{"id":6778,"date":"2021-06-22T09:58:24","date_gmt":"2021-06-22T14:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=6778"},"modified":"2021-11-27T21:53:56","modified_gmt":"2021-11-28T03:53:56","slug":"musicians-spotlight-series-john-kay-from-rock-star-to-elephants-we-were-all-born-to-be-wild-steppenwolf-to-mauekayfoundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=6778","title":{"rendered":"Musicians Spotlight Series: John Kay: from Rock Star to Elephants, We Were All Born To Be Wild #Steppenwolf to #MaueKayFoundation"},"content":{"rendered":"<!--powerpress_player--><div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_8291\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-6778-1\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3\">https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>\n<p>In the first part of our Musicians Spotlight Series, we bring you John Kay from Steppenwolf Fame which brought us such great hits as Born to be Wild, Magic Carpet Ride, The Pusher and 50 years of John Kay music and his work with NGOs helping Elephants survive as they, too, were Born to be Wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay: from Rock Star to Elephants, We Were All Born To Be Wild #Steppenwolf to #MaueKayFoundation<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Show Summary<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>(Full Text Transcript Below)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay reveals his journey from escaping the Iron Curtain, getting on with limited vision, his passion for music and his love and commitment for wildlife and especially elephants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.steppenwolf.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"254\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image-254x300.jpg\" alt=\"Image of John Kay singing, taken from T-Shirt\" class=\"wp-image-4000\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image-254x300.jpg 254w, https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image-127x150.jpg 127w, https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image.jpg 287w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 254px) 100vw, 254px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Ironically, I first learned about John Kay being legally blind from Dan Gausman, a librarian at State Services for the Blind of Minnesota. A client requested to have the Communications Center record an audio copy of John Kay\u2019s 1994 autobiography, Magic Carpet Ride. This is a service provided to people who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have difficulty in reading the printed word. Dan mentioned that John was legally blind. This I did not know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay explains his vision and how it led him from behind the Iron Curtain to the freedoms of West Berlin, his adventures as a youth and his days at Sight Saving school in Toronto. Canada. Most importantly, John talks about feeding the fire, feeding his passion for music and for the protection of wildlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.steppenwolf.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"262\" height=\"268\" src=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-and-Steppenwolf-image-2.jpg\" alt=\"John Kay and Steppenwolf T-Shirt\" class=\"wp-image-3999\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-and-Steppenwolf-image-2.jpg 262w, https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-and-Steppenwolf-image-2-147x150.jpg 147w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 262px) 100vw, 262px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay is transforming from Rock Star to Wildlife Advocate as his touring days with John Kay and Steppenwolf come to a well-deserved rest after 50 years since the release of the first Steppenwolf album. John is ready to make this transition as he has been devoting his time and proceeds from his touring over the last 10 years towards John and his wife Jutta\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mauekay.org\/\">Maue Kay Foundation<\/a>, and NGOs, Non-Governmental Organization, similar to a Non-profit organization, that focus on the protection of wildlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\" id=\"attachment_4001\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Image-of-Elephants-provided-by-MKF-300x95.jpg\" alt=\"Beautiful image of Elephants provided by the Maue Kay Foundation\"\/><figcaption>Image of Elephants provided by MKF<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Join Jeff Thompson and Pete Lane as they sit down with John Kay and learn about John\u2019s continuing soundtrack of his life, his experiences and his focus on the years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This podcast is over 80 minutes long and we suggest kicking back and enjoy this epic interview with one of the great social and political voices with us today. My son asked me while he drove us home from the John Kay and Steppenwolf concert September 29 in Prior Lake, MN, why don\u2019t today\u2019s bands make statements about causes anymore? I thought to myself and wondered\u2026 is John Kay one of the last?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\" id=\"attachment_4002\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Maue-Kay-Foundation-Logo.jpg\" alt=\"Maue Kay Foundation Logo\"\/><figcaption>Maue Kay Foundation Logo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Here are some links that will let you know more about his music and his foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I suggest starting here,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/steppenwolf.com\/\">Steppenwolf.com<\/a>where you can dive in and find out about everything Steppenwolf, purchase their swag, read articles and more about John Kay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Be sure to get their latest release, a 3 CD set titled,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/artist\/steppenwolf\/id33600\">John Kay and Steppenwolf-Steppenwolf at 50<\/a>. Included in this 3-disk set is an entire CD of John Kay and Steppenwolf live. You will learn and enjoy this collection of hits, and somewhat over-looked songs from 1967 to 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That is where you will find all the music used in this podcast,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/album\/steppenwolf-at-50-1967-2017\/1338000006\">John Kay and Steppenwolf-Steppenwolf at 50.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Follow&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/steppenwolf\">John Kay and Steppenwolf on Facebook<\/a>and on&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.last.fm\/music\/Steppenwolf\">Last.FM<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Be sure to check out&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/steppenwolf.com\/p-4268-john-kay.html\">John Kay\u2019s web site<\/a>. Where you can find links to articles, interviews, his solo music, the elephant sanctuary and the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mauekay.org\/\">Maue Kay Foundation<\/a>and learn about the passion and selflessness that John and Jutta and others are doing to protect wildlife around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And an Elephant size Thank You to John Kay for taking time to conduct this interview and to Charlie Wolf for all that you do and whom I met at the concert in Prior Lake, Minnesota. Glad I could support the band and I love the T-Shirts. By the way, the concert was Great!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thanks for Listening!