Steppenwolf’s 1968 hit, Born to Be Wild, may be one of the most recognizable songs in rock history – and the guitarist behind the solo that captured the track’s palpable, authentically wild, and care-free spirit was an 18-year-old: Michael Monarch.
“I met the guys from the band The Sparrows in Hollywood,” he reminisces in a new interview with Guitar World.
“They had come to LA from Toronto, Canada. I had seen them play a couple of times on the Sunset Strip at a small club. I was impressed with the keyboard/organ player, Goldy [McJohn], both his playing and especially his sound.
“The drummer, Jerry [Edmonton] was also top-notch. They were in the process of breaking up after coming to LA and not having much luck. Their guitar player was leaving to become a songwriter, and the bass player was going to form his own band. I joined on guitar, and we then found a bass player from an ad on a music store message board.”
Monarch's involvement in the LA-spawned Steppenwolf should not come as a surprise, however. Growing up in Los Angeles, he had ample opportunities to be part of the fabric of the heady scene that was bursting at the seams with music, venues, and cultural change – particularly on the Sunset Strip, or “the Strip,” which became a magnet for both aspiring and seasoned musicians.
“Los Angeles had a great scene in the ’60s,” he relays. “There were so many clubs to go to, and I got exposed to a couple of great guitarists back then. The Sunset Strip was really happening, and there were young people out there all the time, but especially on weekends. The energy of that time was special. So many bands that actually sounded different from each other.”
Monarch had only been playing guitar for a couple of years when he joined The Sparrows – and he, alongside the new bass player, Rushton Moreve, being “quite a bit younger” than the rest of the band, brought a “wild spirit” that permeated the music.
“We were rehearsing in a small garage under singer John Kay’s apartment in West Hollywood. We were discovered there by a neighbor, Gabriel Mekkler, who was just hired as a producer and, I guess, A&R for ABC/Dunhill Records. It was his idea to change the name of the band to Steppenwolf, named after the Herman Hesse novel.”
As for how the band's career-defining single, Born to be Wild, came to fruition in the studio, Monarch recalls recording in a “little studio called American Recorders in LA”.
“I was using my Fender Esquire guitar into a Fender Concert Amp, kind of like a Super Reverb, but without the reverb, with four ten-inch speakers,” he describes. “It had white, round knobs and was covered in brown Tolex.
“I had turned everything to ten, as there was no eleven back then,” he quips. “Engineers Ritchie [Podolor] and Bill [Cooper] asked me to turn it down because it was too distorted. I don’t think I did, and eventually, they thought it blended with the organ in a cool way.”
The song that would soundtrack the counterculture in Easy Rider (and later end up being played on the moon and even on Mars) and reached second spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart upon its release. In 2018, it was forever cemented in music history after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Guitar World's full interview with Michael Monarch will be published in the coming weeks.
