After all these years, the Scorpions have plenty of sting left

It’s 3 p.m. in St. Louis at the Four Seasons Hotel, where Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions is staying under an assumed name. The handle he’s chosen isn’t one that would be easy for autograph hunters to guess, nor does it roll off the tongue. In fact, it takes the front-desk operator several minutes to track down Schenker, and that’s even after his alias is spelled out.

When the guitarist is finally located, the founding member of the Scorpions is instantly engaging when he answers the phone. Discussing his band’s upcoming five-show run at The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel, which kicks off Friday, noting how the energy is different playing for a more intimate audience, he’s as friendly and talkative as his accent is thick.

“The people who really want to see the Scorpions, they appreciate very much when we play a smaller place, because they have the feeling that we’re talking to them and not to (50,000, 100,000, 200,000) people,” Schenker says. “And I think that makes the whole concert very private and very, let’s say, emotional, because everybody is very close to the stage and you can oversee the whole thing.”

In the band’s nearly half-century of existence, the Scorpions have played to some massive crowds, from a gig in Poland where the band performed for 800,000 people to a supporting slot at Roger Waters’ famous concert at the Berlin Wall that drew half a million people. Those shows carry a completely different vibe. While it’s thrilling to play for such big audiences, it’s easier to connect with a smaller crowd, Schenker says.

“I think it’s a different energy,” he explains. “When you play in front of 200,000, you play in a way it’s your last day, because you want to give every energy and you’re feeling all the energy which comes from the audience. But when you play in this place — in a smaller place, a historical place or in a place which has an overlooking crowd — then you have energy like you play for everybody, for every single person, and that’s a different energy.”

That’s the thing about playing these smaller venues, you can actually see the fans, which makes connecting a lot easier. “Here, you focus on this person, you know, and this person, you know,” says Schenker, the longest-running member of the band next to singer Klaus Meine and guitarist Matthias Jabs. “After 50 years, you know many people.”

Without question. But while the act’s core audience is firmly established at this point, at the same time, according to Schenker, the fan base is actually getting younger as it continues to grow worldwide. “On Facebook,” he points out, “we have 80 percent of our fans are between 18 and 28 years old. So, in this case, there’s a new generation coming.”

There’s certainly plenty of music for newer devotees to discover, more than two dozen albums, beginning with the band’s 1972 debut, “Lonesome Crow.” While the band established its now-signature sound with the release of 1979’s “Lovedrive,” which featured the complementary fretwork of Matthias Jabs and produced one its most beloved ballads, “Holiday,” you can hear how the band evolved from its earlier releases like “Lonesome Crow,” which sounds quite different from later releases and delves into more psychedelic territory.

The early songs put a higher premium on fiery fretwork than melody, and that was largely due to the sensibilities of original guitarist Uli Jon Roth, from the sound of it. When Roth parted ways with the group and Jabs joined, Schenker took the songwriting helm and was able to finally unveil the mellower numbers he had written and held back for a few years, and he and Jabs quickly found a chemistry.

“After Uli Jon Roth left and I was the only composer, I was looking at what is the power of the Scorpions? What can we do without Uli? Because Uli was, as a guitar player, he was more a solo artist than Matthias, because he wants to be the guitar player. That’s not good for the singer. That’s not good for the band.

“In the ’70s, I composed so much stuff, and Uli didn’t want to play it because it was too soft for him. It was not the way he wants to play, like ‘Still Loving You,’ like ‘No One Like You,’ like ‘Lady Starlight.’ This kind of songs were already written in the ’70s, but they were not ready for Uli Jon Roth. And when Matthias came, more as a ‘bend’ guitar player, yeah, we locked in. We were clear. ‘Yes, that’s the song. There, this we can play.’ Now is the chemistry right to play this kind of songs.”

The band’s longtime producer Dieter Dierks helped capture all that chemistry on tape, resulting in a distinctive sound that’s instantly recognizable. The band really reached its stride by the time it released “Blackout” in the early ’80s. The title of the breakthrough record, according to Schenker, has an origin that is very literal and also a meaning that’s figurative.

“Blackout was a song which actually was came out of a situation that I was partying with the Judas Priest guys, Glenn and K.K. (Downing), and with the Def Leppard,” Schenker recalls. “Out of that, it was a hard party — no question about this — I had a blackout, which I didn’t know so far exists. I told (drummer) Herman (Rarebell) the story. I said, ‘Aw, I lost sight. I was …’ (He said,) ‘You know what you had? You had a blackout.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, by the way, that’s a great title for an album.’ So we didn’t know that this title was also supposed to be the situation for Klaus with his voice.” (Meine had vocal surgery around the time the album was issued.)

The artwork for that particular album is iconic, featuring an image of a mustachioed man screaming with enough ferocity to shatter glass, with gauze wrapped around his head and forks taped to his eyes.

According to Schenker, he and Meine happened to see the same photo in Stern Magazine, a German publication, and thought it would make a great album cover. With the blessing of the photographer, Gottfried Helnwein, who snapped the self-portrait, the shot became the cover art for the 1982 album.

Like their input on “Blackout,” Schenker says that he and the rest of the band have been very involved in the artwork for each album. “We did the next one, which was not so exciting, “Animal Magnetism,” Schenker says of working with the British design firm Hipgnosis, which also designed the “Lovedrive” artwork.

“It was still arty, but not so exciting,” he says. “We found out that the first kick you get working with somebody, you’re getting the most out of it. So in this case, we tried on each album cover, then, to work with somebody new. Of course, we’re going through all the things and somebody came up — I don’t know who it was in the end — ‘Andy Warhol would be great. That would be fantastic.’ ”

So the band members reached out to Warhol, and to their surprise, he agreed to do it. Sadly, the collaboration never came to be, an opportunity that Schenker regrets.

“We ask him and he said yes he’d love to do it, but he didn’t want to give us the rights,” Schenker recalls. “That was a problem. That was ’88, “Savage Amusement.” When you go on tour, you want to have your album cover on the T-shirt, and it was not allowed. In this case, we said, ‘No, then we are not doing it.’ It was a mistake, now, looking back.”

It wasn’t the first one, according to Schenker. Plenty of people have attached that same criticism to “Eye II Eye,” the 1999 album in which Schenker and company deviated from their designated template and created an album that was considerably different from its predecessors with processed drums and other electronic sounds. The songs from that record aren’t necessarily bad, but they don’t sound like the Scorpions.

“Exactly,” Schenker agrees. “But you know, for us to do that was good at this time, because at the time, whatever we would do at this time, it would not fit us. So in this case, instead of splitting up, we said, ‘OK, let’s use this time for trying out what else we can do.”

The experiment wasn’t met with much enthusiasm, so the band went back to the original formula, much like when Coca-Cola, in the mid-’80s, discovered that changing its recipe wasn’t a good idea. “I tell you one thing,” Schenker says with a laugh. “I was using the same example: People want to have the old drink. They’re not want to change.”

Indeed, and when you’ve spent as much time as Schenker and the Scorpions building such a strong and reliable brand, name recognition is very important — well, unless, of course, you’re a rock star staying in a hotel and looking to maintain a low profile.

Read more from Dave Herrera at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at dherrera@reviewjournal.com and follow @rjmusicdh on Twitter.