The Giant Panther

I don't know why I'm filing this one under Guilty Pleasures because I don't feel guilty. Most people know Magic Carpet Ride or Born To Be Wild and that is the extent of their Steppenwolf education. Too bad for them. I had these 45's when I was a kid, make no mistake, but Steppenwolf was a great band and one of Canada's finest rock exports. Formed in 1967, this band sold over 25 million records. Sounds like nothing next to sales of say, U2, but in those days people didn't buy records, they bought singles. The Beatles and The Stones might have sold actual albums, but after that not too many bands were selling a lot of albums. Album Oriented Rock (AOR) radio was just getting started. Before that all you got was the 45 rpm single with an "A" side and "B" side.

One of my very first singles was The Box Tops version of Wayne Carson Thompson's The Letter. The "B" side, Happy Times, I couldn't tell you a thing about. Sometimes the "B" song was terrible. Another early single in my collection was The Rolling Stones' Honky Tonk Woman. The "B" side was "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Wow. Now there's a double whammy for your 99 cents or whatever I paid in 1969. Still other singles, like The Shocking Blue's "Venus" has an obscure "B" side like "Hot Sand." Hot Sand was a great track I still love to this day, but nobody I know has ever heard of it. As much as I loved Venus, I never came anywhere close to buying the whole album. It just wasn't done in those days. Today you have iPod Nation focusing on singles and mixed track play lists. It's really the same thing except we had crappy portable Close and Play turntables for our 45's. I may have mentioned in this space in the past that I held a yard sale and dumped all my Beatles 45's for pennies so I could buy bubblegum and baseball cards. Fool. Anyway...

Steppenwolf had several radio friendly hits besides the two mentioned above like Rock Me, but they were a blues band first and foremost in my opinion. Anybody who has heard their cover of Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher" from their first album and made famous by its inclusion on The Easy Rider Soundtrack knows what I'm talking about. What's ironic about this band is that they basically were given credit for coining the phrase "Heavy Metal" as it was used in the song "Born To Be Wild" to describe a Motorcycle's noise quotient. They were too heavy for the AM radio dial where they first made their bones, but they were not heavy metal. I could go on and on about why I loved this band or which songs were my favorites, but from 1968-1976 Steppenwolf was one of the biggest names in rock. Motorcycle clubs still gravitate to their music to this day. The record I'm taking the song I'm posting from is called Steppenwolf The Second. People will probably laugh and The Giant Panther will have yet another chuckle at my old wrinkly expense, but there isn't a bad cut on this record (nor the first record for that matter). I'm leaving you with one of my all time favorite Steppenwolf tracks called Don't Step On The Grass Sam. It's essentially a call for the legalization of marijuana, but it's more about telling the government to find more important things to worry about. It's got some great imagery and sound effects and it's bluesy as all get out. Truly a guilty pleasure as defined by me. Happy Memorial Day to everyone. This one's for the Veterans of the 60's. THANK YOU!

Goth Rock. Atmosphere. Depression. Self loathing. The color black. Hypnotic beats. Tribal sounds. Dirge like music. Dark lipstick. Heavy eye makeup. Pasty skin color. Dyed jet black hair. Far away eyes. Skeletal physiques. Body art. A particular fashion trend. Drum machines. The Cure. Sisters of Mercy. Siouxsie & The Banshees. Bauhaus. The Cult. Gene Loves Jezebel. Dead Can Dance. Killing Joke. The Fall. Fields of The Nephilim. The Mission UK. Mistle Thrush. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. Joy Division. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. This Mortal Coil. Tones On Tail. Love Like Blood. The Goth scene has always fascinated me. The culture of Goth is kind of interesting, but it's the music I've always loved. I don't know Peter Murphy or Robert Smith, like most people, but they represent the face of Goth to me. I'm very big fans of both. Today The Dresden Dolls and several others try to carry the flag, but to me it seems like Goth's time has come and gone (musically anyway). I don't mean that in any kind of derogatory way because I'm still a big fan of the genre some 30 years later, but I was never involved in the Goth culture. I might have felt disenfranchised at some point, but I never marched to the Everyday is Halloween mantra. That doesn't make me right or them wrong; it's just what my experience was. I never ran into it much until the early eighties. By the 1990's into this decade they were making movies like Blade, The Craft, The Crow and The Labyrinth that celebrated the Gothic way of life. Loved the movies, loved the music. Pretty cool when you think about it...

Regarding the music one of the many bands I loved from that era was Love and Rockets. Bauhaus is probably the mother of all Goth Rock bands. When lead vocalist Peter Murphy left the band in 1983 some of the remaining members, Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins formed Love and Rockets in 1985 after Ash and Haskins had spent a couple of years in Tones On Tail. Love and Rockets was not really a Goth band per se, but their music demanded your attention. I can still recall their cover of The Temptations' Ball of Confusion being played on TV's Miami Vice. Crockett and Tubbs doing their thing to Love and Rockets. The nation got a taste of Goth as millions watched. How cool was that?

Their first release, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven in 1985 didn't set the world on fire, but I thought it was great. Haunted When The Minutes Drag was an interesting track. Their followup to that was Express in 1986. I just loved this record. In addition to Ball of Confusion (US release) it had All in My Mind, It Could Be Sunshine and a tremendous track called Kundilini Express. Then they released Earth Sun Moon in 1987. I was all over this record when it came out. It had hits, sleepers, and even a folk song or two, but No New Tale To Tell rocked me hard. I still love this song. Two years later they released the self titled Love and Rockets with the single "So Alive" on it. The cumulative effect of the past three records pushed this one as high as #14 on the U.S. charts if you can believe what you read on Wikipedia. That's about as high a chart position as you'll ever see an alternative rock band rise. They never again reached these heights, but I'll always look fondly on my four Love and Rockets CDs even if my local alternative rock station, WFNX, seems to have forgotten they ever existed. It seems so much more important to them to play Rancid's "Time Bomb" over and over again. I don't know, maybe I don't see how dated this band (maybe it's me who is dated) is. I'm willing to leave room for that possibility, but I really enjoyed this band's music. Hopefully you did too.