With two members “smashed after touring”, in early 1983 the Scorpions‘ career was wobbling. Then the following year’s Love At First Sting album turned them into global superstars.
It wasn’t easy to upstage Van Halen in their prime, but calling in the US Air Force will do the trick. It was Sunday, May 29, 1983, and Scorpions were second on the bill on the so-called Heavy Metal Day at the Us Festival, the massive music jamboree near San Bernardino in California organised by promoter Bill Graham and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, which also featured Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest and a rising Mötley Crüe.
A problem was that Van Halen were being Van Halen. The headliners may have honed their chops covering early Scorpions songs Speedy‘s Coming and Catch A Train in their formative LA club days, but now they weren’t above a little inter-band shithousery.
And so the Scorpions found themselves prohibited by order of Dave Lee Roth and co. from using their full stage set, beyond a bit of pyro to open the show.
Fortunately, the band’s Liverpool-born tour manager, Bob Adcock, hit on a brilliant idea. The resourceful scouser put a call in to a nearby US Air Force base, and asked if they could fly some fighter jets over the festival site at the precise moment the Scorpions kicked off their set. “Sure,” came the reply. “Why the hell not?”
“The planes were outstanding,” recalls guitarist Rudolf Schenker, a man who exists in a permanent state of full-tilt enthusiasm. “Five fighter jets flying above the stage and over the mountains just as we started. You could not do that today. Van Halen heard about it and weren’t happy.”
Assisted by the appearance of some multimillion dollar military hardware, the Scorpions stole the day from under the noses of Van Halen. But that Us Festival appearance was more than just a victory for Germany over America in some imaginary heavy metal Cold War. It also represented a turning point for the Scorpions. The album they released early the following year, Love At First Sting, was a slab of exhilarating 80s heavy metal designed to appeal to American audiences. Propelled by the timeless MTV hit Rock You Like A Hurricane, it did just that. Suddenly, Scorpions were no longer Euro-metal curiosities with funny accents. They were global superstars.
“We always wanted to make a better album each time,” says Schenker. “We pushed ourselves: ‘Let’s do it better, let’s do it better.’ With Love At First Sting we did it.”
In 1970, the then 22-year-old Rudolf Schenker told a German music magazine that the Scorpions would become “one of the thirty biggest rock bands in the world”. It seemed like a preposterous idea at the time. But 1982’s Blackout album re
