Classic Rock Revisited caught up with ex-Scorpions drummer Herman Rarebell to discuss his recent role in an upcoming solo album by rocker Michael Schenker. Herman let us know that the new album is great and it is being recorded with Pete Way of UFO on bass, hopefully. It seems Way is still Waysted most of the time and with Rarebell and Schenker being drug free his antics are weighing heavy on their nerves.

Not all the news is bad, however, as Rarebell is still rocking and waving the hard rock flag into his sixties. He has overcome the odds and rocked us like a hurricane for decades. He still has a fever for rock n’ roll and the only cure he can find is to keep on jamming.

We also take a look back in time to the days before Herman joined the Scorpions and learn how writing lyrics came to fall on his shoulders. Lastly, we discuss some career highlights including what it was like to play during Roger Water’s live DVD performed in Berlin where the famous wall once stood.

I am in Brighton rehearsing with Michael Schenker and Pete Way. Michael will soon release a solo album with many, many guests. As far as who the guests are, you should ask Michael. I will be one of the guests and so will Pete. I know Carmine [Appice] is playing on a few songs. Simon Phillips and Chris Slade will also play on a song. I will be on seven songs. It is all new material that Michael wrote over the last few months. Whatever comes out of this the future will have to show.

This is the best I have ever seen him. He is totally clean. He is doing no drugs and no alcohol and he has lost a lot of weight. He looks really good and I personally think that he is playing better than ever. Pete and I will go into the studio and finish recording in February.

I have known Pete from the days he was with UFO. What can I tell you about Peter? You know all about Peter so what is there to say?

It would have been very dangerous. Michael Schenker has dried out completely as a matter of life or death. He could go on like he was and be dead in a year or he can give it up and go on and create some beautiful things. That is what he did. The new material he wrote is killer material; it is really first class rock music.

I hope the album will do well. It is very simple; if the album does well then we can go out and tour together. If the album does not do well then there is no reason to go out and tour. I toured the United States last year, as you know, for six weeks and I did a lot of promotion. I didn’t really see anything on the sales side, however. The only way to convince people these days is to go out and play live. I think with all the guests he will have on the album it will be a big success. The songs are good as well and I think he has a good chance to go into the Top 10 with this album. It really is that good.

I will play with Herman Z’ German & Friends on the 18^th of June, in my hometown in Germany. It is an outdoor show and I will be the headliner there. I am really looking forward to it because it is going back to the homeland. It is very special to me. I told my agent to book me some more dates in the area around that time. There are talks of touring with Michael this summer but I have not confirmed that yet. He has plenty of drummers to choose from. Besides me he can choose Carmine, Simon or Chris Slade. I think he has the best drummers in the world, in rock for sure, on this album. We are all big names. You have to remember Chris Slade plays in MSG with Michael.

Michael made a damn good DVD in 2009 with Simon Phillips on drums and Neil Murray from Whitesnake on bass. When you watch the DVD you will flip out at how good he is playing right now. It is called Live in Tokyo. I am not sure if it is released in America. It was released in Japan and Germany and it went to number one in Japan on the DVD charts.

In America people are in the computer age and that means they don’t have to learn instruments by hand. There is also karaoke and they are used to everyone being a singer. Anyone can be a star for one night now.

I played “Lights Out” with him. When he goes out this summer I don’t know which lineup he will go out with. It looks like it could be Pete and myself. The problem in the United States is that we can’t get Pete into the country because of his health.

I think the truth is the drugs and his record of them. They don’t want him in the country because of his drug record. He did everything from cocaine to heroin and God knows what else. He is registered and we won’t be able to play shows in America with him. I can go with Michael and play but not with Peter on bass.

This is the way the world works. Some people get lucky and they can have a huge drug record but they have a lawyer that can pay the lawyer from the government good money. Once you pay the money then you can get in. I am sure Keith Richards doesn’t have trouble. Pete doesn’t have that kind of money anymore. He cannot go to lawyer and tell them to pay a million to make it clear.

He is still the wild man and he has not changed. In fact, I think he has gotten worse. I called him last night and told him that he had better fucking stop this and he couldn’t even answer me, that’s how fucking drunk he was. I am worried the most about Peter because he has not changed. If he does not change he will be dead in a year, you will see. Michael and I are totally straightened out and we expect the same from him.