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You can follow us on Twitter&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/blindabilities\">@BlindAbilities<\/a><br>On the web at&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/\">www.BlindAbilities.com<\/a><br>Send us an&nbsp;<a>email<\/a><br>Get the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/appsto.re\/us\/demUab.i\">Free Blind Abilities App<\/a>&nbsp;on the App Store.<br>Get the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=com.blindabilities.android.blind&amp;hl=en_US\">Free blind Abilities App on the Google Play Store<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Full Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">John Kay: From Rock Star to Elephants, We Were All Born To Be Wild #Steppenwolf to #MaueKayFoundation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>To become aware of how special they are. I\u2019m a big elephant lover you might say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Blind Abilities welcomes John Kay, wildlife activist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>My vision got me probably out of Communist East Germany and my vision very definitely kept me out of Vietnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Who happens to be a rockstar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>They were all telling her, \u201cYou got a legally blind, penniless musician, and that\u2019s your future? I think you can do better than that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John talks about his limited vision, his band, Steppenwolf, one\u2019s inner voice, and following your passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>There\u2019s an old snide remark, what do you call a musician without a girlfriend? You call them homeless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>I would like to thank Dan Guzman of the Communication Center at State Services for the Blind of Minnesota, as Dan informed me that a client had requested the autobiography of John Kay to be converted into audio format. Dan also informed me that John Kay was legally blind, and this started the process that led me to the interview of John Kay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Hey, we all got stuff to deal with, kid, just get on with it. You learn how to figure out workaround solutions for what you\u2019re dealing with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Hello, John Kay. I\u2019m Jeff Thompson, and with me is Pete Lane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Good morning, John. It\u2019s an honor. I\u2019m Pete Lane. I\u2019m in Jacksonville, Florida. Jeff is in \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Minnesota, Pete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, Minnesota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I\u2019m in Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>What\u2019s the tie to Tennessee then?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I lived there for 17 years. In \u201989 my wife and I were a little tired of Los Angeles beehive activity. We said, \u201cIf not here, then where?\u201d To spare the other boring details, we wound up just south of Nashville, Tennessee. In our travels with Steppenwolf we had played there several times. We\u2019d met a lot of friendly people. It\u2019s a beautiful area. Lots of music, obviously. We were out in the country, and lots of privacy, and had a recording studio and our tour bus. We just relocated what we called Wolf World out there. For the following 17 years that was home. It was a good period during our life to be a little bit away from large cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you have an elephant reserve, do you not, still in Tennessee?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I don\u2019t, but Tennessee certainly does. While we lived in Tennessee, we became aware of the elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, which was about, I don\u2019t know, maybe 40 minutes drive from where we lived, which was near a little town called Franklin, Tennessee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Anyway, one thing led to another. Eventually my wife got involved with the board of directors of the sanctuary, and then they\u2019re after our daughter, who\u2019s all about animals, so from childhood wound up becoming a caregiver to three large African elephants. She was there for several years. It was like the Peace Corps slogan, the toughest job you\u2019ll ever love. She did love it, but she\u2019s rather slender in build and developed arthritis. The doctors told her she should quit, which she had to do very reluctantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>However, the sanctuary of course continues doing very well. It\u2019s a wonderful place for often abused, neglected, sick, old circus and zoo elephants to finally live amongst their own kind without any human intrusion. They have 2,700 acres of rolling hills and woods and waterholes for them to swim in. Once you get to know elephants, because our foundation is involved with African elephants-focused NGOs in Africa, in Kenya, Tanzania, and the like, once you get to spend a real amount of time with them out in the wild, in those places where they aren\u2019t traumatized by poaching, you become aware of how special they are. I\u2019m a big elephant lover you might say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was reading on your website where you posted the awareness of the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee and how they live a lifestyle that they never get to live when they\u2019re held in captivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Exactly. It used to be this way, and I don\u2019t suppose that has changed, the number one killer of captive elephants was foot rot, because unlike in the wild, where they walk up to 50 miles on relatively soft, sandy soil, in captivity they are often forced to stand on a solid concrete floor, and that\u2019s not good for them, so eventually they \u2026 One of the rescues, Tina, which came from the Vancouver Zoo, when she arrived, they had to \u2026 I was gonna say, one of the sandal makers, I can\u2019t think of the name of the brand right now, they actually made a pair of very soft boots for her because she was suffering so badly. Unfortunately, she died a couple of days before those boots arrived. I saw the bottom of her feet, which were just terrible situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>They don\u2019t belong in captivity unless you can have a relatively good number of elephants together in a large area where they can at least simulate the kind of life they would have in the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>2,700 acres is a large area. Do you know how many animals are on the preserve?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I think at the moment they have somewhere in the neighborhood of close to a dozen Asian elephants. They fenced off a section of the 2,700 acres for the African elephants, which are much larger, and thank goodness in relatively good health. They\u2019re larger and younger and very active, so they keep them away from the Asians, that are older and more docile. I believe right now they have about four Africans, because the Nashville Zoo I think has two of them that are there at the sanctuary now. I don\u2019t know whether they will stay there long-term, but that\u2019s what\u2019s going on there right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It\u2019s quite an amazing place, and so much has been learned about how to look after these creatures, and from the standpoint of veterinarian care. The research, both in the wild and in places like the sanctuary, on elephants continues, because there\u2019s still much to be learned, even though people like Joyce Poole has been studying their communication skills and language and rumbles and all of that for over 40 years. They\u2019re still working on figuring out what goes on that\u2019s