Red Army soldiers stand in Lenin Stadium, Moscow, in August 1989, and Klaus Meine watches them from the stage. They “turned around to face the stage and started throwing their caps and jackets in the air.” His summary: “It felt like the world was changing right in front of our eyes.”
Scorpions had tried to get here once already. In 1988 their Moscow dates were refused, so the band played ten shows in Leningrad instead. A year later they’re on the bill at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, two nights, 12 and 13 August, staged by a foundation belonging to their manager, Doc McGhee, and co-organised with the Soviet rock pioneer Stas Namin. The festival is billed as anti-drug and anti-alcohol. A hard-rock manager behind a sobriety festival. Keep his name in mind.
Between shows there’s a boat trip on the Moskva river, ending at a party in Gorky Park: the bands, MTV journalists, Red Army soldiers. Meine: “It was like the whole world was in that one boat talking the same language: music.”
Everyone knows the year. Check the date.
Now the detail most people skip. Meine is the singer and the lyricist. Music is usually someone else’s job. “Up to this point I very rarely wrote music. I focused more or less all those years on lyrics.” On Crazy World, song doctor Jim Vallance co-writes seven of the 11 tracks. One track is credited to Meine alone, words and music. This one.
Producer Keith Olsen first hears it at his Goodnight L.A. studio, stripped right down: Rudolf Schenker on acoustic guitar, Meine singing. “It raised the hairs on my arms.” Hold on to the opening, too. It has a story of its own.
Crazy World comes out in November 1990, a month after Germany reunifies. It keeps going. ZDF viewers vote it Song of the Century in 2005, and in February 2023 its black-and-white video becomes the band’s first to pass a billion YouTube views.
It also travels to rooms a hard-rock ballad has no business being in and, more recently, gives its own writer a reason to look at it again.
Meine has always played down any grand design. “It’s not like I said ‘I’m going to write a political song’. We’re a rock band. What do I know? I’m not a politician.”
Ask most people what Wind of Change is about and they answer without thinking: a wall, a city, a year. Hold that answer. Then play it again.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“Wind of Change is the song of the Berlin Wall falling.”
It was written while the Wall still stood, and not about Berlin. Klaus Meine wrote it in late summer 1989, after the Moscow Music Peace Festival; the Wall came down on 9 November, months later. In 2015 he told Rolling Stone: "The funny thing is, it's not even a song about Germany or the Wall. It's a song about Moscow." The song the world plays over the Wall coming down was finished before anyone knew it would.
“A peace anthem like this grows out of a peace concert.”
It did. But the man behind the concert had a drug case of his own. In 1988 the band's manager, Doc McGhee, pleaded guilty over smuggling 40,000 pounds of marijuana into the US. The Moscow festival was staged by his Make A Difference Foundation, a program he says he "formed after my plea deal with, with the government." Jon Bon Jovi says the trip kept McGhee out of jail; McGhee says the deal had no connection to the festival. Either way, a peace anthem was born at an anti-drug festival run by a foundation that began with a marijuana plea.
“Everyone knew that whistle was the hook from day one.”
Not at first. Klaus Meine whistled it in his first draft; as he puts it, "I'm not a lead guitarist." Producer Keith Olsen: "That intro was supposed to be a guitar motif." They tried guitars, clean guitars and keyboard. Rudolf Schenker: "At first, even I didn't like it." And a Mercury A&R man in New York told Meine: "we have to take out that whistle. It won't work in America." The sound everyone hums was nearly replaced twice, and stayed.
“Scorpions sang about Soviet change from the safety of the West.”
They took it into the Kremlin. On Saturday 14 December 1991 the band spent an hour with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev, played for him, and handed over two checks totalling $70,000 from the song's royalties, for medical equipment for children's hospitals. Meine said then: "We know that Mr. Gorbachev is facing very difficult times right now." Eleven days later, Gorbachev resigned. The next day, the Soviet Union was dissolved.
“Nobody rewrites a peace anthem once the world has learned it.”
Klaus Meine did, twice. From the opening of the Las Vegas residency on 26 March 2022, he dedicated it "to the brave people in the Ukraine" and replaced the opening lines: the Moscow river and Gorky Park went, and the opening pointed to Ukraine. His reason, on Loudwire Nights: "it's not the time to romanticize Russia". On a later tour he changed it again, to a wider wish for peace that names no country. The opening the world learned is no longer the one he sings.
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