The year was 1985. I was a senior in high school living out in the country, where our house was surrounded by farms. Isolated from almost all of my classmates, my social life was limited. Dates were few and far between, and my teenage angst needed an outlet.

One sunny, spring day, I was outside doing yard work, listening to the radio, KQRS, a classic-rock station in the Twin Cities. My parents had this old wood cabinet stereo, and it had a very warm sound I remember.

The thing about KQRS back then was that every so often, in between the usual mix of my beloved '70s arena-rock standards and '80s hair-metal blather, the station would sneak in a transmission from the underground, like "Radio Free Europe" by R.E.M. This day, however, it was The Replacements' "Little Mascara," and from that moment, my whole outlook on music changed forever.

It wasn't like anything I'd ever heard before. The guitars were noisy and, not necessarily abrasive, but... let's call them thorny. The singer's voice was a sandpaper-rough caterwaul, most likely the result of some hard living. And the production on the thing was ugly, unprofessional. And that was it!

The whole thing sounded raw and amateurish, but that only made it better, because immediately, you could tell that it was made by people who were living just barely above the poverty line, or possibly below it. They were social outcasts, and I was one of them, even if I didn't live in ultra-hip Minneapolis. They weren't prodigies. They weren't born with silver spoons in their mouths. They were the kids who smoked on the sidewalk before school. They mostly likely had blue-collar dads who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and barely noticed their sons, or even slapped them around a little.

That wasn't my childhood, thank God. But, in some way, I could relate to it, even though "Little Mascara" was a bitter indictment of a vain, self-centered woman who lost only a "little mascara" in crying about the sad condition of her white-trash existence.

But, what struck me was how edgy it was, how the hooks just sunk their teeth into your neck and how that tugboat of a tempo just pulled the song up out of the muck and onto a higher plane. I had to get my hands on more Replacements. And I found out there was a lot more out there, three independent releases of snarling, trashy punk rock and the occasional heart-on-the-sleeve ballads. But, it was the album that had "Little Mascara" on it that I had to have, so as soon as I saved up enough money and found a record store that had it, I bought Tim, The Replacements' first major-label release.

Tim was the 'Mats' first release on Sire Records, and it was an eye-opener. From the drinker's lament "Here Comes A Regular" to the howling, outsiders' anthem "Bastards Of Young" to that swaying ode to loneliness and fear "Swinging Party," Tim was the full realization of The Replacements' brilliance. Paul Westerberg's clever wordplay was never sharper, and the band that used to get by on just its ragged glory actually gained some sort of focus, obviously helped by the production of one Tommy "Ramone" Erdelyi.

On Sept. 23, Rhino reissued deluxe versions of all four of The Replacements' Sire Records releases — Tim, Pleased To Meet Me, Don't Tell A Soul and All Shook Down — with an assortment of outtakes, alternative versions, demos and other unreleased gems. Some critics will tell you that after Pleased To Meet Me, and the departure of guitarist Bob Stinson (his life, riddled with substance abuse, sadly snuffed out at the age of 35), The Replacements lost the shambolic magic that made them the darlings of the underground. I'm not one of them.

Tim and the Jim Dickinson-produced Pleased To Meet Me are undisputed classics. Remnants of the old, rough-and-tumble 'Mats could be found there, although it was clear the band was in transition, becoming a little more... mature — a bad word to be sure among longtime fans.

And that growth resulted in All Shook Down, a magnificent epithet and an underrated send-off that acted as a bridge to Westerberg's acclaimed solo career. As the 'Mats sound took on more of an alt.-country tone, maybe it lost some of its edge, but "One Wink At A Time," "When It Began" and "Nobody" are as infectious as anything the band ever did, and the heartbreaking "Sadly Beautiful" is one of the loveliest songs Westerberg's ever written. And Don't Tell A Soul has a bounty of great songs, too, including the band's highest-charting single "I'll Be You" and the merry-go-'round honky tonk of "Talent Show."