This is what we have to consider. Since he is an old friend we want to give him a chance. If he is not taking the chance then we will have to tell him that we are going to take Neil Murray on bass. We go back our whole life. I said, “Why don’t you just get drunk after the rehearsal? It would be much easier that way.” But you can see after five songs that he is getting sloppy because he is on his sixth beer or his second bottle of whiskey plus all the blow and all the other shit he is taking. He is just like he was when he was in UFO, no different. Pete is a great player and a great showman. He is a real British rock star.

When you get older you have to watch the body. You can’t do the same thing when you are sixty as you did when you were twenty. For me, I decided on my fiftieth birthday that there would be no more cocaine and that I would only drink wine with dinner and then only a glass or two. I am sixty-one years old now and have been clean off drugs for eleven years and am very happy. I will have wine with a meal but that is it. I am totally fit and totally straight and I play better than ever. I can play well and I don’t fall over during the third song.

I have not talked to them for months. I do know that Rudolf has written a song with Michael. It is a great song, a ballad. They sent it to me three days ago and I am doing the drums on it now. One of the combinations after the Scorpions will be The Schenker Brothers. I am sure I will be playing drums for them. There are a lot of things in the pipeline and I don’t want to nail myself down to one thing. I just take it as it comes, just like the song says. If someone calls me and wants me to do a two-month tour of Japan and South America then I want to be able to do it. I don’t want to miss that because I have made other commitments.

There will be several special shows but in America the promoters don’t want to pay for the extras. The extras are Michael, Uli Roth and myself. If they are not willing to pay then there will be no special shows in America.

I always have a good time when I play with the Scorpions. Don’t forget most of what they play I wrote the lyrics for. “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” “Dynamite” and “Blackout” are all my songs and a bunch more as well. I gave those songs their titles. It is because of me that song is called “Blackout.” For me, seeing them playing my songs on stage is great. I say, “Thank you very much. I look forward to receiving the publishing on them.”

I joined the band in 1977 but I lived in England for six years before that and my English was the best in the band. One day Rudolf asked me if I would write lyrics to the songs. I came up with “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” which is a true story.

When we visited Paris on a promotional tour, being young men, we drove around the red light district. We saw this beautiful prostitute and we put down the window and yelled for her to come over. She came over and said, “Hi guys, how are you” in German, in a low voice. She was a German transvestite. I wrote the lyrics for that song that night. It was my first time writing lyrics. From then on I wrote lots of lyrics on the albums Lovedrive, Animal Magnetism, Blackout and Love at First Sting. I found I had a talent writing them. It really came easy for me.

My philosophy is to have fun because then people can have fun. It is that simple. Remember that I didn’t have as many words to play around with because my vocabulary is not as big as yours because English is your Mother language. I had to learn English in England from 1971 to 1977 that is really when I learned all of my English. If you were to come to Germany tomorrow then you would speak fluent German in six years without a problem. Now, most people could answer you in English but if you were to have come thirty years ago nobody would be able to answer you in English because nobody spoke it. If you would have come to East Germany they would have spoken Russian.

No, just that one. At the time we had Uli Jon Roth in the band and Uli presented us with a finished song. He would say this is called “I’ve Got To Be Free” and you can put the drums on there.” He had the structure and the lyrics of the song ready. The direction he wanted to go when I joined the band was more of Jimi Hendrix style music with an orchestra. When I joined I told Rudolf that we should become a melodic hard rock band who writes songs that people can sing along with. Uli wanted to do his own thing and he formed Electric Sun.

Monika was writing a lot of his lyrics. She was also the original girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix. She was the one who was with him in the night when he died. She claimed that she told him to take a quarter of a sleeping tablet but he took four tablets. That is the story that has been told all of these years but I don’t believe it. I don’t buy that at all. I think your government killed him because he was too popular for a black guy at the time. He was opening up his mouth for freedom. The CIA or the Secret Service took care of him just like they did Kennedy. For me, I think that is what happened to him. Don’t forget that he was perceived as more dangerous as even Martin Luther King at the time. He was the hero to the white kids. For a country who has so much racism, like you have in America, it was unthinkable that a black man could have that kind of power in the United States.

The first time I went to see Scorpions was when Michael Schenker called me and told me that his brother was coming over to England to play at the Marquee Club and then the next night they were playing at the Sound Circus, which was only a few kilometers away from there. He told me that they were looking for a drummer.

