Steppenwolf

Me and boys from Sliverville were as excited as a young man with a new motorcycle license when we heard Steppenwolf were coming to town. Down at the Bad Allah we learned all the Dope City punks were real excited about the show too. We had all grown up in the '70s and thought Black Sabbath, T. Rex, Slade and the handful of bands from that era we still respected would never again grace a stage in Dope City. Steppenwolf! We could not fucking believe it.

They played at a big barn of a nightclub on the waterfront that we used to park our cars under when we went drinking at the Bad Allah. It was a private parking lot where we could get tuned up for the real drinking after we had gotten stamped for in/out privleges at the Allah. Loads of punks actually paid real money and made it to the show too. We all staked out places near the stage as was our custom. We also noted there were tables of Satans Angels and their gals in the balcony.

Steppenwolf put on a fantastic show. Jimi still has a pair of drumsticks and an ape mask the guitar player wore for the first part of the show. I have seen thousands of rock shows over the years. A lot of them kind of melt into one another. But that show I will take with me to my grave.

It was the first time Dope City's young punk rock community ran into the Satans Angels who went on to patch over to the Hells a short while later. I guess the Angels did not like the looks of us carrying on by the stage so they started throwing beer cans at us. Full beer cans. And you know what? We stood our ground. We did not go attack the greasy fuckers. That would have been a bar fight and a half. We just stood there and absorbed the attack. A few people got gashed up pretty good but after the Angels had lobbed dozens of steel cans of full beer at us and we did not move they developed a certain amount of respect for the other black leather jacket wearing lunatics in town.

Oh yeah. We were all born to be wild.