These albums were the soundtrack for my passage into manhood, and they've been with me through the down times, when drinking myself into oblivion seemed like a very good idea. I never saw The Replacements live. Reportedly, they could be magnificent, the very embodiment of what rock 'n' roll should be. They were funny, self-deprecating and they churned out burning rockers that set the house on the fire. And on other nights, they could be so falling-down drunk they'd barely get through a set. I wish I could have experienced either one of those scenarios. Then, I'd have a story to tell. But, as it is, I still have these albums, and hearing them enhanced sonically is a breath of fresh air.

If you ever saw The Replacements in concert, I'd love your stories. Please feel free to respond to this blog and leave them here for all to read.

And to find out more about these releases, and maybe order them, visit www.rhino.com


  

Coming in the next issue of Goldmine is a story on Camper Van Beethoven, the quirky, eccentric uncle of alternative-rock that's, once again, feeling his oats.

Back in the early '80s, when punk got all rigid and conformist, Camper Van Beethoven eschewed the three-chord simplicity, the sheer volume and meat-headed uniformity of the shaved-head syndicate and established its own identity, mixing ska, Tex-Mex, folk (even the Eastern European variety), country and ... well, basically everything their warped imaginations could think of into an impossible-to-categorize form of music.

They were complete originals, blessed with a wry, engaging sense of humor. And though they broke up in the late '80s, they would eventually get back together. This past weekend, Camper and its first cousin, the David Lowery-led Cracker, hosted its annual Campout Night in Pioneertown, Calif., at Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace.

Camper took the stage Friday with longtime indie faves Built To Spill and Quasi. Saturday was Cracker's night. If you missed out and you live in, or near Chicago, you get a second chance to catch them. November 21-22, CBV will play two shows at The Abby Pub in the Windy City.

Jonathan Segel, the band's utility infielder — a guitarist by trade who wound playing keyboards, violins and mandolin for CVB — was interviewed for the story, and he didn't pull any punches in our conversation. To give you a taste of what to expect in the print story, here are portions of my e-mail interview with Segel that are lying on the cutting room floor:

First off, tell us how (Camper's) silver anniversary show (in June) went. What did the set list consist of?
Jonathan Segel: Looking over the list post-facto it looks like a two-hour reduction of the entire catalog. Like any good Camper set, it manages to flow between songs from all our albums. I thought the show was a real success in many ways: We played well, we played a long time, a lot of people came to see us and we got The Catheads to reunite to open the show, and they were great. We used to play with them alot back in the day, and we're historically connected in many ways.
here it is:
http://www.archive.org/details/CVB2008-06-28.matrix


Popular Songs is a broad survey of the band's eclectic approach to music-making. Listening to it, it's hard not to be struck by how many styles of music Camper Van Beethoven played. Where did that willingness to experiment with so many genres come from, or is experiment not the right word?
JS: Experiment is definitely the right word. One thing that allowed us access to such a diverse palette was Santa Cruz in the 1980s. Besides the normal college punk rock scene of the early '80s, there was a thriving post-'70s hippie scene (duh, it's Santa Cruz), and a whole lot of roots-less American kids searching for their roots — or, if not theirs, then some that sounded cool. So, we get lots of people resurrecting Irish music, Klezmer music, Balkan music. So, as a rock band, we get exposed to all of these people who are actually learning these old tunes, and we copped a few scales... Plus of course the university ethnomusicology classes... and Anthropology classes — being UCSC, we had some pretty amazing and amazingly outsider teachers. And the college radio music scene was changing rapidly in the late '70s and early '80s; huge influxes of odd DIY bands from England, followed by punk and other oddities here in California.

What amazes me most, in going back and listening to these songs, is how the two ska tracks, "Skinhead Stomp" and "Border Ska," meld ska and traditional elements, like how "Border Ska" takes on a Tex-Mex quality and you hear fiddle in "Skinhead Stomp" and it makes perfect sense. How did slip those traditional qualities into these tracks?  
JS: Well.. if you think of ska as only that backbeat pattern, then a whole lot of polkas and tex mex are actually ska to begin with. The great 60s ska players like Don Drummond used that same beat to play all sorts of styles of music!  And note that Tex-Mex is that way because of the huge influx of Czech and German immigrants to central Texas — they brought the accordion.

