“Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf

"Born to Be Wild" came from the pen of Mars Bonfire, and Steppenwolf were the first to release it, as a single produced by Gabriel Mekler. It's a hard rock stampede: a revving riff, a snarling vocal and a chorus that sounds like an open road with no speed limit.

The song never actually mentions motorcycles, but once it roared through the 1969 film Easy Rider, it was bolted to biker culture for good. Ever since, it has stood for a leather-jacket, open-throttle attitude in the mainstream and the counterculture alike, the sound of anybody who wants to feel like an outlaw for three minutes.

It carries a bigger claim, too. Some call it the first heavy metal song, and a line in its second verse marks the first time the phrase heavy metal turned up in a rock song, although there it described a motorcycle rather than a style of music. Proto-metal or not, the thunder in it is real.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.