With the album ‘Blackout’, the Scorpions were starting to break big and it looks like the record company wanted to promote more of the band’s 70’s material, especially with Uli Jon Roth. This is the band’s second compilation and like the first one, only features songs with Uli. Released on May 4, 1982, ‘Hot & Heavy’ is released under the RCA banner of “Takeoff” series. The album, as the title suggests, features the heavier songs by the band and even has 3 Uli sung songs. The songs cover the years 1974-1977.
Admittedly, this is not really necessary as a release, but it is a good showcase of the band’s more rocking material. Sadly, there are 6 repeats on this compilation that are on the ‘Best of Scorpions’ released a few years back. My version is the German release of the album and the back cover has a brief history of the band in both German and English. The back cover also highlights a few other albums under the “Takeoff” series umbrella.
After the debut album, ‘Lonesome Crow’, Michael Schenker was given an offer he couldn’t refuse. A chance to play guitar with the amazing band UFO. He was only kid so why not jump at the chance. They had asked Uli Jon Roth to join Scorpions after helping them finish out the tour, but Uli chose not to do it and instead stayed with the band he was also in called Dawn Road. Rudolf Schenker really wanted to work with Uli so he decided to break up the band and go join Dawn Road. Dawn Road already had Francis Buchholz (bass), Achim Kirschning (keyboards) and Jürgen Rosenthal (drums), but they amazingly found themselves needing a singer. Uli convinced Rudolf to invite Klaus Meine to come sing in the band…and he agreed.
Dawn Road had four members plus two old Scorpions members. Dawn Road basically outnumbered the Scorps. However, they decided to change the band name to Scorpions mainly because that name was more well known than Dawn Road and the Scorpions were back in business. They recorded the follow-up album ‘Fly to the Rainbow’ in April 1974 and on November 1, 1974, the album was released. The album ended up selling better than ‘Lonesome Crow’ and saw the band’s sound go from psychedelic rock to a more straight-forward hard rock sound…but not the 80’s rock sound yet…still some years off. One interesting thing to note is that 3 of the songs on the album were co-written by Michael Schenker which some how was part of the deal for him leaving the band.
The album cover is not quite what you’d expect from the Scorpions. The color scheme is not very metal and Uli Jon Roth has no idea what it means and I am guessing the band had no say in what it would be. The same design firm that did the debut album, which was great, did this one as well and I am not sure what drugs they were taking, but they had to be high as a freaking kite to come up with this nonsense. I do like the back cover with the band’s name on the guys ass..that’s kinda funny. My copy of the album is a standard U.S. release and nothing special so enough about that. Let’s get to the music.
2 Loud 2 Old Music 