Why was Camper Van Beethoven so comfortable playing different genres?
JS: Probably because we didn't think of them as different genres once we incorporated them into the band — just as rock music.

When you joined the band, it seemed to really open up the possibilities of what this band could do. Your playing on "ZZ Top Goes to Egypt" is remarkably inventive. From your perspective, in what ways did having you onboard change what Camper Van Beethoven did?
JS: I guess. I was definitely into trying out any type of playing. I was basically just learning how to play the violin when I started playing with Camper; they already had enough guitars. (I have to say that being a guitarist who is learning violin in a band makes it easier 'cause I could read their fingers and know what chords to play — plus I tried to play chords on the violin. I think having me in the band (~fall of 1983 i think?) changed what the band did only in that the addition of another person's interests broadened the gamut that much more. This band is about the personalities of the players and what they bring to the table as much as what they are able to play.

[Asked because of the CBV classic "Take The Skinheads Bowling] Did you come into contact with skinheads a lot?
JS: I've avoided them pretty much since being drunkenly robbed in Scotland in 1982! Actually for the most part skinheads seemed to anthemize the song and liked it. It certainly isn't a pejorative against skinheads. In fact, the whole skinhead thing is very weird and difficult to trace, especially in California. It takes on so many meanings. There's a great film from 2006 called "This Is England" that takes place in the early '80s and shows how an honest two-tone ska-type skinhead bunch can get sucked into the racist fascist thing. In California, it just seemed weird to me to have a specific mode of dress, especially when everybody dresses the same (um, uniforms? not into them.) It's unknown when we ran into skinheads whether they were straightedge, fascist, violent or just fashionable. I myself shaved my head in 1987. Didn't dress in suspenders, though. Did own Doc Martins... shoes, though, not boots..

With the second album, II & III, were you trying to balance the carefree, fun aspect of Telephone Free Landslide Victory with slightly more focus?
JS: Well, when TFLV came out, we had been a band for a long time already and had a ton of songs. We started recording the second batch in Davis again, but by the end of 1985, we switched to working at Fox Studios in Felton, near Santa Cruz. Tom Fox had basically converted his house into a studio. After a short tour to Texas in fall of '85, [drummer] Anthony [Guess] quit, and rather than going back to having David and Chris Molla switch off on drums like we had before Anthony, we actually got a drummer (Chris Pedersen) and a real lead guitarist (Greg Lisher). So half of that record has these guys on it, and it sounds way different. I managed to get a few more serious tracks on that record, and also David had written a few love songs, so it has a wider range of emotions represented I think.
We stayed at Tom Fox's for the third record and [the EP] Vampire Can Mating Oven also, so the third record is very much manufactured in the studio, which was a very different way of working.

Lovers of country, and really any genre you tried, probably wouldn't have noticed much difference between your songs and artists they were more comfortable with, with the exception of your lyrics. Was that something you strived for on songs like "Sad Lovers' Waltz?"
JS: Hmm... probably more that it was easier to play country music accurately. Or at least old country music; modern country sucked, still sucks for the most part. But the decision to filter the vocals like that in "Sad Lovers' Waltz" was probably to match it more to our ideas of what older country music really sounded like. And adding a few tricks like that made it sound authentic. I mean, lovers of 12th century troubadour music would never fall for "Une Fois" (from the third record) as being genuine, especially as we used a sitar as the rhythm instrument.

Country and Eastern European folk merge on "When I Win The Lottery," which has a real noir-ish quality. What made that song particularly effective?
JS: The lyrics I think are the most effective part of that song. By this time in CVB's development, the styles are ingrained, and the music is becoming a fusion of things whether we liked it or not. But David's character writing was becoming really strong. The whole Key Lime Pie record is pretty noir.

Your covers of songs like Sonic Youth's "I Love Her All The Time" and Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" are opposites in that the former you change entirely and the latter you stay faithful to. What went into those decisions?
JS: Well, it depends on where we wanted to go with the song, of course. Doing sonic youth as country is a piss take. "Interstellar...," on the other hand is a platform — it's basically a head within which to improvise, like jazz. When you say it's faithful to the original, it's really only faithful in that we play the chord progression at the beginning and the end. We had this song called "Processional," which is very straight in its recorded version (and we played it this way more recently also), but live in the late '80s it basically served the same function as "Interstellar..."; we started it and spaced out in the middle, went into other songs, eventually came back to the head. Sometimes it even sandwiched "Interstellar..." in there as well.
We did actually do "I Love Her All the Time" as a slow and faithful cover once in Nijmegen, Holland in 1987, fueled by Belgian beer.