beyond the grasp of science right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>We\u2019ll be sure to put a link in the show notes for that. John, your story is quite interesting. I\u2019m doing some research, and I just came across Feed the Fire. I was wondering, hearing about that elephant sanctuary, your foundation, it seems like you stuck to your passions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah. That\u2019s quite observant and quite spot-on, because long ago as a child, the first time I became aware of something that is I suppose related to passion or rooted in passion is when I discovered the power of music. That oddly enough was \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>My father had been killed in Russia a month before I was born. When the Russian Army advanced on the area where my mother and I lived, I was just a few months old, she took me, and we got on a train headed west, and wound up eventually in a little town that wound up behind the Iron Curtain, and hence we were living under Communism until I was five. When we escaped, my mother and I, by paying off some people and getting through the border, which was patrolled with soldiers and all of that, anyway, we made it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The point is that I was about eight or nine years old, living in West Germany, under democracy and freedom, and my mother took me to hear, of all things, an all-male, a Russian choir, the Don Cossacks. This was in a church with great acoustics. It was just a concert. Some of these ancient, incredibly sad songs that these 15 guys with these amazing voices were singing reduced me to tears, even though I didn\u2019t understand a word of Russian. I still don\u2019t. In fact, my mother was somewhat concerned. It introduced me to the power of music when it connects with your internal core.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Oddly enough, less than maybe four years later, I had a similar but very opposite experience when I first heard on American Armed Force Radio Network the likes of Little Richard and Elvis and all the rest of the rock-and-roll pioneers. I just had goosebumps, chicken skin from head to toe. Once again, I didn\u2019t understand a word of what they were singing, but the music was so primal, so intense, so full of just joy of living I\u2019d say. That was just something that I had to have more of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I became obsessed with trying to find this music wherever I could, and of course at a certain point started to have the delusion that someday I could be on the other side of the ocean and learn how to speak English and get a guitar and do this sort of thing myself. Obviously conventional wisdom and the adults were saying, \u201cYeah, sure, kid. In the meantime, pay attention in school.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>It\u2019s quite obvious you didn\u2019t lose that glitter in your eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah. That\u2019s I think very important. It\u2019s one thing that concerns me with regards to young people that are raised with constant sensory stimulation and having a virtual life through their little screens that they\u2019re attached to all the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I remember once talking to university students, and I asked them, \u201cBe honest. How many of you fear silence?\u201d A number of hands went up, because a lot of them, from the time they\u2019re toddlers, whether it\u2019s TV or the background music of the supermarket or wherever, whenever there\u2019s silence, it astounds them, and it concerns them. I finally said, \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that unless you learn to find some quiet spots, you may never hear a voice that\u2019s in you that is trying to tell you there\u2019s more out there. In other words, if you don\u2019t hear that voice, you may live a totally external life all your life, instead of finding something that is \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That is the humbling experience that I\u2019ve had, running into people who all their lives have not been seeking the spotlight, but have been from early on moved by a passion to work on behalf of something greater than themselves. I\u2019m specifically talking about the various people that in the last 15 years, through our efforts in various parts of the world, we\u2019ve had the great pleasure and honor even to rub shoulders with. It\u2019s a humbling thing to see people who are not about themselves, but on behalf of others. You learn from that sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>There are a lot of young people who have that capability also. I\u2019m often wondering whether they aren\u2019t so barraged with constant Twittering and social media and whatever else is going on that they never have a quiet moment. That\u2019s not necessarily a good thing in my opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>I was talking to Pete earlier, and I was dissecting your song, but you just answered the question for me, that solitude is no sacrifice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s right. You picked up on that. That song has been used by a number of people who wanted to play something for their daughter or son that were about to leave home and go to university or go far afield to do something on distant shores. That\u2019s basically it. \u201cSolitude\u2019s no sacrifice, to catch a glimpse of paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That\u2019s an awesome song. I really like that song. Pete, you\u2019ve got some questions I\u2019m sure. I\u2019ve been jumping in here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John, I\u2019m just honored to be speaking with you. I\u2019m in my late 60s and of course grew up with you and your music and of course Steppenwolf. Until recently I had no idea of how enduring you have been and how diverse you are in your view of the world and society. I just want to compliment you on that for starters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Thank you. That\u2019s very kind of you and generous. I would hope and think that I will continue to be still in a lifelong learning process of clumsily following the footsteps left by others that have preceded me with their examples of how to nurture their humanity and how to have a purpose in life beyond just mindless consumption and amusing themselves, as the book once said, amusing ourselves to death. It\u2019s something that keeps the inner flame burning, and been very, very fortunate in many different ways, currently still healthy, thank goodness. Any day when you remain vertical is a good day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>There are so many out there who lead with their example. I have met some of them who have been inspirational. Every so often, some young people come along, say, \u201cHey, I came across your music, and it has given me some stuff to listen to when I have to get over one of the speed bumps of life, and thank you for that.\u201d It\u2019s a generational thing. I\u2019m still focused on the ones ahead of me. There are younger ones that have found something in what we have to offer of a value that went beyond just musical wallpaper, but with no real substance that you can use for your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>There\u2019s so many out there who have written songs and played music practically all their lives, which has given sustenance to the rest of us, or the listeners, and have had personal little anthems that we go to when we need to have a moment of rejuvenation through music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I sometimes talk to people who say, \u201cYou\u2019re talking about all these other people doing great work, making music that gives great pleasure and joy to people. It\u2019s not a bad way to make a living either.