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If you've seen the Scorpions recently during their Las Vegas residency, you've heard an updated version of the band's greatest international hit, "Wind of Change."
During the first show of Scorpions' residency at the Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood in late-March, the band dedicated the song to the people of Ukraine.
"This song is a calling for peace," proclaimed frontman Klaus Meine. "And tonight, I think, we shall sing it even louder."
"Wind of Change" was written during the band's trip to Russia in 1989. It's original lyrics celebrate the growing movement for democracy in Eastern Europe in the late-Cold War.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, however, Meine has scrubbed the song of its references to Russia. He elaborated in a recent conversation with Loudwire Nights.
"I thought, it's not the time with this terrible war in Ukraine raging on, it's not the time to romanticize Russia with lyrics like, 'Follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park,' you know? I wanted to make a statement in order to support Ukraine, and so the song starts now with, 'Now listen to my heart / It says Ukrainia, waiting for the wind to change.'"
Scorpions' Vegas residency continues through April 16. The band will perform May 6 at Madison Square Garden in New York City before heading across the Atlantic to tour Europe through June.
"Wind of Change" was such a ubiquitous song in Eastern Europe in the '90s that it is credited with accelerating the region's move towards democracy during that decade. The song is so closely tied to the Cold War that the band included fragments of the Berlin Wall in the single's 30th anniversary box set.
"Wind of Change" was so influential that a 2020 podcast series by New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe explored whether it might actually have been part of a wide-ranging CIA propaganda operation.