Sunday, August 02, 2020

Japanese Virgin

To start 2020, I put the Japanese pressing of Taken By Force from Scorpions on my Top 10 Want List for the year. I had become obsessed with the original cover that ended up being censored, and I wanted that shit in my collection. The OBI strip was a very cool bonus. Once I had that record in my hands, suddenly I wanted all of my Scorpions records to be Japanese pressings.

I don't own all the Scorpions albums that I'd like to have in my collection, and most of the ones that I have are US or German pressings, but there is just something cool about the prospect of lining up all those OBI strips. At some point, I'm going to have to upgrade those albums that I own that aren't Japanese pressings.

One of the bigger holes in my Scorpions collection was their Virgin Killer record. I love that album, but I've been on the fence if I wanted to grab a pressing with that original cover featuring the prepubescent girl. Sure it tends to offend people, but come on guys, what are you going to do, settle for that a censored cover? Whatever. Give me that original cover. I'm not going to lie...I did have to secretly open the box when it arrived and quickly get that shit into my music room, away from the eyes of my family. I have no problem owning this, but they don't need to know that I have no problem owning this.

Okay, I got confused when I was buying this on eBay, and thought this was a first pressing. I wasn't paying close attention to the OBI differences, and it turns out that this was the '82 reissue and not the '77 pressing. Oh well, the price for each is comparable, so I'm not going to sweat it.

Included with the Virgin Killer album, the seller also had a Japanese pressing of the Best Of Scorpions. I don't typically care about Best Of records, but with a cover that features some kind of spotlight scorpion shooting a laser from a tanned and glistening woman's ass, I guess I'll get down with that.

Originally released in '79, this compilation basically covers the three album stretch of In Trance, Virgin Killer and Taken By Force...plus the best song from Fly To The Rainbow. It is a solid collection.


2 comments:

mcs said...

Of course, I went straight to google to view the cover. There's not many things I find shocking, but this was one. It wasn't so much the cover itself that shocked me, but more just the fact that anyone would ever decide to go with this artwork in the first place. I don't think that this was a case of 'different time', as clearly this kind of thing was never acceptable (hence it getting pulled I guess), but it just seems like a weird decision to ever go with this in the first place.

Mike said...

Yeah, it is considered the worst album cover of all time for a reason. Definitely uncomfortable, and such an odd choice for the record company to push.