Brian Johnson on the counterculture song that launched the heavy 1970s
While Brian Johnson didn’t truly reach the peak of his career until he was summoned as the replacement for Bon Scott in AC/DC following the singer’s untimely death in 1980, he was still reasonably well-known and regarded in his home country of the UK. There was a very good reason why the Australian rock group hired him, and knowing that the group carried on with him as the new frontman following Scott’s passing, their former singer would’ve been proud to know that his bandmates had brought in someone he personally thought the world of.
Having been the frontman in the Newcastle rock band Geordie throughout the early part of the 1970s, Johnson had impressed Scott on many occasions, with him regularly citing Johnson as being one of his favourite frontmen and vocalists in the world. Geordie weren’t exactly unknown, but they never achieved notoriety in the US and only ever reached a high point of number six in the UK chart with their second single, ‘All Because of You’.
The group were never as heavy as AC/DC, which made it all the more unusual that Scott had such an admiration for Johnson, the frontman of a glam band. The hard rock styles that AC/DC were dealing with at the same time had been slowly growing, but that wasn’t to say that they weren’t all taking inspiration from the same places, and Johnson himself believes that one song, in particular, kickstarted an entire movement of hard rock acts that followed in its wake throughout the 1970s.
Released all the way back in 1968, Johnson claims that one song that pushed his own musical projects forward, but also acted as a catalyst for the entire hard rock and heavy metal scene, was Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to Be Wild’. Released as early as 1968, it was one of the first songs to achieve mainstream success with a heavier sound, even supposedly becoming the track that would spawn the genre name, ‘heavy metal’.
‘Born to Be Wild’ was unlike anything else before it, and it took a few years for other bands to begin to latch onto the trend of heavy metal as a genre. However, once it caught the attention of other young musicians, there was no escaping it, according to Johnson. Speaking about the song on the BBC Radio 2 programme Tracks of My Years, he claimed that it had such a profound effect on the genre.
“I was just starting in a small band then,” said Johnson. “We were all apprentices; we all wanted to be in bands. The Yardbirds, The Beatles, The Kinks, the whole wonderful explosion. We started a little one, we’ve tried to do songs, but we kept running out of talent. We’ve heard this wonderful simple song, ‘Born To Be Wild’, and it was easy to play and everything. And all of the kids wanted to hear, it was quite a cult song. So we learned it and then on stage even started to make us change our clothes.”
Claiming how they saw clips of bands from the West Coast of the US attempting to launch this style, Johnson argued that not only did his band want to copy it, but they fully adopted it for half a decade until they were tired of taking that direction: “I think it was very important because it was punchy, it was rocky, it had everything for a young musician and band.”
Whether mimicked to death or not, the impact that Steppenwolf had on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Born to Be Wild’ was significant, and it remains a hugely important song to the development of metal as a genre.
