Steppenwolf - Live

I just bought this the other day while I was in Windsor, Canada.  I don't usually write about something I just got, but I just never owned it because pretty much everyone in my junior high school never owned their own copy of this.  We shared the same copy that the school library had, and believe me, Steppenwolf Live was absolutely the heaviest album our school had.  It well may have been the only Rock album.  So every study hall we'd go down and get it out and put on these godawful headphones and sit around and listen to it.

I remember the old record player.  It was a Califone.  I think it was a Rheem/Califone.  My hot water tank is a Rheem, so it only makes sense that they used to make record players and sell them to schools.  I'm pretty sure the players lasted for at least forty years, but any record payed on them was pretty much beat to death before you even flipped it over.  Ours had a little pod that came out and four kids could plug in headphones and listen to the same record at the same time.  I think they went so far as to cut the wires going to the speaker to make sure no one disturbed other people in the library.  So that's where we'd go, into the library and pop on set of phones and break out some Steppenwolf!

We had a smokestack out behind the school where we'd sneak out and smoke in between classes.  But before school I used to meet people at the Fairgrounds or at the Masonic Temple behind the school.  It was right around this time that all of us started smoking the evil weed, and it was always fun to get high and then go to school.  So we'd smoke a J and go hang in the library and listen to Steppenwolf.  I remember thinking that John Kay was probably a brilliant man because I thought Monster was real poetry.  I don't think that anymore, but I do think Kay was better than a lot of the bands of his era, and he doesn't get much credit for anything other than inspiring people to ride motorcycles.  Maybe some of his lyrics sound kind of cliche these days, but we really did think about the draft.  We thought about it a lot.  So a song like Draft Resister really kind of opened our eyes a little bit.  I think I once told someone, "Why should I go fight for my country in Vietnam or something?  My family is peaceful, I should stay here and fight to make the people that want to send us to wars go fight them themselves.  I don't want them here anyway."

Man, I remember that didn't go over very well with some parents.  But all of us knew that the kid down the street or an older brother was in Vietnam, and all of us had seen the devastation to a family when that kid didn't come home.  I used to go door to door with petitions and hang out in K Mart's parking lot getting signatures for a lot of things, like ending the draft, lowering the voting age and lowering the drinking age (my sentimental favorite).  I think that stuff worked, because I was one of the first graduating classes that just had to get a Selective Service number (which terrified me enough).  So yeah, these days maybe Steppenwolf sounds a little corny with their protest songs, but they were better at it than a lot of other bands were.

Now, getting back to junior high, weed and the library - I remember more than one occasion when we'd be kicking back, enjoying the buzz and digging Steppenwolf for the billionth time, and one of us just blurting, "Sookie, sookie, sookie, sookie, sookie sookie soo!"  Man, all of a sudden all the kids in the library would start laughing and the librarian, I think her name was Mrs. Morton, would come over and rip the needle of the record with a screeching "rrrrriiiiipppppp!" sound, and whisper/shout at us to "Be quiet or you'll all sit in separate corners with no music!"  Man, that would make you feel stupid, lemme tell ya!

So I bought this the other day at Dr. Disc in Windsor.  I was flipping through the recent arrivals bins, and there was a pretty worn looking copy (not as bad as the one I used for a picture - that looks more like the library's copy!), but it says Made in Canada and it looks like a pretty early Dunhill Canadian pressing.  Inside the back pocket of the cover another, older record store wrote 4.49 on it.  I remember a lot of used record stores used to do that.  They'd open the sleeve and tell you how much the record was.  So I was thinking, "Man, this is the second store (at least) that this record has wound up at, probably isn't worth a second look," but the records themselves are in audiophile sleeves and they look very rarely played.  The cover just wasn't stored in a bag, so it's got some ringwear.  Now, I buy records to play, not to admire from a distance, so things like primo records in so-so covers don't bother me.  When I got home I found my new Nagaoka MP110 cartridge waiting for me, so I mounted that sucker, and popped in my new record.

I'll say this - if you want a cartridge for 100 bucks, you'll probably like this one a lot.  I'll also say this - Steppenwolf Live is a great record.  Yeah, it's definitely of an era, but the crunchy guitar on Magic Carpet Ride and the ten minute long version of Monster are just really cool.  A couple songs are actually studio recordings, but so what?  They still sound great.  The band was tight and just ramshackle enough to make things worthwhile.  I'm glad Dr. Disc had it.

By the way, Dr. Disc is a really cool store for Canada.  They don't have as much cool Detroit sounds as I'd hope, but they always seem to have four or five albums I want, and their prices are way better than most Canadian record stores I've been to.  The guy that's always in there when I've been there is super friendly, and if the store isn't busy he'll talk your ear off!  But I like that.  I like record store people that don't try to make you feel insignificant (you know, like High Fidelity) and I like guys that don't mind saying, "I never heard the band you're talking about."  Since when is it a crime to not know something?  There's like 100 billion records on the planet, and no one has heard them all.  So if you go to Windsor, stop in and buy some records or cd's.