michael schenker

Long ago, several lifetimes in the past, my mom would take me with her to a grocery store in Pawling, New York, where my family owned a weekend getaway home.  Going to the store with her was one of the few times when I got to see what life was like on the other side of the tracks. I remember mothers smacking their children’s faces when the kids talked back, and I recall asking my mother what Food Stamps were and why we were the only ones in the store not paying for our stuff with them. This was a million miles away from my life on Park Avenue, where domestic servants seemed to be hiding in every closet and bathroom, the kind of lifestyle where you have a maid, but you also have a woman who comes in a few times a week to do a deeper cleaning. Whenever I think about this stuff now, it reminds me how downwardly mobile I've been. If, as Engels wrote, the purpose of the family is to reproduce class relations, then our family was a miserable failure.  But I don’t really wanna talk about Engels and class reproduction.  That, too, is a remnant from a life I once lived.  I’d rather talk about UFO… One thing I remember clearly about this Dickensian grocery store I would go to with my mom on the weekends is that they sold LPs.  Weird, right?  Government cheese, Ajax, and Led Zeppelin III, all for sale under one roof...

The LPs were kept in a bin near the cash registers, and I would look at them while my mom shopped. One record the store always had in stock was UFO’s Lights Out.  Not to dwell on the topic, but in retrospect I can say that their having this particular album was another marker of their main demographic. UFO makes music that’s nothing if not blue collar.  But this class character is not the same kind of working class vibe you get with Springsteen or even Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, where there’s a certain amount of poetry and aesthetic refinement introduced into the music, which often is indicative of a gap between the singer and the world he describes in his songs.  UFO is the real fucking deal, scar-faced lads from Birmingham, and (in their heyday) one equally trashy guitar playing ubermensch from Germany.  I may be making this up in my head, but UFO’s music sounds like it could only be made by guys who know what it’s like to live amidst burned-out steel mills, who know what it’s like to stand in long dole queues…

Along with records like Foghat Live, Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, and Angel’s On Earth As it is In Heaven, Lights Out was a record I always looked at and wanted when I was at that grocery store, though I never dared ask my mom to buy it for me.  But a little while later, I bought Lights Out at a store on Third Avenue called Music Maze. Like many small record shops in those days, Music Maze also sold bongs, pornos (on actual film reels), incense, and Alice Cooper belt buckles.  I got Lights Out on the strength of its cover art alone. As it turns out, it’s ok every now and again to judge a book by its cover because I loved what I heard right away. The music was so hard rocking, and nasty, and of a forbidden world, the world of  teenagers on pot, which at 10 or 11 is what I aspired to be when I grew up. And the nice thing is that a lot of UFO’s music (not all of it, but quite a bit) still stands up.  It’s unabashedly music made for arenas, or soccer stadiums filled with rabid hooligans who wanna hear some heavy duty rock and then go flip over cars and set buildings on fire.  When you’re a young lad, and you exist in a narrowly defined and somewhat staid environment, you hear a band like UFO and the hard hitting aggressiveness is exactly what you want and need.  It's like a lightning bolt across the night sky...

There’s a lot of things I really like about UFO, but I think the biggest is Michael Schenker’s shreditude.  Shreddiness, in and of itself, is no longer something I value much in guitarists.  Shredding for its own sake bores me, which is why I’m only into metal in controlled doses.  Perhaps I have only one ball or something, but playing lightning-fast sweeps without bringing any other aesthetic considerations to the table usually makes a guy sound (a) overly clinical (i.e. lifeless), and/or (b) like he works in the stock room at Guitar Center.  But sometimes shredding adds an element of frenetic excitement, particularly if it’s approached in a way that’s highly musical.  The thing about so much of the metallic shredding you hear is that it’s not really very musical sounding at all.  It’s just a guy with decent manual dexterity, and a two-inch cock, who can play really fast. BFD. I’ll take the lumbering creakiness of Neil Young over Randy Rhodes or Kirk Hammett any day of the week.  And yet, there are a few guys who shred tastefully – aesthetically pleasing shredders, let’s call them – the best example being Michael Schenker.  I can’t really put my finger exactly on what makes Schenker different other than to say that some remarkably melodic and even intricate ideas lurk beneath the high-octane intensity of his particular brand of shred.  Intricacy is, of course, not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of UFO and Scorpions.  But what makes both bands so good is that, even as the songs drip with testosterone and bravado, the underlying tunes are surprisingly catchy. I give Schenker a lot of credit for this, especially in the case of UFO.  His feel for tight song structures comes across not only in his soloing but even more so in his super-crunchy accompaniment.  He also gets amazing tone from his Flying V, a kind of tuneful distortion that would work in any high-energy musical context…

So my advice to the uninitiated is to go out and get your hands on some UFO.  If you like your music hard, tough and loud, and if you wanna hear some shredding that actually sounds like music, these guys are just the thing.