Early Steppenwolf (#29, 1969) consisted of older Steppenwolf demos. At Your Birthday Party (#7, 1969) continued the streak with "Rock Me" (from the film Candy) (#10, 1969). The Second yielded another massive hit single in "Magic Carpet Ride" (#3, 1968), and around the same time, "Born to Be Wild" and "The Pusher" were featured in the film Easy Rider, more or less solidifying Steppenwolf's enduring identification as a biker band. Steppenwolf's hard rock won them favor with local audiences, and Steppenwolf (#6, 1968) yielded "Born to Be Wild" (#2, 1968). Mars Bonfire) offered the group a song he'd written for his solo album, "Born to Be Wild." Opposed to reviving the Sparrow name, the group went with Mekler's suggestion, inspired by the Hermann Hesse novel he had just read: Steppenwolf. In 1968 ABC-Dunhill producer Gabriel Mekler encouraged Kay to re-form the group and offered them studio time to make demos. The group toured and recorded (including an early version of Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher") without success and eventually broke up. In 1965 Kay joined the Sparrows, followed by another ex-Mynah Bird, Goldy McJohn. In 1963 Kay and his family moved to Buffalo, New York, then to Santa Monica, California, where Kay fell into the burgeoning folk-rock scene and appeared on his first record playing harmonica on a song called "The Frog." He played around the country as a folk singer, and in New York met Jerry Edmonton, of a popular Canadian group called the Sparrows, a group that included Bruce Palmer, who was later replaced by the bass player from Neil Young and Rick James' group the Mynah Birds, Nick St. A gym teacher who could not pronounce "Joachim" informally rechristened him John several years later he adopted the Kay surname. Ten years later he emigrated to Canada with his mother and stepfather. Leader John Kay, never seen without sunglasses in part due to the fact that he has been legally blind since childhood, escaped from East Germany to West Germany with his war-widowed mother in 1948. Though tangentially identified with late-1960s West Coast psychedelia, Steppenwolf's music was uncompromising hard rock, and the term "heavy metal" was popularized in their first hit, "Born to Be Wild."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |