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Sunday, 03 August 2008 12:23 |
 Shelly Harris at KNAC.com recently caight up with SCORPIONS guitarist
Matthias Jabs. The following is an excerpt from the interview.
KNAC.com: I’ve heard that you’ve done it in the past, but on the
world tour this year you are letting the fans in the different
countries vote on the set list, which means you have to quickly get
ready to play different songs for each country’s leg of the tour. Do
you already know which songs you’ll be playing on this American leg?
Jabs: "I’ve seen the final result of the vote for the U.S. [the website
vote ended on Sunday, July 27], and we always sit together the day of
the show, in the afternoon, because we need to let the lighting
designer know – you have to program the desk for the order of the songs
– so the crew needs to be informed exactly, but we are much more
flexible. And we have a different situation in the first three shows,
because we are playing with Sammy Hagar as a package, and that means in
California, because of the strict curfews, and the situation – there
are three bands I think – we don’t play as long as we normally do. In
Europe we play like two hours and twenty, and here it’s just like 90
minutes, so that automatically changes the set, because we have to
leave quite a few songs out. So, we will talk about the set list when
we all meet [before the first show] in a few days."
KNAC.com: So, even though Scorpions obviously have a very long and
extensive song list – at least a hundred – it’s like you’re ready to
wing it and play whatever you have to play, really?
Jabs: "Yes, yes – there’s not one song that we don’t know. Some of
them, like #89, those songs are not so popular, and with us they’re not
so popular either. (laughs) And therefore we haven’t played those, and
if we don’t have to play them, we won’t, but everything in the top 50
we know right away. Also, we keep changing the set around. You can
imagine the votes, the results in Russia, are totally different from
the ones in the U.S., or in Spain, they vote for different songs than
in England or Japan."
KNAC.com: I know your most recent album, Humanity Hour One, came
out last year, and will you also be playing some of those songs?
Jabs: "A few but not too many – it has to be the right proportion.
People don’t like it if you play too many new songs, but we play three
or maybe four. They [Americans] want to hear the back catalogue – the
'Rock You Like A Hurricane', 'No One Like You', 'Holiday', 'The Zoo'
and all that, and once you do that, the first hour is gone!"
Go to this location for the complete interview.
The Scorpions' US tour schedule is as follows:
August
2 - Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheater **
3 - Costa Mesa, CA - Pacific Amphitheatre @ Orange Co. Fair **
5 - Tucson, AZ - AVA Amphitheatre **
8 - Minneapolis, MN - Myth
9 - Sparta, WI - Fort McCoy Army Base
10 - Chicago, IL - Charter One Pavilion (with RATT)
** with Sammy Hagar
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