\u201d While I agree with that, music will continue to be something that I do on occasion, meaning once in a while I have a desire to write a song or two, irrespective of whether they will ever be recorded and commercially released. I\u2019ve performed at fundraisers and things like that. Music continues very definitely to be part of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>By the same token, I am very much now focused on bringing the word to a lot of people, who once they know what we are losing, meaning wildlife, we\u2019ve had this number of times, we\u2019re talking to people who are well-educated, quite engaged, very successful in what they do, and when we talked about that an elephant was being killed every 15 minutes for their tusks and that we, at this rate, 15 years from now, may no longer have any living in the wild, and the same holds for the rhinos and numerous other species, they\u2019re aghast. They\u2019re, \u201cI didn\u2019t know that. This is terrible. Who\u2019s doing anything about it?\u201d Then further to that, \u201cWho can I trust with my money if I want to help?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s really what our little foundation is about. We have been supporting various entities. I think at this point we\u2019re at 16 different NGOs we support annually for about 15 years. We\u2019re the ones who are a little bridge between the boots on the ground who are fighting to preserve what remains, and those who are willing to help provide it, there\u2019s some assurance that their money will go to the boots on the ground. We\u2019re the ones who can vouch for a number of wonderful people at NGOs. Because we have born witness to the work they do, we\u2019re going to back to Africa next year to look in on several of the NGOs again. That\u2019s my role of both my wife and I.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>In fact, this year\u2019s the last year that Steppenwolf will be performing. We have six more engagements to play, the last one October 14, and after that the wolf will go into hibernation, if you want to put it that way. My emphasis is now on \u2026 I assume both of you are familiar with TED Talks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Mm-hmm (affirmative).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>With that in mind, although the following is not a TED Talk per se, because those talks are limited to 18 minutes in length, mine is more like an hour and 15 minutes, but what it is, it\u2019s similar to a TED Talk, in the sense that I\u2019m up on stage giving my story, while behind me on a screen there are many, many still images and short video clips and so on. The whole thing is called Born To Be Wild: From Rock Star To Wildlife Advocate, John Kay of Steppenwolf and His Journey of Transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It basically starts with my early life and how I got out from behind the Iron Curtain and was enthralled with American rock-and-roll when I grew up as a teenager in West Germany and made it to Canada as an immigrant, got my first guitar, and then got into music more and more, and of course the story of Steppenwolf, and then how gradually over time we, my wife and I, through our travels, went to Cambodia, where we saw the killing fields, and we got involved with building a school there, which was the start of our foundation, and then Africa and so on down the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Basically at the end of this presentation, towards the end, after having shown what we do, where, and who is doing what in Africa and Asia and Borneo and so on, it\u2019s basically a pitch of saying, \u201cNow that you know, if you didn\u2019t know already, you can use our website as a gateway to other NGOs or you can support what we do directly, but do it for your grandchildren\u2019s sake or do it to honor the 2,000, almost, African rangers that have been killed by poachers in the last 12 years, or do it simply because our fellow living beings have very little left to call their home, and they too have a right to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Unbelievable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That\u2019s awesome. I love the way you talk about your passion that you even have today. Pete and I both met because we had a passion for recording. One story that really caught my attention is when you were in Toronto and you received your reel-to-reel, and I don\u2019t think you listened to the books as much as you wanted it for recording music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>You got that right. It was a scam from the get-go. I said, \u201cI don\u2019t need talking books. I can read books, even though I gotta read them with my nose.\u201d I said, \u201cI could use it for something else.\u201d I was just simply appalled at what came out of that dinky little speaker that was built into that Wollensak tape recorder, because when I tried my hand at recording my first efforts of playing guitar and singing, I said, \u201cI don\u2019t sound like that, do I? This is terrible.\u201d It was sheer ego that kept me going, said, \u201cOne way I can get better if I keep at it.\u201d Hope springs eternal. Sometimes you simply have more luck than talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John let\u2019s talk a little bit more if you don\u2019t mind about your eye condition. Talk about that a little bit. Let\u2019s start if you don\u2019t mind a little bit in your early years and maybe focus in Toronto when you were moved into is it Deer Park, that Deer Park school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah, that was the sight-saving classes. It\u2019s a strange thing, with respect to my eyes. When I was still a baby, lying in one of these carriages that back in those days were typical, I think the English call them prams or whatever, living in this tiny little town in what was then East Germany, I would cry whenever the sun was in my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I was older, my mother took me to an ophthalmologist, and he said, \u201cHe obviously has very, very poor vision and he\u2019s very light-sensitive.\u201d The only thing he could think of at the time was that, \u201cHis condition might improve if he had a better diet,\u201d because at that time we were on food rations, and because of where we were, we were eating herring morning, noon, and night, boiled, fried, stewed herring, coming out of the ears. I never touched a fish again after that until I was 40-something years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>This is the important point about this. My mother took that as a, \u201cMaybe the doctor\u2019s right.\u201d It was that that caused her to take the risky chance of getting caught, imprisoned, or shot by, in the middle of the night, together with about half a dozen other people, getting smuggled by a couple of border guides that worked for the railroad and knew how to time the searchlights from the watchtowers and the dog patrols and everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We got through, and then it turned out that, this was in Hanover, Germany, West Germany, and of course this was after the war, there were still schools in short supply, having been destroyed, and so there were classes 50 children large, two shifts, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I was not doing well. It was my mother who was working as a seamstress who managed to get me into the Waldorf school, the private school, which was banned under Hitler because it was far too humanitarian, but which looked after me. There I blossomed, and the eyes didn\u2019t play as big a role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It wasn\u2019t until I came to Toronto that I was back in public school. I didn\u2019t speak English yet and couldn\u2019t read what was on the blackboard. The school officials got in touch with the CNIB, Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and they said, \u201cWe have these sight-saving classes in a, it\u2019s just one large schoolroom segmented into two or three different grades, at a public school called Deer Park School, in the northern part of Toronto.