When the band signed to Virgin, it seemed the group took a serious turn with Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. Why was that?
JS: Money? I don't know. They needed to sell it? How do you mean serious? For one thing, it was the first time we had an outside producer, and we had big differences within the band over how this manifested itself. Plus, David had been in a long trend of controlling what music CVB did by essentially not working on anybody else's input. Virgin, like any major label, likes to have a central figure to deal with and make decisions so they encouraged this sort of thing. I regret making my feelings known to Mark Williams, our A&R guy at the time, as I could see him calculating as soon as I mentioned the problems...

Creative and personal differences resulted in inner band turmoil that resulted in the band's dissolution in 1989, after Key Lime Pie. What was at the heart of those disputes? Had they been festering long?
JS: A lot of this started over working with Dennis Herring. I still maintain that he's a fraud, a gleaner of other people's ideas who makes arbitrary decisions based on what he thinks will be the "coolest" thing to do at the time (and in a limited perspective — how has the production of Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart held up? I find it incredibly dated.) He wasn't so much a producer as an engineer with veto power.
Note that I got kicked out of the band at the beginning of 1989, after only working on demos for Key Lime Pie. I never heard the record until a couple years later and was floored by it — the songs were the best ever and the production was everything I fought with Dennis for on OBRS (hmm...)
During the touring for OBRS, I wasn't quiet about my feelings. That's not cool in Hollywoodland. In the summer of 1988, before my last tour with CVB all fall, I finished my first solo record "Storytelling," and it came out right as I got kicked out of the band. Not a good record to start a solo career on; prog rock wasn't in then (is it now?). Plus my band were all still in CVB! The irony of the situation for me was that I fled to Indonesia in december of 1988 to clear my head and came to the realization that it didn't matter what we did in CVB, I would always have the time and energy to do my own work if it never was present in CVB, but as soon as I came home, David came over and said he couldn't work with me anymore. Everyone else wanted to keep their jobs and that was it, I go or the band goes. Eventually, of course, a year or so later, the band went. Virgin, as we see, kept their main man.

What led to the reunion in 2000, and the Tusk remake in 2002?
JS: Several things. In the '90s I started Magnetic (www.magneticmotorworks.com — a label for putting out my stuff and Victor's). I had my own bands, Hieronymus Firebrain and Jack & Jill, where I played guitar and sang, but I also played violin with Victor's bands and in Granfaloon Bus and Dieselhed. David and Johnny Hickman came over to a Dieselhed show once after Cracker played in [San Francisco], and we spoke briefly. I was sort of drunk I think, so I was probably nice. After that encounter I did a lot of soul searching; I had been holding a strong and bitter grudge, as after being kicked out of the band I had never had any success on my own (uh, still, really), and I was blaming David mostly. But it really wasn't his problem; he had no responsibility for my life, so I realized I had to let it go. All this lite-Buddhism happened as I left San Francisco to pursue a failing relationship to LA, and many things happened in the brief three years I lived there.
First, I think was that Cracker was going to do a song on the Clash tribute record Burning London, and in CVB we used to do "White Riot" as a country song, so I flew to Richmond where David's studio is and recorded it with them. it was fun... the next thing was that David put Mark Linkous in touch with me, and I ended up quitting my job at Danetracks doing film sound effects to play for a year and a half with Sparklehorse. During this time, David was producing the Counting Crows in L.A. near my apartment, so I saw him occasionally there. He came to the Sparklehorse show at the Troubadour in L.A., and we did "All Her Favorite Fruit" — which really was the first time I had played a Camper song in 10 years I think (although i think we might have done "Abundance" in Sparklehorse sometimes? [I] can't remember..) And David got Victor to sub on bass in Cracker a few times... we conceived of the "Traveling Apothecary Show" tour wherein Cracker morphed into Camper, and we played some CVB tunes... we started the process of seeing if we could record together by getting Victor and I out to Richmond in December of 1999, where we put together Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven. The next recording test was Tusk. And the next live step was to play as CVB. We did this in New York at the Knitting factory, three nights in 2002. The rehearsals were in NY beforehand; it was truly weird. I remember in the '80s when we would have a break, we came back and would try to play every song on every record; this rehearsal was like that, trying to consciously prevent your mind from remembering how to play the songs and allow your hands to do it. I remember realizing in the rehearsals then that these were the people that I had really learned to play music with despite any other bands I had played with, and it was so comfortable to know that.
At the time my most recent solo record (Scissors and Paper) had been done over the course of playing in Sparklehorse, and I did everything myself pretty much. It took awhile because, as much as anything else, I was intimidated by the Sparklehorse peer group (Radiohead, PJ Harvey!) and their creative output.  But, after that, every time I have recorded a rock record, I play with Victor at least, if not more Camper elements.

