A late September show at an outdoor amphitheatre can often mean that you’ll be bundled up in layers, trying your hardest to keep from freezing, yet some unseasonably warm weather for this time of year meant that the Scorpions show at the Budweiser Stage felt more like the middle of summer. The heat didn’t deter some members of the band from wearing leather pants though – they are in a German heavy metal band after all.
Megadeth started things off with a bit of a greatest hits set, delivering classics such as “Sweating Bullets,” “Hangar 18,” “Peace Sells,” and “Symphony Of Destruction” during their roughly hour long set before the headliners took the stage. While Scorpions already had the crowd on their side, they threw in a bit of pandering for good measure, flashing a Canadian flag backdrop onto the screen early on in the night and it made me wonder if they do this for every country they play in. Do they have another version that features silhouettes of the band playing in front of say, the Uzbekistani flag or do they just get really excited about playing Canada? I was also left wondering why singer Klaus Meine pulled out a handful of drumsticks and just started tossing them into the crowd while they played “The Zoo.” To be fair, he did later use some of these sticks to play the cowbell, but it still seemed kind of odd for him to just start throwing a seemingly endless supply of drumsticks out there, especially when I thought for a second that he was pulling them out from inside of his jacket.
Speaking of drums, one of the highlight of the night was seeing new drummer Mikkey Dee, formerly of Motörhead, launch into an impressive drum solo right after the band played a cover of his former band’s “Overkill,” a solo that featured his drum kit rising high above the stage on a hydraulic lift. Other highlights of the night included “Blackout,” “Big City Nights,” “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” and that sweet whistling intro to “Winds Of Change. The band also played a few numbers off their latest album Return To Forever, including set opener “Going Out With A Bang.” While that title (and the fact that, in some form, these guys have been playing together for around 50 years – yeah, they’re no spring chickens) would seem to suggest that this could be the last Scorpions tour, I am reminded that they pretty much announced that they’d be calling it quits a few years back and that didn’t seem to stick, so we’ll take it with a grain of salt.