\u201d That\u2019s where I went for about two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The primary benefit was that, yes, they had textbooks with extra-large print and all that, but I learned English during those years, not just in school, but because of my obsession with listening to the radio all the time, looking for music that connected, I was always having to try and make out what these speed-rapping DJs were saying, because they were yakking a mile a minute. Between radio and the Deer Park School, I got to the point where I got a handle on things. Of course during that period at that school, I was also given this tape recorder on loan. As I mentioned before, I immediately pressed that into service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That\u2019s really impressive, just the journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>One thing I should add, by the way, was that nobody really knew what was the matter with me. I went to a Toronto University I think, the medical department, ophthalmology I think it was. There I was treated like a guinea pig. They brought in all these medical students and take a look in my eyes and everything. They said, \u201cOh, you\u2019re totally colorblind. Let\u2019s see here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>They had one of those books where every page is made out of these little mosaic little pebbles with different colors.\u201d Embedded amongst them, so to speak, would be a combination of these colored tiles that spelled something, a letter or a number or something. At the beginning of the book, the contrast between the primary colors versus whatever the number or the letter was very stark. I said, \u201cYeah, that, it says six, okay.\u201d As we went from page to page, the differences in terms of contrast became more and more subdued to the point where by page whatever, I don\u2019t see anything other than just one page of all these little mosaic tiles and pebbles. They would say, \u201cNo, actually there is a light yellow whatever something or other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>They figured out later down the line that I was an achromat, achromatopsia, that as an additional bonus with that condition comes extreme light sensitivity. Then finally, I also have a congenital nystagmus, which is the eyes shaking all the time. You do the best you can with what you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Now in \u201963, and this has a point with respect to my vision, my vision got me probably out of Communist East Germany, and my vision also probably, in fact very definitely, kept me out of the U.S. Army and probably out of Vietnam, because when in \u201963 at age 19 my mother and stepdad, my mom had remarried, decided to move from Toronto to Buffalo, New York, because my stepdad had something going on business-wise, and I joined them there, the first letter that hit our mailbox was from the draft board. Of course I had to show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Welcome to the States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Of course somebody once said that the military intelligence is an oxymoron. I\u2019m not the judge on that, but I will tell you that I had something that made me scratch my head, namely when I was there and I was to have a complete physical, I tried to tell the man that I was legally blind, and of course he said, \u201cWe\u2019ll get to that, son.\u201d After a very, very thorough, top to bottom, in and out physical examination, he said, \u201cNow read those letters on that chart on the wall.\u201d I said, \u201cWhat chart?\u201d He said, \u201cYou can\u2019t see the chart?\u201d I walked a little closer, said, \u201cI see it now.\u201d \u201cWhat do you see?\u201d \u201cIf I can step a few steps closer \u2026 \u201d \u201cYeah, you can.\u201d \u201cOkay. I think there\u2019s a large capital A at the top, and the rest is guesswork.\u201d He harrumphed about, \u201cYou could\u2019ve said \u2026 Never mind.\u201d My designation was 4F. I asked him, \u201cWhat does that mean really?\u201d He said, \u201cSon, in your case it pretty well stands for women and children first, before you. Nobody\u2019s gonna put a rifle in your hands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It was one of those things where during those times, because in short order I went to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, to hear the greats, and I was amongst tens of thousands of young people my age, of course many of them, at least 50% or more, being young men. The draft in the Vietnam War was very much on everybody\u2019s mind. I could relate to their concerns about going off to a foreign land. This case, I would imagine my eye condition did me a service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That was probably a baptism into the social issues of the United States coming from Toronto for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s very true. That is very true. Sometimes you have the aha moment decades after it was already rather obvious. In certain ways, what makes up my musical background in terms of my self-taught things, is to some extent rooted in the early \u201960s folk music revival, in my visits to not just the 1964 but also the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. \u201965 of course I saw Dylan go electric. That is that I had already, because of my baptism with rock-and-roll, by the early \u201960s rock-and-roll had lost a lot of its punch and we had the pretty boy Philadelphia singer syndrome, like Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and the like. There wasn\u2019t much on the radio that I could really sink my teeth into. Here comes the folk music revival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>While living in Buffalo, a folkie says, \u201cIf you really want to know the roots of all this stuff, go down to the main library, they have a music department, which has all of the Library of Congress recording that John and Alan Lomax made in the field. You can listen to Appalachian Delta music. You can hear Delta blues, whatever.\u201d I did that. They would let you take a few albums home every week and trade them out for other ones. I went through the entire thing and gave myself a bit of an education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Then when I went to the Newport Folk Festival and saw some of those still alive, those recordings I\u2019d heard, I didn\u2019t know that McKinley Morganfield, who was recorded in the Delta by the Lomaxes, was actually Muddy Waters. Here he was with his band playing at Newport, and all of those kind of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The blues, which as Muddy once said, \u201cThe blues had a baby and they called it rock-and-roll,\u201d so the blues immediately spoke to me, particularly when I came across some of the lyrics of the chain gang songs and other things. There\u2019s a powerful song about \u2026 The lyrics go, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go down ole Hannah.