Michael Schenker claimed The Rolling Stones offered him a guitarist job in a new Eddie Trunk interview.
Trunk said, “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?”
Michael responded, “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?’
“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.
“Germany was not the place that I wanted to be living in, and so not speaking English either and hearing about the guitarist guy of The Rolling Stones and seeing the magazines, I got kind of, you know, I actually [Michael’s older brother and Scorpions guitarist] Rudolf straight away.
“And I said, ‘Rudolf, I just got a phone call to audition for The Rolling Stones, what do you think?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s your life, you have to make a decision.
“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.”