For the greatest-hits record, you rerecorded five songs that Virgin wouldn't let you have for the record. Tell us how that came about.
JS: Well, that's simple. We wanted to include tracks from the two Virgin releases, we tried to buy the rights, they wouldn't sell, so we re-recorded them. Difficult for all of us to make them realistic (especially the crappy production of OBRS! Had to find yamaha SPX90s to get that gated snare sound, strangely no ProTools plugins dare to emulate these.) For me the hardest part was doing "All Her Favorite Fruit" and "...Lottery" — I had played on demos way back when, had my own way of playing the songs, had been playing them my way live for eight years, and now I had to learn note for note the Don Lax version that was recorded in 1989. I don't play like that (for one thing he's a real violinist; I'm a guitar player playing violin). It was simultaneously humiliating and humbling. I had to record like 10 takes of each measure to get it somewhat accurate. I felt like I was having to go into the past to lick the boots of my ex-girlfriend's present boyfriend. But we managed to rerecord them really well, thanks to Bruce Kaphan and to Fantasy Studios. and then the Kitchen managed to master the whole disparate collection into a sonicly interesting cohesive whole — the new recordings fit right in and the old ones sound somehow new, almost remixed.

What's next for Camper Van Beethoven?
JS: Well, last summer we talked about making another record, and some of us started setting aside riffs and things for it, but then David went in a different direction and worked on his solo album and a new Cracker album. I made my most recent album Honey, Victor had just made Cock Crows at Sunrise and accidentally went and wrote two more albums that will be out later, Patriarch's Blues (after the death of his father) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a duo with Alison Faith Levy. We have all stated that to make another CVB record we want to get together and write it together, but it hasn't occurred yet. I recently started picking at the bits I had from last summer and may make them my own. So the answer is, who knows? We'll make another record sometime.
After New Roman Times came out in fall of 2004, we toured a lot, a lot, a lot, up through last fall. Since then, we played one week at New Years and one week in June for the Fillmore 25th anniversary show; we'll play again later this month (August) and then, of course, our September Camp-Out Festival in Pioneertown by Joshua Tree.
But touring so much in the past few years wasn't so financially great for those of us that don't have income from our other sources, so I suspect that we'll be working our day jobs a lot in the coming years.

It's a question all Beatle fanatics face at one time or another: Who is your favorite? Is it the adorable Paul, the brooding George or the "giving peace a chance" bad boy, John? Or, perhaps, it's Ringo who does the trick?

If Ringo is the one, there's an upcoming memorabilia auction you need to be aware of. It's the "All Access Rock Auction" hosted by Backstage Auctions Oct. 12-19. While the lot selection is a diverse one with pieces from artists ranging from Roger Daltrey to Joe Walsh to Alice Cooper to Jack Bruce to Vince Neil to Levon Helm, the big draw promises to be the extensive Ringo Starr offerings.

Jacques van Gool of Backstage Auctions says this auction might include "more signed Ringo Starr items than any in history." Well over 100 pieces signed by Ringo will be included in the sale, according to van Gool.