\u201d Hannah was the name they gave to the sun, \u201cAnd don\u2019t you arise no more, and if you rise in the morning, bring judgment day,\u201d because these are guys, they hated her, because the sun came up, they were forced to work in the field, out of the prison, the chain gangs, and they didn\u2019t get any rest until the sun went down. I learned that the blues had a lot more to offer than just, \u201cWoke up this morning, my chicken walked across my face,\u201d and all the rest of the stuff they\u2019d write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The other thing was great, was that the likes of Dylan and numerous others of the times were following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and writing new songs about the here and now that was of interest to our own age group, because this was the time when the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi. I remember hearing, let\u2019s see, I can\u2019t think of his name right now, it\u2019ll come to me later, he was just like Dylan, a topical, as we called them, we never called them protest songs, topical songwriter. I remember he sang it, had just written it, about the killing of these three, at a topical song workshop in the afternoon. His name was Ochs, Phil Ochs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Phil Ochs, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Phil Ochs, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Suicide some years later. The refrain of the song was, \u201cAnd here\u2019s to the land that you\u2019ve torn the heart out of. Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That rings through with your Monster song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah, because the thing that became obvious to me was that songs can have content which is reflective of what\u2019s on people\u2019s minds. One of the first things we experienced as Steppenwolf was a baby band, when we went on our first cross-country tour and we were still approachable, so to speak, by long-haired kids in bellbottoms who wanted to say hello after the show, a lot of them said, \u201cThose first two albums of yours we got, you\u2019re saying on our behalf some of the things that worry us or that we are concerned with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s the first time we had positive reinforcement that what we were writing about was not just our own individual personal opinions, but it was reflective of what was on the minds of many of those in our own age group. Of course I had experienced that at Newport. It was a galvanizing experience to be amongst 20,000 young people, and they\u2019re listening to somebody like a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan, and others who were writing about what was going on in our country in the world. Like JFK once said, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the role of the artist, to remind us of the potential we have yet to reach,\u201d in terms of being a just society and all the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When it came time for us to start writing our own songs, we had of course witnessed, in fact I\u2019d played in a couple of the same coffeehouses as a journeyman folk musician solo act in Los Angeles with the likes of David Crosby and then still called Jim, later Roger, McGuinn and the rest, who formed of course The Byrds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>The Byrds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Their first album was by and large electric versions of Bob Dylan songs. In fact I was at Ciro\u2019s nightclub when The Byrds played, when Dylan showed up and played harmonica with them. That was a photograph on the back of their first album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The point is that I took from there, why couldn\u2019t even rock music have lyrics that go beyond \u201coowee baby\u201d and the typical? That\u2019s why our first album had songs like The Pusher and The Ostrich and Take What You Need, which was really about the environment, and later, things like Don\u2019t Step On The Grass Sam and None of Your Doing, which was on the second album, which was about a Vietnam soldier coming home and nobody understands him and he can\u2019t deal with what he had witnessed. Then of course eventually came the Monster album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The thing with the Monster album, which was very, very successful, popular on the college campuses, were all these demonstrations which were going on against the war in the campuses, and then of course the horrific Kent State shooting. These were things where what we had to say resonated with a lot of young people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>What I found interesting was that we after so many years were no longer playing that song as part of our show. Then came the Great Recession, 2007-08, and all of a sudden, a couple of things happened. I can\u2019t think of his name right now, he\u2019s been a stalwart writer for Rolling Stone for several decades, from the early days on, and he had posted a thing, something like, \u201cI went back to listening to Steppenwolf\u2019s Monster album and I was astounded how appropriate it is in the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That coincided shortly with getting more and more requests on our website via email primarily, \u201cPlease start playing Monster again.\u201d From about 2009 onward, we\u2019ve been playing it ever since. It\u2019s rare that that song does not get a standing ovation in the middle of the show. Of course it\u2019s aided and abetted by visuals that accompany our live performance, not every song, but many. In the case of Monster, it is a 10-minute film that illustrates pretty well what the song, line by line, lyrically is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I remember when we did it for the first time in 2009, our sound man, who\u2019s been with us now for over 30 years, and he said, \u201cJohn, I had the most weird experience tonight, because there was this strange situation with Monster. It was like I was watching a movie that had a soundtrack that a live band was playing, and instead of a narrator telling me what the story was, you were simply singing the story. It was just a really intense experience.\u201d It\u2019s been like that ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Sometimes you write something, and it goes out there like a kid leaving home, and you have no idea what it\u2019s doing out there, and then all of a sudden it comes back and say, \u201cI\u2019m still here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>The prodigal song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It\u2019s been like that for the last 10 years. It\u2019s a song that seems to very much resonate about what we are dealing with right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It\u2019s funny, John, Jeff and I, again, were speaking before you connected with us this afternoon, and I had prepared a question along those lines. As you did earlier in this interview, you\u2019ve answered it. Let me ask you this question. It\u2019s a slight variation on what we just spoke of. For those of you who don\u2019t know, Monster is just a dynamite song. It chronicles the country, the United States from its inception to what was then modern-day U.S. back in 1970 I believe, \u201971, early \u201970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My question is this. If you were to write that song today, would you title it anything different?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>No, because in my opinion the Monster has almost taken human shape now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Donald Trump:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The American Dream is dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Richard Nixon:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m not a crook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Donald Trump:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We will make America great again!