You ever wonder what your fourteen year-old self would think of the person you are today? This happened to me as I reflected on my recently having seen the great Uli Jon Roth perform live for the first and perhaps only time. So, I thought I’d put fingers to keys and tell you, Dear Reader, all about it.
My relationship with the mystical Mr. Roth dates back to about 1983. As a youngster, forced to grow up in the deep rural and racist South, I had very little access to music that didn’t sicken me, or much of anything else for that matter. I guess that’s not true. To be fair, we had both kinds of music: Country and Western, as my dad used to say. Ugh! At any rate, there was a low-powered radio station about an hour away from my abysmal hometown that played Top 40 music until midnight, at which time it switched to a more Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format. In those magic hours could be heard a fair amount of hard rock and heavy metal music. This style of music spoke to me (The understatement of my life) and was only just beginning to gain some mainstream popularity, at least where I was imprisoned.
At any rate, there was my angsty, teen self, lying awake hoping to catch songs by Black Sabbath, Van Halen, RUSH, Iron Maiden and the like when I heard a song that really caught my attention. It had that mysterious, unmistakable voice-box effect I had become acquainted with through Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” It had mid-tempo, chugging guitars and a big, sing-along chorus with a memorable hook. Thusly, I was hooked! The problem was, I didn’t know who the band was and the very stoned, not-quite-local DJ was no help. I called several times before finally getting to speak with him. By that time, several more songs had been played and the DJ didn’t know or care what I was talking about as I attempted to describe the song to him. Through several long-distance phone calls (Remember those?) for which my mom yelled at me, I was finally able to learn the song was “The Zoo” by Scorpions. Scorpions?!