Steppenwolf - 7

In the grand tradition of counting all your recordings to produce ridiculous introductory sentences, Steppenwolf's 7 is their fifth album (because live albums are a separate category). It's the one with a song about John Kay and his mother fleeing East Germany as it was officially forming when he was 4, and also chicks, and drugs being bad. It's not a coherent story, is what i'm saying.

It is good old fashioned 60s/70s hard rock, and hard rock's version of country. It's an album for people who like Steppenwolf. None of the songs ever cracked the top 40, but since the band actually still exists, who cares? It's a lot like Steve Miller Band's Number 5 in that respect. No, it's not the stuff that made them famous, it's the stuff they made because that famous stuff made them professional rockers, or because their famous stuff hasn't happened yet and you live in a reverse time line...

If you like the band you like it (and i do), if you only like the three songs you know from their first album, you won't like it much and i assume the trumpets will confuse you...

... they confuse me too, but you're supposed to think that i know a secret you don't. Well, i do know lots of secrets that you don't know, but the reason why there are trumpets on Easrschplittenloudenboomer isn't one of them. What is the Hippo Stomp? No fucking clue, but that's because none of us know what it is. We're all just hippos sliding in water too deep to touch the ground. If you listed all of the possible metaphors for life, this would be one, i guess. We are fat, and we do like to swim. I told you this wasn't a thinking album. They don't have to be smart all the time. It's their 3rd fifth time in front of a tape recorder, and don't you forget it!

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