I talked to Rudolf the night before and I told him I would come and check the band out at the Marquee. I checked them out and Rudolf asked me what I thought. I said, “You have two bands here. One band backs up Uli Roth and sounds like Jimi Hendrix and then you have another band that is Klaus and you who sound a little bit like early Uriah Heep.” Rudolf said, “Yeah but we will never find another guitar player like Uli.” I told him that if that is the case then let’s play like that. We have to decide one direction. Either we go the way of Uli Roth or we go the direction of Klaus, you and me.”

Uli wrote the song on Taken By Force called “I’ve Got to Be Free.” When you listen to those lyrics then you could tell he had already made up his mind, then and there, that he was going to leave the band. He was not very happy with the direction that I wanted the band to go in. I wanted us to have songs that had hooks but he wanted to do his Jimi Hendrix type stuff, which I thought had already been done by Hendrix. I thought Jimi had already done a great job of it. So, he left and did his solo thing, like he always wanted to do. As my mother always said, “If a train is rolling then let it roll. Don’t jump on it because you could get hurt.”

I told Rudolf that we would find another guitar player. We found Matthias Jabs, who I think is a fabulous guitar player, and more importantly a team player. As you know, at the time, Michael Schenker had joined the band and he played on three songs on the Lovedrive album. He played on my song, “Another Piece of Meat” and on “Coast to Coast” and he played on the title track. We were thinking of replacing Uli Roth with Rudolf’s brother, Michael. At the time, Michael had already decided to start his own band, The Michael Schenker Group or MSG. He said, “I am in Germany and if you want me to I can come by and put down some guitar parts.”

He had gone on tour with us when one day he decided to go buy a motorbike. He ended up in Spain. We were in the middle of a tour and we didn’t have a lead guitar player. We remembered this guy in Hannover named Matthias Jabs, who can play exactly like Uli Roth and play the other songs as well. So what happens is that Matthias was in, but Michael came back so we threw Matthias out. Michael left again and we phoned Matthias and he said, “I will help you out one more time but that’s it. I will come but I won’t keep playing this game of Michael being in or out.” I talked to Rudolf and said, “I know he is your brother but you have to make up your mind here. I know he is a brilliant player but what is the point of having a brilliant player if he does not show up to the gigs?” We told Matthias that he was in the band and that he was the guitar player. After this we made our first tour with Matthias and conquered America.

Like I said it was two bands before. It was the Uli Roth Band and it was the Scorpions featuring Klaus Meine and Rudolf Schenker. With me coming in from the outside I said there was no point to have two directions of the band. You can hear the two directions clearly on the album Taken By Force. You have “Sails of Charon” and then you have “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man.” When Uli left, Rudolf was really sad because he thought it would be the end of the band. Matthias came in and he is still in the band to this day.

Right away. It was me who was the biggest influence to make this move to this type of band. It was also me who knew we had to make a killer album cover. Klaus and I flew to England and met up with Storm Thorgerson, who was the main guy with a company called Hipgnosis. He made those great covers for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I told him that I wanted to make a great cover because now we were a band and we had one direction. There was no more Uli in the band. It was no longer all guitar solo oriented; it was song oriented. You can hear it with songs like “Another Piece of Meat” and “Lovedrive.” This was the first Gold album in America.

The cover showed a woman with bubblegum on her tits. It is an outstanding cover. A lot of people bought it just because of the cover. It got banned in America and they put red vinyl around it. It is a joke compared to stuff that is out today but back then it got banned.

It was Elton’s. Storm had done work for everybody including Elton. He just borrowed it. I remember when he flew from London to Cologne, to Dieter Dirks studio and he showed us the covers he had made. He brought about ten different covers. As soon as he showed us the cover with the chewing gum we knew that was the one. He made the album cover for Animal Magnetism as as well. He is the best when it comes to making album covers.

We came on July 28, 1979 and Leber-Krebs signed the band. They told us that the first gig we had was a festival in Cleveland. Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, Ted Nugent, AC/DC and Journey were all there. We played at ten thirty in the morning. We went on tour opening for Ted Nugent and AC/DC and then we opened up for Aerosmith.

Bon was a very good friend of mine. Many nights, after we finished playing, Bon and I went out and played with local bands. If you look back at the early days of the Scorpions we were playing with all the Leber-Krebs bands. We had a special opening act called Def Leppard who was the newest band that they signed. Peter Mensch signed the band and they became really big. I remember their drummer, Rick Allen, who had both arms then, was only sixteen and we had to smuggle him into the clubs because he was not twenty-one. Those early tours are what broke us in the States. A lot of people saw us live and the word of mouth went all around America that the Scorpions were a great band.

“Make It Real,” “Hold Me Tight,” “Falling in Love,” “Only a Man,” “Don’t Make No Promises” and “Animal Magnetism.” I wrote the lyrics and music to “Falling in Love.”

I play “Only a Man,” “Falling in Love” and I play “Passion Rules the Game” in my band. I also play “He’s a Woman” and I play “Now” and “Arizona.” There are many songs that the Scorpions never played live that I play live in my band.

It is totally a true story. I got picked up on the street by a woman in a limousine who took me out to the desert and made love to me. The next morning she dropped me off at the hotel.

That is another true story. I went to bed with a girl who unpacked her tits and there were no more tits. She wore a padded bra. That is why I said, “Don’t make no promises your body can’t keep.” It is like the guy who says, “I’m going to fuck you all night” and then he fucks her for two minutes and rolls over and falls asleep.

Those lyrics were very easy to write. I woke up early in the morning after fucking and doing cocaine all night and I opened up the curtains. “It’s early morning, the sun comes out. Last night was shaking and pretty loud. My cat is purring and she scratches my skin.” She had scratched my back during our lovemaking. I just sat down and wrote it right then and there, it was five in the morning and the girl was still in bed as I was sitting there writing it. The next day I said to Rudolf, “I have some great lyrics for that riff you have.”

That song is still one of the most played songs in the entire world. We sold out three nights at Madison Square Garden.

You have to remember that I was already thirty-five years old at that time. I was twenty-seven when I joined the band. Klaus and Rudolf were a year older. Don’t forget that we had a hard time getting to America. We were the first band ever from Germany to break out in America. We used to tell our record company that we wanted to play in America they used to laugh at us. They used to say, “You want to play in America? What do you think they are just sitting around waiting for you?” We said, “Of course they are waiting for us.” We proved them all wrong.

The album went triple platinum at the time and everybody was talking about the Scorpions. We were the band at the time and it was worldwide. We made a live album called World Wide Live that was, at the time, the biggest live album since Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive. These were what I considered the most important years of the Scorpions. There was a high point later with “Wind of Change” but it was not a rock song, it was a ballad. Suddenly, we had a lot of female friends at our concerts. A lot of the hard rockers, however, didn’t come out because of that song.

It didn’t sound like the Scorpions anymore. It changed drastically.

I told them all those years to do an album like we did when I was in the band. They would say, “We don’t want to sound like that anymore. We want to do something new.” I told them, “But that is what people want to hear so please do it again.” They didn’t.

When they did Pure Instinct I told them that I wasn’t going to play on that shit and I left. Then they did Eye to Eye, which was even worse; it was the worst album ever. They did Unbreakable and it slowly put them back on the route again. I like the new album very much. I think that is the way people hear the Scorpions.

It was not properly played on the radio but I don’t know what to do about that.

What is the point of putting out more new music on CDs? My philosophy is to buy my old album because there are a lot of great songs on there. Once you have done that then I will give you the next one. There is no point to make the next one if the other one is still existing but nobody knows about it. For most people the old album is the new album.

When the big hit “Wind of Change” happened it changed things for us. Roger Waters wanted us to be part of The Wall Live at Berlin. At the start of the DVD you can see a big white limousine accompanied by six to ten motorbikes. We get out and you see me go behind my drums and the band starts the Pink Floyd song “In The Flesh.” There were 400,000 people sitting there in Berlin where the mines and bombs used to be and we played there.

“Wind of Change” was played up and down the radio. In East Germany it was their freedom song. All of that came from that song being played in Russia. I remember Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev saying to me, “What was the biggest mistake the United States made?” I said, “I have no idea, Mr. Gorbachev.” He said, “It was 1964 when they let the Beatles come into the country. Everything changed drastically because for the first time people wanted to have freedom. My biggest mistake was to let you guys come to the Soviet Union.” The wall had fallen down on the ninth of November of 1989. Suddenly you could see relatives from East Germany that you had never met but you had heard about. This is how I grew up. Mr. Gorbachev could see the entire Soviet Union was going to fall down as well.

If somebody would have told me when I was 14 or 15 years old that in fifteen years from now you will play at Madison Square Garden I would have said, “You’re fucking crazy.”