen to “No One Like You.”
I started at the beginning.
Side One.
Track One.
“Blackout.”
That opening guitar hit me.
I don't know how else to explain it.
There is a wonderful moment in Ratatouille when the food critic takes one bite and is instantly transported somewhere else.
That's what happened to me.
The guitars.
The intensity.
The insanity of the lyrics.
The solo.
And Klaus Meine.
Image: Klaus Meine. Source: Discog
Oh. My. God.
That voice.
Klaus could sing beautifully, but there was something about what happened when he pushed that voice into a scream that absolutely grabbed me.
The song ended.
And I broke the record-player rules.
I picked up that expensive needle, moved it backward and played “Blackout” again.
Then again.
And again.
I probably listened to that song five or six times before I finally let the record continue.
There was my beloved “No One Like You.”
“Can't Live Without You,” which I still love.
And then I found “Dynamite.”
That was it.
The door had opened.
Metalhead Angel walked through.
Scorpions at the Cow Palace
Image: The Cow Palace, San Francisco. Source: Wikipedia
Eventually Scorpions came to town.
By this point I had been to concerts, including Day on the Green, but this felt different.
In the Bay Area, going to the Oakland Coliseum was easy for me. I could take BART, get off right there, go to the concert, get back on BART and go home.
The Cow Palace was another creature entirely.
And yes, the name was exactly as weird as it sounds. The place had a history tied to livestock shows and rodeos, and it was enormous.
Getting there required driving.
Parking.
Walking.
Navigating this massive crowd.
And I wasn't going alone.
I had a date.
One of my first real dates, as a matter of fact.
To see Scorpions.
Because apparently Young Angel was already establishing standards.
There was another element to that evening that I remember very clearly.
I was a young Black girl walking into a Scorpions concert.
And my date was white.
Interracial couples were not something I experienced as being nearly as commonplace or accepted then as they are today. Add to that the fact that I was entering a huge metal crowd where I already felt conspicuous, and I was uncomfortable.
Actually, I remember being almost frightened.
The crowd was deep. We were packed together, everybody moving toward the entrance in this enormous mass of bodies.
At some point his hand naturally found mine.
I pulled away.
Not dramatically.
I tried to make it look like I hadn't pulled away at all.
He noticed.
He smiled, took my hand again and said something along the lines of:
“I don't want us to get separated.”
Smooth.
Very smooth.
I let him keep my hand.
And Then the Lights Went Down
We had great seats on the floor near the stage.
They had been expensive, at least by our standards at the time.
And Scorpions absolutely crushed that room.
We rocked.
I mean, we ROCKED.
There are bands that make great records.
There are bands that are fun to watch live.
And then there are bands that understand the assignment.
Scorpions understands the assignment.
Klaus Meine wasn't merely standing onstage singing songs at us. He talked to us. He interacted with us. He seemed genuinely delighted to be there with the audience.
That's a frontman.
The entire band had this energy that filled an enormous arena and somehow made you feel part of what was happening onstage.
And somewhere during all of this, another thought entered my head.
Wait a minute.
Why does this outrageously good German rock band sing everything in English?
I had spent all this time learning German and these people wouldn't give me ONE SONG?
Really?
I had questions.
But mostly I was too busy rocking.
That concert was magical.
And so was the date.
The young man and I ended up dating for about six months. We had a wonderful time together and eventually went our separate ways when I entered the military.
That's another story for another day.
But after we parted, I occasionally wondered about that Scorpions concert.
Had the night been so incredible because of the band?
Or had it been incredible because I was young, on one of my first dates, holding hands with a boy I liked?
There was only one reasonable way to investigate.
More Scorpions.
Going Backward
I dove deeper into the band.
And instead of only waiting for whatever came after Blackout, I started going backward.
That's when I realized these guys had been around for a long time before I ever knew they existed.
So I started hunting.
At Tower Records I found an older album called Virgin Killer among the harder-to-find records and imports.
I didn't know these songs.
They weren't the songs I was hearing on the radio.
Didn't matter.
I wanted to hear more.
Then I found Lovedrive.
And “Holiday.”
Excuse me, Klaus Meine.
Where did THAT come from?
The man had pipes.
Serious pipes.
“Loving You Sunday Morning.”
“Lovedrive.”
More.
Give me more.
