Scorpions

This year, for the July preview (by now a regular fixture dedicated to hard rock and metal), the AMA Festival played the “now or never” card, putting together a two-day bill with names of unquestionable historical weight, but who have by now well and truly crossed into biological and artistic old age. Both Klaus Meine and Rudolf Schenker of the Scorpions, and Alice Cooper (who played the following day), were born in 1948. Which, on one hand, shows a touching bond between the audience and totemic figures who have devoted their whole lives to that same audience with genuine affection; on the other, it's proof of a worrying lack of generational turnover for a certain section of the crowd. Did it work, though? Partly.

Saxon (also not exactly spring chickens, though it was impossible to notice) definitely passed the test, packing more than an hour with a string of their classics (“Motorcycle Man”, “Heavy Metal Thunder”, “Denim And Leather”, “Power And Glory”, “And The Band Plays On”…), blasted at insane volume and intensity from a wall of 16 amplifiers stacked behind them. The great thing is how they make it all look completely normal: they arrive, they see, they drill straight into the crowd's ears. All it takes is a microphone and a few looks for Biff Byford, English proletarian hero, to command respect like an admiral standing at the bow of a galleon. And then, when they close out with the one-two punch of “Crusader” and “Princess Of The Night”, the chills down the back of your neck are real.

Right on time at 9.30pm, after a brief introductory video, the main event begins. The staging is lavish, with a huge image of a rising sun, and as the arpeggio that opens “Coming Home” kicks in, the five of them appear through the smoke and Klaus Meine starts to sing.

Let's get it out of the way straight off: he shows every one of his 78 years — planted behind the microphone, almost leaning on it, his voice unsteady; his struggles are plain to see. Equally plain, though, is the audience's love, which fills the gaps, often singing the lines in his place. Rudolf Schenker is cut from different cloth, looking like the ripped, tanned grandfather of some American action movie. On the whole, four-fifths of the band are working brilliantly: Matthias Jabs grinds out riffs with an amused grin and the air of someone who's had the time of his life in the worst bars of Caracas, Paweł Mąciwoda holds down the bass with zero slip-ups, and Mikkey Dee behind the kit is simply monstrous, stealing the show from everyone (unsurprising, given the man spent a lifetime playing “Overkill” almost every single night).
It's no surprise that a good third of the setlist is made up of instrumental digressions, with every solo stretched out to the absolute maximum.

It must be said that, when duty calls, Maine doesn't back down, and alongside square-cut, trademark Scorpions rockers like “The Zoo”, “Bad Boys Running Wild” and “Big City Nights”, he also tackles the trickiest ballads – I'm not talking so much about “Wind Of Change” (which I personally hate, but which on Saturday night I was singing along to with everyone else), but rather “Still Loving You”, which, however necessary, I honestly wasn't expecting given the singer's condition. Still, the performance was dignified.
Definitely better, in any case, was the encore, with two sensational classics like “Blackout” and “Rock You Like An Hurricane” closing out a show that feels like a farewell is on the horizon – and that's surely as it should be.
Also worth mentioning, on a smaller stage on the other side of the park, was the performance by several artists from the Go Down roster, including Juxebox '74, with their soul-infused rock, and the fantastic Mad Dogs, a punk-inflected rock band from the Marche region who, on a tiny stage, delivered the kind of energy the Scorpions used to bring in better times.

(Photo by Giovanni Zonta)

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