Before I say more about the band, I want to discuss the sound quality here, because out of all the acts in the festival, I had the most difficulty with this one. There were some acts where I couldn't find any much from them at all, mostly from Day Four of the festival, which was Country Day. I'll discuss that day later. Of the acts on the other three days, I found at least something, all with worthy sound quality. The one exception of Los Lobos, who were the opening act of Day Three. But apparently they didn't play on the main stage but some smaller side stage, so I don't know if they really count.
Anyway, the one exception was the Scorpions, because I found some of their music with very high quality, and the rest from an audience bootleg with much lower sound quality. The three high quality songs were "Nobody like You," "The Zoo," and "Can't Get Enough." This is because the Westwood One radio network later broadcast highlights of the festival on the radio, and that included those three songs. The audience bootleg was of the entire set, but a lot of it sounded too rough to merit inclusion, in my opinion. For some reason, some of the songs sounded better than others. For instance, "Always Somewhere" is more of a ballad, and was less fast and busy, so perhaps that helped. Anyway, I rescued the other three songs here from that audience boot. Then I processed them in various ways to try to get them to sound better. For instance, I ran them through the MVSEP audio editing program to get rid of most of the crowd noise (except at the ends of songs). I also ran all the songs in this set through the UVR5 audio editing program to improve the balance between the lead vocals and the instruments. Now, all the songs here at least sound decent, but I should warn you the parts from the audience boot probably sound the worst out of anything else I'm posting from this festival.
Anyway, with that out of the way, here's a bit about the Scorpions. They undoubtedly are the most famous and best selling hard rock/heavy metal act to come from Germany. The band was formed way back in 1965, but they didn't put out their first album until 1972. It wasn't until 1979 when they had an album make the charts anywhere, even in Germany. But they sang their songs in English, and from 1979 they started finding a lot of success internationally, including in the U.S. Their 1982 album "Blackout" took them to another level, selling over a million copies in the U.S., helped by the inclusion of "Nobody like You," their biggest hit at that point.
Their next album, "Love at First Sting" in 1984, would be even bigger, selling three million in the U.S. They would have lots of success for many years after that, eventually selling over 100 million albums worldwide. Their 1990 song "Winds of Change" would be one of the biggest singles of all time, selling 14 million worldwide. But in 1983, they were still relatively unknown but rising in popularity.
Oh, and technically, their name is "Scorpions," not "The Scorpions," but this is one of those band name cases like "The Eagles" where most people add the "the."
If you want to know more about the band, here's their Wikipedia page:
The band's lead singer Klause Meine later recalled a fond memory he had about the band's festival performance. "Going out there, I never forget this because it was an opening, which is really hard to top. Our people had arranged five fighter jets to fly over the stage and over San Bernardino Valley the minute we hit the stage with the first song. That moment, it was like all hell broke loose. There was huge fireworks, and [the announcer] couldn’t finish his introduction because the fire went off, and on top there were five fighter jets flying over the stage. Then we went out and hit the first song. It gives you chills when you think about it. It was so special, and the timing was amazing. One of the best intros of rock history, I would say."
This album is 36 minutes long.
086 talk (Scorpions)
087 Always Somewhere (Scorpions)
088 talk (Scorpions)
089 Nobody like You (Scorpions)
090 Can't Live without You (Scorpions)
091 Dynamite (Scorpions)
092 The Zoo (Scorpions)
093 Can't Get Enough (Scorpions)
094 talk (Scorpions)
https://www.upload.ee/files/17028231/VA-1983USFstvlDay0206Scrpons_atse.zip.html
alternate link:
https://pixeldrain.com/u/Gcs78YYR
The cover photo looks almost staged to me, but it really is of the Scorpions in performance from this exact concert.
The photo really does look stages, they probably practices those poses well pre-hand
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