Check out this absolutely brilliant adaption of AI images which makes this powerful song even more relevant and contemporary today.
This was my favorite song when I was a teenager in high school.
Steppenwolf was definitely my favorite group.
It played a seminal influence in shaping my ideological world view.
I finally got to see Steppenwolf perform live in a little club in Tulsa in the late 1980s.
I was never much of a person to go to concerts or live performances, so this was significant.
I loved its brutally frank recitation of history, and the powerful indictment of the divisiveness fostered by statism it described, yet the central thrust was optimistic and libertarian (long before I knew the meaning of the term or concept of libertarianism).
That would come in November of 1970.
The song still captures my ideological world view perhaps better than anything else.
Presidential candidate Ed Clark at the 1979 Libertarian Party National Convention in Los Angeles made the concise statement below which also summarizes exactly what Monster was driving at in outlining what was crucially distinct about the founding of the American Republic:
“Freedom is the genius of American civilization. Other great nations have been born in conquest. Ours began with the Declaration of Independence, and the enshrining of the idea of the Natural Rights of Man. It was founded, not on the power of the State, but on the liberty of the individual. That principle of individual liberty has had its good days and its bad days in the United States, and it’s been denied to many groups of people for far too long. But the ideal has always survived. It is our answer, and our hope.”
Despite all their hits this song alone qualifies Steppenwolf & John Kay to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
This is one of the strongest political statements ever made in rock — and it’s incredibly prophetic.
9:03 am on August 27, 2024
