It wasn’t easy to upstage Van Halen in their prime, but calling in the US Air Force will do the trick. It was Sunday, May 29, 1983, and Scorpions were second on the bill on the so-called Heavy Metal Day at the Us Festival, the massive music jamboree near San Bernardino in California organised by promoter Bill Graham and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, which also featured Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest and a rising Mötley Crüe.
A problem was that Van Halen were being Van Halen. The headliners may have honed their chops covering early Scorpions songs Speedy‘s Coming and Catch A Train in their formative LA club days, but now they weren’t above a little inter-band shithousery.
And so the Scorpions found themselves prohibited by order of Dave Lee Roth and co. from using their full stage set, beyond a bit of pyro to open the show.
Fortunately, the band’s Liverpool-born tour manager, Bob Adcock, hit on a brilliant idea. The resourceful scouser put a call in to a nearby US Air Force base, and asked if they could fly some fighter jets over the festival site at the precise moment the Scorpions kicked off their set. “Sure,” came the reply. “Why the hell not?”
“The planes were outstanding,” recalls guitarist Rudolf Schenker, a man who exists in a permanent