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Richard Nixon:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m not a crook. I\u2019m not a crook. I\u2019m not a crook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just a dynamite song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>There\u2019s another long big song. It was big on the album I bought. You had over I think it was 20-minute long, The Pusher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah, that thing. There\u2019s a story to be told about that, I\u2019ll tell you. You\u2019re referring to the so-called early Steppenwolf album, a vinyl album obviously, back in those days. One side was that 20-minute version of The Pusher. That whole thing came to be because it was really a performance done by the band The Sparrow, which I had joined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I was in the early \u201960s, like so many others, with a guitar, hitchhiking around, playing wherever they\u2019d let me, in coffeehouses and the like, when I returned after a year of being in Los Angeles, hanging out at the Troubadour, doing various things, meeting Hoyt Axton, learning The Pusher from him, etc, and wound up in Toronto again, and York Village at that time, section of Toronto had exploded into this area of just coffeehouses and clubs, all sorts of things. While I played at a coffeehouse as a solo act, I bumped into this Canadian band called The Sparrows, with an S, plural at the time. We joined forces. I started to perform The Pusher with an electric band instead of just acoustically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The Sparrows eventually left Canada, because in those days most people did, where there was Joni Mitchell and Neil Young or others, and wound up in the States. We played in New York for a while, got a record deal that went nowhere. I kept badgering them that having seen the formation of The Byrds in L.A., that we ought to go to California. That\u2019s what we did eventually, and wound up, through various reasons I won\u2019t take time to explain, in the Bay area. There we played on the weekends usually the Avalon Ballroom or the Fillmore Ballroom. During the week we would play different clubs. One of them was a permanently beached paddle wheeler ferry boat in Sausalito called The Ark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We were now amongst all of these Bay area bands that liked to stretch out and experiment and jam and do different things. We said, \u201cHey, we can play songs that are longer than four or five minutes.\u201d We started to do different things. One of them was this ad-libbed version of The Pusher, which was preceded by us doing different instrumental experiments. Steve Miller would come by and sit in and play all the different things. One of the things we\u2019ll always remember is that regularly the Hells Angels would come, drop acid, lie down on the dance floor, and stay all night listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We also played a club called The Matrix. Unbeknownst to us, the manager of the club had a couple of microphones suspended in the ceiling. When Steppenwolf later were moving forward into the \u201968 and \u201969, when we were quite successful with our first couple albums, we were being badgered to go back into the recording studio, because the label was always hungry for a new product. We had a couple record contracts that obligated us to deliver two albums a year, which was in hindsight ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Anyway, the point is that the label said, \u201cThis young man, or this guy showed up, and he has these tapes that he recorded, unbeknownst to you, when you guys were still called The Sparrows, from a show you played at The Matrix in San Francisco. We would like to put it out as a collector\u2019s item called Early Steppenwolf.\u201d We listened to it. Of course you can imagine that with a couple of microphones suspended from the ceiling, this was, yeah, a collector\u2019s item for those who must just for bragging rights have to have one of everything, to be able to say, \u201cI got everything they ever did.\u201d We hated that. We hated it then, but it bought us time. It bought us time in the studio, because when that thing was released, we got busy on writing and eventually recording what became the Monster album. That was a major step forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Yes, it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fascinating story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John, I want to go back to you told a story about how kids in school would bully you, but you took their names, you remembered, and you would get them back somehow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>It wasn\u2019t so much in school. What would happen is, like just about everywhere in the world, including the States these days, soccer, what they called football, every kid plays it. They play it barefoot in Africa. Whatever. We did too, meaning the kids in the street in West Germany when I was young. There was a vacant lot next to our little apartment building, and that\u2019s where we played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>During the day, with the sun in my eyes, even with my dark glasses, that wasn\u2019t so cool, but the moment the sun started going down, during twilight hours, I\u2019m like a nocturnal creature that can make do with very little light. My eyes open up. I don\u2019t squint. I can see much better, not further, just more comfortably I can see things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I would join the kids playing soccer. When they figured out that I couldn\u2019t always see what was going on, there\u2019s an 11-meter penalty kick that\u2019s part of the rules, and so when it was my turn to make that kick, some wise ass would put a half a brick in front of the ball, so I wouldn\u2019t see it. I\u2019d come with just regular street shoes, no special athletic shoes, and take a run at shooting this ball, and of course, wham, would run my toes right into that brick-<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Ouch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>\u2026 holding my foot and hopping around on one leg, doing a Daffy Duck, \u201cWoo! Woo!\u201d That did not go down well with me. I was fairly big for my size always, tall. They then of course saw that I was gonna come after them. They also knew that if they managed to run a certain distance, I could no longer find them. I had to learn to say, \u201cThis is not the time.\u201d Two or three days would go by, and they would have forgotten about it, and whoever the instigator was would be doing something, and then I would go over there and deck them. They would be, \u201cOh man, what was that for, man? I didn\u2019t do \u2026 \u201d \u201cYes, you did, and I did not forget, but I hope you will remember this,\u201d and they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>I remember seeing your album covers. I collected albums. There was one of you leaning back, and you\u2019re very tall, the way the angle was on it. You wore the sunglasses. When I thought of artists, musicians, I go through Roy Orbison and other people that wore the sunglasses on stage and stuff, I never thought of you. When someone brought it to my attention, State Services for the Blind here, some client wants your book recorded, so they\u2019ll take volunteers, record chapter by chapter for the person to listen to. They contacted me, said, \u201cHey, John Kay, he\u2019s visually impaired.\u201d I went, \u201cOh, that explains the sunglasses,\u201d maybe for the lights on stage or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Absolutely the case. I had learned over time, since I wore dark glasses during the day, certainly outdoors, I got in the habit of keeping them on, because I went, \u201cSpotlights and stage lights, they\u2019re pretty bright, and sometimes it\u2019s difficult for me to see the guitar fret board, where my fingers go and everything, and so I\u2019ll just keep the dark glasses on. Besides, some pretty cool people seem to be wearing them, and so that\u2019s just part of the persona.