Scorpions play Lenin Stadium and come home with Wind of Change
In August 1989 a hard rock band from Hanover played to a hundred thousand Muscovites at the Moscow Music Peace Festival. The song Klaus Meine wrote on the way home became the anthem of the year the Wall fell.
Footage: Scorpions - Still Loving You (Moscow Music Peace Festival 1989), published by Scorpions on YouTube
- About 100,000
- Crowd each night
- 1991, number one in Germany
- Wind of Change released
- About 14 million
- Sales
- Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe
- Also on the bill
The Moscow Music Peace Festival was staged on 12 and 13 August 1989 at the Lenin Stadium, later Luzhniki, as a Western rock benefit against drug abuse, with Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Skid Row, Cinderella and the Soviet band Gorky Park on the bill. Scorpions had already played Leningrad the year before, the first Western hard rock band to tour the Soviet Union, and were the act the Moscow crowd knew best. Around a hundred thousand people came each day, watched over by soldiers who, by the second evening, had stopped standing to attention.
Klaus Meine went home and wrote about it. The whistled melody, the Moskva river, Gorky Park: Wind of Change is a diary of that trip, written in the weeks when the Hungarian border opened and East Germans began leaving through Prague. The band released it in early 1991, after the Wall had fallen, and it went to number one in Germany and across Europe and to number four in the United States.
It has sold around fourteen million copies, which makes it the best-selling single by a German act. Meine gave Mikhail Gorbachev a copy in the Kremlin in 1991. Whatever the song's own politics, the two nights in Moscow are where it started.
Who was there
Where
Sources
- Moscow Music Peace Festival · Wikipedia
- Wind of Change (Scorpions song) · Wikipedia
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