Michael Schenker: Rock Bottom

A master shows how it is done, and a timeless tune gets right at the feels.

My desire to learn guitar traces back to listening to Strangers in the Night, the live UFO album in a friend’s bedroom one night when I was in high school.

I was absolutely entranced. Hard hitting rhythms, melodic lead breaks, solid songwriting, and it just made me smile.

I learned that the axe slinger was one Michael Schenker, brother of the Scorpions’ rhythm guitarist, Rudolf Schenker, and also a cofounder of The Scorpions with his brother in the late 1960’s.

I bought that album, and then many more. Michael Schenker left UFO to briefly rejoin The Scorpions, and then off to solo work in the Michael Schenker Group that went through several iterations.

One song though captures the magic of Michael Schenker, Rock Bottom. It is a rock anthem, eight-ish minutes of a killer jam, but in reality it was always a vehicle for the Schenker guitar solo, where even on the album version it has a solo break.

But the live versions are magical. The solo changes, but the themes remain the same, and Michael shows his versatility and adaptability, always building, always moving, and always keeping the listener invested to the music.

I must have at least 15 versions of this song in my collection, and I still come across great recordings in my YouTube travels.

Below is eight minutes, three seconds of my favorite song of all time:

The origin story that Michael tells about this, is that shortly after he joined UFO, this was his warmup jam that he would play to loosen up before practicing. The band’s jaws dropped, and worked to turn it into a song, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Bonus time, as I was writing this, YT recommended another Schenker tune, Lost Horizons, a similar song that is just epic live, and a vehicle for Schenker to showcase his chops.

I hope you enjoyed listening to these.

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