Tour De Force

40 Years After the Release of the Scorpions' Taken by Force, Guitarist Uli Jon Roth Looks Back at the Making of That Classic Album and Explains What Caused Him to Leave the Group Just as It Was Poised for Worldwide Superstardom. 

- Richard Bienstock

IT FELT LIKE THE END OF AN ERA,” says Uli Jon Roth, talking about the three shows he played with the Scorpions at Nakano Plaza Sun Hall in Tokyo, Japan, in April 1978. And indeed it was. Shortly after those dates—from which were culled the performances that comprise the definitive Scorpions live document, Tokyo Tapes—Roth left the German hard rockers to step out on his own. By that point, he and the band had released four albums (plus one prior to Roth’s joining) of ferocious, riffy hard rock, all of it shot through with Uli’s virtuosic, classical-music-influenced shredding, and gained a substantial following throughout Europe and Asia. After Roth’s exit, he and the Scorpions followed very divergent paths—the guitarist explored Hendrix-y psychedelic rock with his own Electric Sun project and spent years immersing himself in classical and symphonic composition, while the Scorpions rode a more mainstream hard rock and heavy metal sound to global superstardom.

More recently, however, Roth has come back around to his Scorpions past, first with his 2015 album, Scorpions Revisited, and now with the live set Tokyo Tapes Revisited. For the new package, which has been released in a variety of configurations ranging from a 2-CD/DVD offering to a super deluxe limited edition box set boasting eight discs (CD and Blu-ray), four vinyl albums, an 80-page hardcover book and other goodies, Roth returned to the very place where the original Tokyo Tapes was recorded—Japan’s Nakano Hall. As for how it felt to go back to the venue that, in his words, hosted the Scorpions “at the peak of our live powers together”? “It felt good,” the guitarist, now 62, says. “I walked in, and it was the same place. But of course it was also different…because it was almost 40 years on!”