By Martin Popoff
"So if you're not careful and you want to carry on playing your own music, you have to make sure to cover yourself in such a way so you can carry on doing your music, rather than having to change your style so you'll be hip and people invest in you. So I have my own little vision where I have come to the point of where I left the machine in '92, and then I kind of went back to the machine in '95 and then decided that one leg in the machine and one leg outside the machine is the way to do it, for freedom. And then I decided to build a first-class recording studio in order to not have to worry about not making a record because nobody wants to invest. So that was a very important move. And everybody is creating their own little future. You know, we're hanging out and making another record, we'll go out and tour and do the best we can. And like I said, UFO has grown older and there is no more fighting and stuff like that, at least to the level that there used to be."
Praise be to the man on another point there. Be Aware Of Scorpions is produced by Michael, at Michael's "home" studio. And it sounds fantastic. When Ace Frehley tells me he's building "a multimedia studio on 7 1/2 acres in upstate New York," all you can think of is if there's some sort of a pay-for-view special where you can watch him simply try order a phone line. Or renew his driver's license. Michael, on the other hand, seems to have carried it off, creating top-flight music, and a splendid hard rock classic of an album in Be Aware Of Scorpions, at home, apparently with much of the responsibility falling on his tortured shoulders and not his tortured soldiers.
Now, like I said, I have no clue what goes on. Never will. The doors are locked to people way closer to the gate than I'll ever be. Maybe Michael did none of the dirty work. Maybe it was all on the broken back of co-producer Ralph Patlan, who may be sequestered behind his own locked doors now. But those guitars... no one but Michael could shape shapely, comely music like this.
MICHAEL SCHENKER GROUP - Behind Locked Doors Page 7