Featured in this auction is the private collection of legendary rock and roll promoter David Fishof. It was Fishof who created the Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band concept. Fishof has produced eight All Starr Band tours in all.

"Typically, you have two to three, or four or five pieces [from an artist], but it's usually a single-digit number," says van Gool.

Here, there will be Ringo signed drum sticks, lithographs, tour programs, posters and promotional material, among other items, including Christmas cards from Ringo and his wife. Also, there will an original Peter Max "Ringo" painting (above, right). There are only three of these, and Ringo owns the other two.

What's interesting about some of the tour posters is that they're signed by the whole All Starr band. "[David] did a good job making sure he saved a couple from each tour," says Jacques. Specifically, there are posters from shows in Tokyo, Russia and Germany.

Some of the big-name artists who put their signatures on such items are Who bassist John Entwhistle and The Band's Rick Danko and Levon Helm.

For more information, go to www.backstageauctions.com. There will be an auction preview Oct. 5. Also, watch our multimedia section for interviews with Jacques and with the consignor himself, David Fishof.

Something to chew on, mull over and digest as you get ready for the weekend.

Insound president Matt Wishnow was good enough, as you probably already know from the blog posted recently, to talk to us about the online music store he runs.

During the interview, I asked him what bands he's been into lately. You might want to check them out if you've just got paid and that money is burning a hole in your pocket.

"There's a band I really like called The Duchess And The Duke, who sound sort of like a raggedy, late-'60s, Let It Bleed-era Rolling Stones," says Wishnow. "I think they're really good. I like No Age on Sub Pop. There's a new band on Touch & Go called the Uglysuit that I like a lot. Those are the three lately that I've been listening a lot to, but if I go back a couple of years that list will get real long (laughs)."

I also asked what albums have been top sellers for Insound, and he replied, "Well, certainly The Walkmen (You and Me) record has been huge for us. The Fleet Foxes (self-titled) record has been good for us. The new Ra Ra Riot (The Rhumb Line) record's been good for us. I'm going to go back a little bit further than that. The Beck record was really good for us. Deerhunter (Microcastle, due out Oct. 28 but available for pre-order), Atlas Sound (Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel), the Conor Oberst (self-titled) record was real strong for us. Always, always, bands like The National's catalog has been really good for us. And even bands from the '90s, like Neutral Milk Hotel, their second record is consistently a Top 50 record for us, always has been."

Check out Insound at www.insound.com.

During a time of social and political unrest, when the hippies and the "man" were locked in mortal combat and profound changes were taking pop music to places nobody had dreamed of before, Steppenwolf was not only there, it was spearheading the revolution.

The pack leader of the late-'60s counterculture, Steppenwolf's fire-breathing biker anthem "Born To Be Wild" laid rubber and spewed exhaust as the band, led by John Kay, he of the primal growl you hear on the song, drove down the highways and byways of America and took magic carpet rides. On its journey, the band found itself at the epicenter of explosive cultural movements, and on the 1969 album Monster, Steppenwolf addressed head on some of the hot-button political issues of the time.

Now comes a career-spanning DVD titled "John Kay & Steppenwolf, A Rock & Roll Odyssey," due out Sept. 30, that tells the incredible story of this iconic band and what was happening around them when Steppenwolf was as big as anybody in the land.

Recently interviewed for a story that will appear in the Oct. 24 issue of Goldmine, Kay relates the tale of how the project came about.

"It was something that had been on my list of projects to hopefully get to one day for several years, and an old friend of mine, who passed away a couple of years ago, Morgan Cavett — who, in fact, co-wrote one of the songs on our very first Steppenwolf album... Morgan and I were talking about doing, basically, a video biography, and he had, over the years, gotten involved in all sorts of other pursuits, and the last one was video shooting, directing and production and the like. So, he would come out during some of the Steppenwolf engagements, he would fly out with some of his gear, and he would shoot some talking heads and performance clips and other things, and amassed a backlog of video footage, but we were always too busy to completely follow through on this. And unfortunately, he then developed a serious illness and died a couple of years ago."

Then, along came a Nashville videographer by the name of Mark Hall to save the day.

