NADHERNY STAV
OBAL A DESKA
The first album of the Steppenwolf is nothing less than another example of heavy rock made in te late 60s, as Vanilla Fudge, the newly born Deep Purple, Cream or The Jimi Hendrix Experience, among others, early stuff that enthroned this band as hard rock pioneers.
This Steppenwolf aka “Born to be wild” features their most famous song, so many times covered by so many artistes and bands, and the album was named after it (at least in later editions); the rest of the LP, that is quite long, is a mixture of seminal hard rock, R & B or simply psychedelia, everything with a very 60s sound; maybe quite little for 47 minutes of music and a supposed classic, but it is their debut LP, and so it was: the success of the song “Born to be wild” came from its inclusion in a movie (Easy rider).
Some echoes of The Beatles’ psychedelic pop (A girl I knew, Take what you need, Everybody’s next one), heavy soul (Desperation) or an old-fashioned rock & roll, tribute to Chuck Berry (Berry rides again), enhance a very uneven album, which still is tasty, all in all.
For the very end there is another interesting cut: “The ostrich”, with overdriven and heavy guitars, still quite a novelty back then; is this the first rock album where the term heavy metal was mentioned in the lyrics? Don’t know, but even having a sound that can look like naïve for us today, possibly Steppenwolf was something pretty extreme for its epoch.