The Scorpions take off. Her comeback album “Rock Believer” was released in early March. A three-day guest performance in the show and gambling mecca of Las Vegas begins today at the Zappos Theater, which in turn will be crowned on May 6 by a triumphant return to New York’s Madison Square Garden and a major European tour. The Hanoverians re-wrote their 1991 hit “Wind of Change” especially for this purpose.
“This song is a call for peace,” said vocalist Klaus Meine at a pre-show in Las Vegas on March 26, “and I think we’re going to sing it even louder tonight.” The band performed “Wind of Change” in one only slightly modified variant, without explicit reference to Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rWKNfawEiw
The original inspiration for the lyrics came to the Scorpions – along with the fall of the Berlin Wall – at the so-called “Musical Peace Festival” in Moscow in August 1989, when they performed to 100,000 people at Lenin Stadium.
In an interview with the hard rock platform “Loudwire”, Klaus Meine (73) now acknowledged a reaction to the dramatically changed world situation: “Before we came back to Las Vegas in March, I thought about how it would sound if we Playing ‘Wind of Change’ like we’ve been doing for so many years,” he said.
“He just didn’t fit in with this terrible war in Ukraine. We can no longer romanticize Russia with verses like ‘Follow the Moskva – Down to Gorky Park’. That will not do. I wanted to make a statement in support of Ukraine. Now the song starts with ‘Now listen to my heart – It says Ukraine, waiting for the wind to change.’”
To this day, the Scorpions have hundreds of thousands of fans in Russia, and their mega concert at the end of the Soviet era is unforgotten by many. There is even a Russian text version of “Wind of Change”. “It’s a pivotal song in the band’s history. Just because of the background and the later meaning,” Meine continued. “I wrote the song when I was very inspired by what we saw coming in the Soviet Union back then: the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall. A moment in which we and the whole world could look into a peaceful future. It was about coming together instead of being divided by wars and alienation.”
Meine has no illusions that the Scorpions could somehow influence the current situation. But the history of the band alone required a strong statement: “There were many great moments with great emotions that we shared with our fans in Russia,” says Meine. “But this is about the regime. And there are many people in Russia who just don’t know the truth. That’s just a fact and it’s so sad to see what’s going on and how many people are dying every day. It breaks your heart. It’s really sad.”