Coming off 1988’s “Savage Amusement” album, the band continued to explore new avenues. On that tour they performed in the Soviet Union, only the second Western band to do so, when they played in Leningrad. The following year they returned with Motley Crue and Ozzy Osbourne to play the Moscow Music Peace Festival, and the huge reception they received from these two performances led to them continuing to tour the region in the years following this. And not only this, it must have provided some inspiration for their songwriting heading into their follow up album.
Moving into their next album, which would become their first of the new decade, the band made the decision to move on from producer Dieter Dierks. Dierks had produced every Scorpions album since 1975’s “In Trance”, the review of which you can hear on episode 124 of this podcast. In that time, he had been a part of guiding the band to the great heights of success that they now enjoyed.
While working on Savage Amusement, however, differences in opinion between the band and the producer emerged, and on the back of this Scorpions decided that a change needed to be made. In an interview in 2011 on the time, drummer Herman Rarebell was quoted: "For Scorpions Dieter was the right man in the right place. The more his influence within the band grew the more our record sales increased. This intimacy however also caused contempt because with his growing influence discrepancies between the band members were flaring up. At the end of the day, though, he did manage to soothe all the egos and succeeded in steering the band into one direction”.
In his place, the band decided to hire Keith Olsen, whose credits stretched through the 1970’s and 1980’s, but whose most recent success stories included Whitesnake’s “1987” and “Slip of the Tongue” albums, and Ozzy Osbourne’s “No Rest for the Wicked” album. With a new decade now upon them, a change in the music scene on the horizon, and a new producer in tow, Scorpions moved forth into the writing and recording of their next album, perhaps somewhat appropriately titled “Crazy World”.
One of the interesting parts of this album from the band is the variance in the songwriting partnerships throughout. In the main, the bands solid writing partnership of Rudolph Schenker and Klaus Meine has been the one that steers the ship when it comes to the songwriting base of the band. Here on “Crazy World” however that is given a shakeup. The new producer’s influence perhaps? I don’t know for sure as I sit here doing this review today. But the influence of an outside writer in Jim Vallance is one of the most noticeable. Vallance is best known as the writing partner of Bryan Adams, and was a part of his major rise in popularity in the 1980’s on the back especially of his album “Reckless”. By 1990 however, their partnership and relationship had dissolved, and now he had turned up in the studio to help compose songs with Scorpions. In all, he helped to co-compose the music of three tracks, and the lyrics of seven songs. It was a definitive move by the band to bring him into the process, and one that either succeeded or failed on your own point of view of the songs produced here. In terms of commercial success, the big hit songs on the album did not have his influence upon them which makes for an interesting case study.
The three songs where Vallance had a hand in co-writing the music are also three of the seven songs he co-wrote the lyrics for. Two are the opening two tracks on the album. “Tease Me, Please Me” has Matthias Jabs involved in the music and the more prominent use of the guitar riff here is a dead giveaway. He plays a nice lead, the riff through the song is enjoyable, and the song overall is a good solid opening. “Don’t Believe Her” which follows has Schenker sharing the music writing, while both Hermann and Klaus again co-write the lyrics as with the opening track. Much like the obvious tones of Matthias’s guitar sound over the opening track, “Don’t Believe Her” has the typical Schenker rhythm riff throughout, his stamp all over the style, while the soloing and squeals from Jabs along the way give it that Scorpions template that we all know so well. It just... doesn’t quite match up with the energy and drive the band has given us on the albums leading up to this. Something is missing, it sounds less hard rock elementally, and more... commercial rock. “Kicks After Six” is Vallance’s final music contribution this time with Francis Buchholtz. This is a more upbeat flavour that the two aforementioned songs, a slightly faster tempo and Rareball actually sound like he playing his drums hard for perhaps the first time on the album. His beat drives along the track, and it acts as one of the better songs on the album.
Four other songs include co-writing credits for the writing of the lyrics alongside Meine and Rarebell. They are “Restless Nights”, the closing track on side A of the album, “Lust or Love”, “Hit Between the Eyes” and the title track “Crazy World”. Klaus composed the music for “Lust or Love” while Rudolph was the music writer of the other three tracks. Lyrically, they are focused on exactly the kind of things you would probably expect a rock hit writer in Vallance would be writing about. “Restless Nights” speaks about the hard life of a rock star being on the road, “Lust or Love” about exactly what you would expect, “Hit Between the Eyes” of the young taking their chances on the streets, and “Crazy World” about the rich getting richer and the poor still suffering. All subjects that the band has sung about before, but in this case do I note the merest hint of a more commercial sound about the lyrics? Perhaps I’m just hearing that. “Crazy World” at the very least is a heavier track, and more energetically and powerfully sung than most on the album. It must have slipped through the sensors in that instance, because it is the exception to the rule of the album itself.
