This post is for everybody but especially for my cousin Connor Mack in Texas and my good friends Simone Santangelo and her husband Mark in Sarasota, all of whom are cycle enthusiasts. There was a bar in my hometown called the Queen of Poland that we frequented as twenty somethings. On the jukebox in 1968 was a heavy-metal rock number called “Born to Be Wild” by the Canadian rock group Steppenwolf. It was arguably the first heavy-metal song. We played it all the time. However, it wasn’t as powerful as when it was paired with a counter-culture film in 1969. That movie, “Easy Rider,” has one of the great opening scenes of any movie with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on two hogs riding through a small town near the Colorado river toward surrounding hills. Fonda was in his Captain America persona and outfit and Hopper was radiating his paranoid-hippie Billy the Kid persona, both out in search of America. In the background is Steppenwolf singing: Get your motor runnin. Head out on the highway. Lookin’ for adventure In whatever comes our way. Yeah, darlin’, Gonna make it happen. Take the world in a love embrace. Fire all of your guns at once And explode into space. Like a true natures child, We were born Born to be wild. We can climb so high, I never wanna die. The posted YouTube’s first cut is the opening of the movie. It also contains a number of other rock classics.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 05:22:32 +0000