Then came Animal Magnetism.
And “The Zoo.”
That song holds another little distinction in my life.
It was the first song I learned to play on guitar.
Rhythm guitar, people.
Let's settle down.
Nobody was confusing me with Matthias Jabs.
Crazy World
Image: Crazy World. Source: The Scorpions Official Website
Years passed.
Then came another milestone.
I bought my first brand-new car.
Brand spanking new.
New-car smell and everything.
And this magnificent piece of modern technology had one of those cassette/CD combination systems.
Naturally, I needed music.
I ran out and bought a stack of CDs, and among them was the new Scorpions album.
Crazy World.
That album became part of the soundtrack of my new car.
Work.
Friends.
Dates.
Events.
Driving around living my young adult life.
Those songs were there.
This is one of the things I love most about music.
An album can become attached to a period of your life so completely that years later you don't simply hear the songs.
You remember the world around them.
I can hear music from Crazy World and remember that car.
That feeling.
That period of my life.
Then Scorpions came to town again to support the album.
Of course I was going.
But this time something crazy happened.
A radio station was running a contest.
The winners would get VIP access and go backstage with Scorpions.
Guess who won?
ME.
Backstage With Scorpions
I was so nervous.
And shy.
Very, very shy.
Suddenly these people I had been listening to for years weren't photographs on album covers anymore.
There was Klaus Meine.
Rudolf Schenker.
Matthias Jabs.
The Scorpions.
Right there.
I got hugs.
Handshakes.
Autographs.
I tried speaking a little German.
My German wasn't particularly good. Their English wasn't always particularly good. Somehow we figured it out.
I spent a little time with Matthias Jabs.
He seemed amused by my awful American German. We managed to communicate.
And I'll leave some of that encounter backstage where it belongs.
What happens backstage with a rock band occasionally deserves to remain backstage.
Let's just say I had a very good evening.
Eventually, though, the party was moving on.
There were people who were interested in continuing the rock ’n’ roll adventure elsewhere.
I wasn't one of them.
And nobody made that uncomfortable.
Before I left, Matthias thanked me for coming.
I thanked him for the autograph.
Then I told him something that actually mattered to me.
I told him how much I loved his playing.
And I told him that I was learning guitar.
He told me:
Keep playing.
And that was it.
I went home.
So...Was It the Boy?
I don't wonder anymore.
That young man and I had a lovely relationship. We dated for six months, had fun together, and eventually our lives went in different directions.
I remember him fondly.
But Scorpions?
I never left.
I saw them again.
And again.
And again.
Every time they came around, there was that same magic.
Their music became part of different periods of my life.
Vinyl records.
Cassettes.
CDs.
Concert tickets.
My first new car.
My guitar.
And eventually something happened that Young Angel standing inside Tower Records could never possibly have imagined.
The world went digital.
I could follow the musicians whose photographs had once been printed on the cardboard sleeves I carried home from the record store.
I still follow Matthias and his life with guitars outside his duties as Scorpions' axe man.
Then COVID came.
The stages went dark.
Concert halls closed.
Musicians couldn't get to their audiences.
And Scorpions found ways to rock with us through social media.
I watched.
Every time I could.
Of course I did.
The Door Never Closed
When I look back now, I understand why Scorpions occupies such a special place in my rock ’n’ roll life.
They were the gateway.
Before Scorpions, heavy metal was this strange, slightly frightening place inhabited by people who didn't necessarily look like me.
Then “No One Like You” came through the radio.
Blackout came home from the record store.
The needle dropped.
And everything changed.
A young Black girl who wasn't entirely sure she belonged in the metal world discovered something important.
She loved the music.
That was enough.
Decades later, I can move from Iron Maiden to Five Finger Death Punch and everything in between because somewhere along the way heavy metal stopped being that scary music on the other side of the street.
It became home.
And Scorpions opened the door.
I've been there through records, concerts, cars, guitars, relationships, adulthood, backstage adventures and a world that changed more times than I could have imagined when I first heard Klaus Meine's voice coming through the radio.
I'm still listening.
Still following.
Still a metalhead.
And if Scorpions finds its way anywhere near my part of the world on this run?
I'll do exactly what I've been doing since I was that nervous little Black girl walking through the gates of the Cow Palace holding a boy's hand.
I'll be there.
Rock on. 🤘
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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