Of the other tracks on the album, there is a certain musical bent about them. Track 3 is “To Be with You in Heaven”, a Meine/Schenker collaboration that does reflect the side of their writing partnership that doesn’t excite me greatly. It’s a rather bland compilation, Matthias’s solo notwithstanding. It sounds pretty, Klaus sings it in that range that tends to draw in the listeners, but doesn’t add anything that could make it anything above an average track. “Money and Fame” is the second of Matthias contributions to the album, something that is most often a highlight for me given his excellence on his instrument. However, here he chooses to compose in the slow mid-tempo range, Hermann is given the chance to hit the drums hard but without any speed to flow into, and the song seems built around the rhythm rather than the lead.
That leaves us with the two power ballads, the two power singles that for the most part define this album and drove its popularity and commerciality. The one you all know is “Wind of Change”, that came on the back of the felling of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Having already played in the old USSR twice by this stage, the combination of the footage of those concerts in the music video for this song, and the fact that it seemed perfectly designed for radio airplay, made this a monster hit all over the world, and in some ways brought the band to prominence in some countries that they had never been able to crack. The song is still played live to this day and has remained one of the band’s biggest moments in its career. The other is the closing track on the album, historically always a power ballad, the way Scorpions almost always choose to finish off their recordings. In this case, the song is “Send Me an Angel”. My usual spiel here would be about how the power ballad to conclude the album is a bung move, that it kills off everything great that has come before it, that it destroys the momentum... I’m sure you know the drill. And so here we go. “Send Me an Angel”... is one of the greatest songs ever written by this band. Klaus and Rudolph have hit the ballad out of the park with this one. On an album that, for the most part is full of drudgery and average tracks that are a shadow of what the band has produced over the last decade and a half, “Send Me an Angel” is an absolute triumph. Yes, it is even better live, but this draws in every ounce of emotion that a truly great power ballad is supposed to do, and nails every single moment.
I am not going to deny that I have, or at least had, some very weird traits about me, and certainly when it comes to music. By the time 1990 and 1991 had come around, I was very deeply entrenched in the bands that I loved of the heavy metal genre, and one of those was Scorpions. “Lovedrive”, “Blackout”, “Love at First Sting”, they were enormously popular albums for me, and I played them often. “Savage Amusement” had been fine without the same polish, and just perhaps at that stage, as heavier and thrashier bands began to come more focused in my music listening, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So two years further on, this was even more magnified than before. 1990 was an outstanding year for music, as I’m sure you will have noticed now if you have been tuning into this podcast for a while, and I didn’t rush out to get this album on its release as a result. And then the release of “Wind of Change” as the third single from the album in January 1991, and the way it blew up on charts and radio all across Australia – and the world for that matter – annoyed me. Almost as much as people walking up to me saying “oh yeah! Scorpions! How good are they! Wind of Change!!” Yes, great, you know Scorpions. Can you name ANY of their other songs? ... “... Wind of Change...” Yea. Thanks for that. So yes, I shunned the album, because that’s what I did back in the day. I didn’t hate the song, but I hated that it was the song that broke through in Australia after 20 years of awesome albums.
Anyway, fast forward a few years and I seem to have gotten over myself and eventually break down and get the album. I’m not really sure how many years after this event it was, but it was a few. And I listen to it. And yeah, it has some Scorpions sounding songs on it. It isn’t as 1980’s Scorpions as I was probably looking for, but it was fine. And over the years it occasionally came out for a listen. But the last week is the first time in some time that I recall deliberately going to the CD shelves and taking it out and playing it on my stereo. And I have listened to it a few times here. And what I have noticed the most is that... it passes by without me even noticing it. A couple of times I’ve had it on, and then I hear the CD changer moving on to the next album, and I think “oh, where did that go?” And the reason for that is that there are just so few songs here that make you stop and prick up your ears and go ‘oh yeah, I like this song!’ and start singing along to it. It just doesn’t have that awesomeness about it. The opening two tracks are enjoyable enough. “Wind of Change” is grafted on no matter how much I wish it wasn’t. Are there any other songs here that matter? Well, only one. The closing ballad is one of Scorpions greatest ever. “Send Me an Angel” is the one song here that I would immediately place on a list of Scorpions songs that I would want a newbie to listen to, to get an idea of the band's greatness. Beyond that... not much.
Perhaps this is overly harsh, but every album that Mattias Jabs played on before this album is better than this album. And at least a couple of Uli Jon Roth’s albums. As much as this sold millions everywhere because of that one hit single, it doesn’t cover the fact that much of this is pretty bland. The era has something to do with this, and perhaps the production. But the messy songwriting partnerships didn’t help either.
I have replaced this back on my shelves, and it will of course come out again at some point in time, but that may well be only once the band has actually finally retired, or one of the bandmembers moves on to the next plane. And when that day comes, and I listen to “Crazy World” once again, my guess is that it is this song that will continue to haunt me.
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