![]() He heard us, produced us and got us signed. We were rehearsing it in a double garage when, by chance, a record executive called Gabriel Mekler moved in next door. Given that the country had recently experienced nazism, the song’s message of freedom really resonated with me. ![]() We ended up in West Germany after the war. My father was killed and my mother escaped the Russian tanks with baby me. I was born during the second world war in what was then East Prussia. The demo sounded puny, but we thought we could knock it into shape. Mars came to us and said: “I think the dog’s eaten the damned tape!” Luckily she hadn’t. This caused Tiffany, Jerry’s great dane, to go crazy, barking and scratching. When Mars came round to Jerry’s with the demo, no one was home, so he threw the cassette through the letterbox. Photograph: Alan Messer/Rex/Shutterstock John Kay, singer ‘Its message of freedom resonated with me’ … John Kay, second from left, with Steppenwolf in 1969. It’s ironic that a song so associated with motorcycles and rebellion was inspired by a medium-sized family car – although I always drove it with the windows down. Without it, I’d probably be back in Canada, working at General Motors. Thanks to its success, I’ve been able to spend years hiking in the great outdoors and enjoying the freedom I had written the song about. But after it was used in the druggy road movie Easy Rider, as the soundtrack to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding “chopper” motorcycles, it took on a life of its own. I was in the Ford Falcon when I first heard Born to Be Wild on the radio. Luckily, the band heard its potential and my replacement, a 17-year-old guitarist called Michael Monarch, played it perfectly. I’d just been kicked out of an apartment for playing my guitar too loud, so I made a demo of Born to Be Wild, almost whispering it, with my guitar so quiet it sounded like a banjo. Then Jerry called to say the band were getting back together – as Steppenwolf – and needed songs. The term “ heavy metals” came into my head, which gave me the line: “I like smoke and lightning, heavy metal thunder!” This was before heavy metal became a music genre.Īll the publishers turned the song down. I was struggling to describe it in words until I remembered the periodic table of elements I’d studied during chemistry class at school. One afternoon, I had encountered a thunderstorm so ferocious I had to pull over as the road turned into a river.
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