‘For Me, The Band Has Been Over Since 1996’

In a recent interview on Talking The Talk With Don, former SCORPIONS drummer Herman Rarebell, known for writing the lyrics to some of the band’s most iconic songs, discussed the possibility of reuniting with his longtime bandmates.

Rarebell said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “The last drummer they had was James Kottak. He passed away. I’m very sad about this because he was a good guy. And then I wrote an e-mail to them. I said, ‘Why don’t we do something together again?’ And you know what? I didn’t even get an answer. After 20 years being with those f**kers, not even an answer. I said, ‘Okay, f**k you. Fine.’ Because I can do my own thing — no problem. They can’t. Because the chemistry we had was unique. And if you f**k that up, it’s gonna be hard to replace. And the people out there, the fans, they’re not stupid. They can hear it immediately. They wrote me so many e-mails: ‘What happened?’ I don’t wanna explain all the time. Everybody can do in life what they want. That’s why we have a free will. And so I respect this.

“For me, the band has been over since 1996,” he continued. “There was nothing which they released after I left which knocked me out, where I said, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ Even the last album, Rudolf [Schenker, SCORPIONS guitarist] told me, ‘It’s gonna be like the Blackout album.’ I said, ‘It has nothing to do with Blackout. You should have got Dieter Dierks, [SCORPIONS‘ longtime] producer, back with the band and me writing some lyrics for you. And then we’d have a great album. But otherwise, what is this? Why you do this?’ No answer.”

When asked when he felt SCORPIONS began to “lose the plot” in their musical direction, Herman responded: “Really after [the ballad] ‘Wind Of Change’ [from the 1990 Crazy World album], you could see the direction. Klaus [Meine, SCORPIONS singer] obviously was all for it to go in this direction, but in my heart, I’m still a hard rock guy. So for me, I wanted to rock more, not go in ballad land. For me, there was nothing to do anymore from the creativity point. So, I said to myself, ‘Well, you have to do something else.’ And that’s exactly what I did.

“When I look back on it, there’s nothing to regret. Look at the band now. As Michael Schenker says in every interview, ‘What have they done after Herman left?’ There’s no more hits. The fans write me many e-mails: ‘Why don’t you do something that you did before on [1980’s] Animal Magnetism, [1982’s] Blackout, [1979’s] Lovedrive and this kind of albums?, which were pure rock albums. And this is where my heart is, and that’s what I wanted to do.”