I don’t pretend to be a huge Scorpions fan. Most of their more well-known, “Rock You Like a Hurricane”-era material I could take or leave, and I don’t own any of their albums besides their 1978 live album “Tokyo Tapes.” I don’t recall exactly how this disc came into my possession—it was either a gift or a radio prize, many years ago—but over time it’s become an album that I feel compelled to spin once or twice a year even though I haven’t been actively into metal for ages. As it turns out, the pre-‘80s pop-metal version of this German band was one of hard rock’s best-kept secrets.

The mid-to-late 1970s marked the unquestioned peak of the live album. “Frampton Comes Alive” was megaplatinum, and many hard rock bands were putting out career-defining albums, from Deep Purple’s “Made in Japan” to Rush’s “All the World’s a Stage” to KISS’s “Alive.” Perhaps the most influential concert recording released during this time was Cheap Trick’s “At Budokan,” which has some strong parallels with “Tokyo Tapes.” Teenage Japanese girls were clearly ahead of the curve in both cases, because both bands got the kind of rapturous responses in the Land of the Rising Sun that they weren’t getting anywhere else on the planet at the time.

It’s hard to understand why the Scorpions weren’t more popular in the Western world at this time, because the material on “Tokyo Tapes” is really, really good. Certainly as strong as anything Deep Purple or Blue Oyster Cult ever put out. Well, at least the first half of the concert is. These shows are the last guitarist Uli Jon Roth would play before leaving the band, and his impressive playing on “Fly to the Rainbow” and “We’ll Burn the Sky” make the case that he should have been looked at as an equal to Brian May and Ritchie Blackmore.

And for that matter, why isn’t Klaus Meine universally regarded as a top-5 rock vocalist? On “Tokyo Tapes,” he sounds like Robert Plant of 1972, if Plant had Freddie Mercury’s vocal range. And from the (admittedly limited) exposure I’ve had to the group’s later work, he hasn’t lost much over the years.

The album drops off after the first half, with questionably-chosen covers of “Hound Dog” and “Long Tall Sally” (not terrible, not particularly worthwhile) and a mediocre drum solo from Herman Rarebell (as underrated as the other Scorpions may be, Neil Peart this guy is not). But the first half is incredibly good, the kind of stuff that there’s no reason more people shouldn’t have known about at the time but that they just didn’t for some reason. The Scorpions would go on to have substantial commercial success in the US during the ‘80s and beyond, but this is their apex.

by Sean