"[He's] a Canadian fellow who's been in Nashville for a long time, and has done numerous video biographies on Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and The Band and on and on and on," says Kay. "He had also done a project with me for the Bravo Canada channel, and so he and I had a good working relationship. I liked the quality of his work, and so, he also had known Morgan, and he was willing to take on this project and to finish it basically."

The idea behind the project was to tell Steppenwolf's story the way it should be told.

"The whole premise of doing this project was really the idea that we would get to tell our story, our way, without any concerns where we would have to satisfy someone else's expectations — meaning, when you create something for cable channels, or VH-1 or whoever, they have their take on what it is they want to focus on in any of these stories," says Kay. "After all, it's about ratings, and in the end about ad dollars, and we knew that would definitely interfere with what we had in mind, because we had already done a 'Behind the Music,' which turned out to be what it turned out to be (laughs). And so, consequently, I decided that this would be a self-financed and directed project, because we, as a band, in our history, don't really fit any particular mold 100 percent. While people tend to think of us as being either a biker band or, because of the Monster album, a social-political oriented band, or if it's 'Magic Carpet Ride,' you know, it's kind of a pop hit... we were a lot of things, but perhaps not enough of one particular thing to fit any particular sort of pigeonhole. And the same thing was the case with respect to this DVD because it is something quite separate and apart from the typical 'here are five guys, who were in a garage and made some music and they got lucky and they had some hits, and the trials and tribulations of being a rock band, and the infighting and you know, eventually half of them go face down in the gutter with drug addiction, you know'... That sort of thing we've seen plenty of and done to death, and it doesn't actually fit our situation to a T in any case."

In Kay's eyes, there was more important stuff to address.

"Far more importantly, from our perspective, is the fact that we had much more of a bigger story to tell," says Kay. "It's because of my individual background, having been born in what was then East Prussia and growing up behind the Iron Curtain, and escaping to West Germany, discovering rock 'n' roll on the Armed Forces Radio Network, you know, coming to Canada, etc. etc. That all leads into my joining The Sparrow, the Canadian band which later migrated to the West Coast, broke up then in L.A., from the ashes of which Steppenwolf was formed in '67, and from there forward. But, during the course of both The Sparrow as well as Steppenwolf's life span thereafter, we were in certain cultural meccas at certain times that were pivotal times."

Such as?
"We were in Yorkville Village in Toronto when Neil Young blew in there and Joni Mitchell passed through, you know," remembers Kay, "and we were on the Sunset Strip when the hippie riots shut down Pandora's Box and Steve Stills wrote "For What It's Worth" about that. We were in the Bay Area playing the Avalon Ballroom and others when the first 'Human Be-In' was at Golden Gate Park took place, and those kinds of things. And also, once we launched our first album in '68 and went out on the road, my God, that year we had assassinations, riots in the streets, the Democratic Convention... on and on. So, a lot of what was going on is part of this bigger picture, and when we first showed a rough cut to someone, just as sort of a trial balloon to get a reaction — this was a person not entirely keen on rock 'n' roll to begin with and was like, 'Yeah, Steppenwolf, "Born to be Wild," that's all I know about them' — but what he commented [on] was very telling, because he said, 'Well, the story of the band is pretty interesting, but it's really sort of a train that takes you through the time tunnel of all these different decades in all these different places you guys were in were either culturally or artistically or because of the times you were in, politically and socially, there were major events that are part of this bigger picture."

Kay isn't sure if there's a particular television channel that'd be willing to show this film, but he's all right with that.

"Unfortunately, because of that diversity of ingredients, it again doesn't really fit on any particular cable channel's focus," says Kay. "Because there's not enough history for the History Channel. There's not enough debauchery and God knows what for VH-1, and so, we basically said, 'Don't worry about that. This is really us telling our story and there are those that have supported us for many, many years, who will be interested —  up to a certain number of them — in this somewhat different, somewhat less typical story of a rock 'n' roll band, and its life and its times that it lived in.'"

For ordering information and all things Steppenwolf related, visit www.steppenwolf.com. Order through Wolf Wares and you can get a copy autographed by Kay himself. Also, visit www.rainmanrecords.com to find more Steppenwolf and John Kay related merchandise.