Michael Schenker doesn’t regret saying no to the Rolling Stones.
“I make music I desire to make, music I can connect to,” the guitarist told Classic Rock about rejecting Motörhead, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne and the Stones. “There’s so much self-expression in my music. It would not have been good for any of those bands who asked me to join them. It would have been a completely bad trip.”
“No!” Schenker replied when asked whether he felt tempted to join the Stones. “I never liked the Stones at that time. And that band was dangerous. People died!”
Schenker talked in a more detailed way about the Stones’ offer in a 2021 interview with Eddie Trunk. Trunk asked him, “You’ve had an unbelievable influence on so many guitar players, but you’ve never really joined established bands. Obviously, in Scorpions, you were in and out of, but you’ve never really done that sort of thing, and I want to ask you, did The Rolling Stones approach you at one point?”
“I got a phone call, I just joined UFO, and it was probably the same month, two months later, I don’t remember. I didn’t have a telephone, I had to go to my landlady, answer the telephone, and there was a request, ‘Would you want to audition for The Rolling Stones?’” the rocker responded.
He continued, “And I went, ‘Uh, let me call you back.’ I hang up, I was so nervous. I made my trip to England, any band that would ask me from England I would go there because, in Germany, nobody understood what I was doing on my guitar, and it was all disco music and no music management.”
“But because I hang up, I never had the connection, and I’m glad I didn’t because I didn’t want to go that far. Probably today I wouldn’t be still alive if I had joined them. But maybe that was just in my imagination what the magazines presented, how crazy these musicians are, it’s not always that true,” Schenker added.
Since leaving UFO in 1978, Schenker has led the Michael Schenker Group on and off, briefly played guitar for Ratt, and formed a short-lived supergroup called Contraband with members of L.A. Guns and Vixen.