\u201d Over time, meaning literally decades, I learned that I could avoid, provided the spotlights were mounted high enough with a downward angle, I could look under them in a sense, look at the audience rather than up into the bleachers. Gradually I was able to dispense with them on stage, although the moment we play outdoors they go right back on. In fact I have one pair that\u2019s damn near as dark as welding goggles when things get really super sunny, Africa\u2019s sun is very bright, or the snow is very reflective, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Of course I remember one time, we were never the darlings of Rolling Stone, and so there was a negative review of one of our albums. The guy said, I\u2019m paraphrasing, \u201cAs far as John Kay\u2019s jive sunglasses are concerned,\u201d he went on about something else. Actually, one of our managers felt compelled to write them a letter and point out that those glasses have a purpose for being on my face. He\u2019s just like everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I was a kid in West Germany when we first got there, I had a key around my neck, because my mother was a seamstress in other people\u2019s homes, so making a living until she remarried, and I had to learn how to get around, to get on this streetcar to get to there, because I was at a daycare center run by the Swedish Red Cross and I had to make my way back home and I couldn\u2019t read the street signs. You figure things out, there\u2019s this kind of a building on that corner, and markers that you imprint into your memory banks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>You have to remember, this is a time, post World War II, the Soviet Union alone lost 20 million people. In Hanover in 1949 and \u201950 and \u201951, there were tons of people, legs and arms missing and crutches and this and that, those who managed to survive the war in some semblance. It was basically a mindset of, \u201cHey, we all got stuff to deal with, kid. Just get on with it.\u201d You learned how to figure out workaround solutions for what you\u2019re dealing with. I\u2019m certainly one of millions who are having to make adjustments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I remember we had a dear neighbor in Tennessee was a Vietnam veteran, Marine Corps, and he was in a wheelchair. He had to overcome his anger and started to meditate and do other things. He said to me, \u201cHey John, it\u2019s not the hand that\u2019s dealt you, it\u2019s how you play the hand that\u2019s dealt you.\u201d He married, had a wonderful daughter. He became a cotton farmer and somehow got onto his tractor, and like so many out there, that okay, he\u2019s not perfect, but what are you gonna do with what you got?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John, regarding your visual impairment these days, do you use technology, computer, smartphone, anything along those lines? If so, do you use any kind of adaptive tools or screen enlargement features, anything like that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I\u2019m lucky enough in the sense that most standard issue devices have features that work just fine. I have a fairly large flat-panel monitor on my PC. Of course with the zoom feature and other things, I can make the font, what I\u2019m reading, as well as what I may be writing, email and Word documents or whatever, whatever I want. The iOS, I have a phone, I have a iPad, they have a zoom feature that\u2019s just marvelous. I use that when needed. Some things with Siri or Chicano or something, in the PC world you can actually just ask for certain things to be brought to the screen. I\u2019m learning how to do that more and more. It\u2019s a great convenience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I really don\u2019t have any problems. I\u2019ve flown all over the world to meet my band mates on my own. I\u2019ve learned to do \u2026 That was a big deal for me, because of \u2026 One of you mentioned you had been to our foundation\u2019s website. There are a number of videos about the things that we support, and we have witnessed and the wildlife that we see and so on. All of that was shot by me, edited by me, and then narrated by me. Now granted my wife, who is a fine photographer and had no colorblindness like I do, I ask her sometimes, \u201cWhat about this?\u201d \u201cWe can tweak that a little, whatever.\u201d Other than a little color assistance, I do all that myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The reason I can do it primarily is because there are several brands of prosumer or even professional camcorders that have up to 20x optical zoom lens, which gives you an incredible reach from where you are to get a closeup of whatever\u2019s in the distance, an elephant, whatever it may be. I use it like a pair of binoculars, because I remember one time we were in Africa and our guide was asking my wife, \u201cHe\u2019s constantly looking through that thing. Is he always shooting?\u201d She says, \u201cNo no no. Instead of picking up a pair of binoculars, then finding something he wants to shoot, putting down-\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>\u201c\u2026 the binoculars, picking up his camera, he just uses that zoom lens of his like a pair of binoculars, and when he sees something, he just pulls the trigger and starts recording.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That\u2019s great. That\u2019s neat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s my workaround solution for that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John, there\u2019s so much information on your website. I was going through it. That\u2019s how I found out about the elephants and your foundation. I also was reading your question and answer, which any of the listeners who are out there, go to his website and check it out, the question and answer, because it answers so many questions. One of them was when someone mentions you are a legend, I loved your response to that. You would say it to if you met Chuck Berry or someone else or something. It was just such a humbling thing that you \u2026 Then I believe you met your wife in \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Toronto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Yeah, in Toronto. Usually when you hear about rock stars and these legends, they\u2019ve gone through wives, divorces. You\u2019re still together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We are still together. I was a member of the aforementioned Canadian band in Toronto called The Sparrows. We were playing Downtown Toronto at a place. Between sets, our bass player said, \u201cHey, my girlfriend is here, sitting over there at that table, and she brought her girl friend. Why don\u2019t you join us for a drink or something?\u201d I went over there, and I met this young woman by the name Jutta, spelled J-U-T-T-A. She was from Hamburg, Germany, where she had already as a teenager seen the band that later was to name itself the Beatles and numerous American rock-and-roll stars at The Star-Club in Hamburg. We had some things in common. I liked her a lot. I followed her home that night and moved in with her. We\u2019ve been together ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>The longest one-night stand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah. The thing is that I, like so many others in the rock-and-roll world, being in our early 20s when we caught a wave as Steppenwolf and we were out there on the road, there\u2019s a degree of too much ego, testosterone, drugs, and temptations out there. When my wife sometimes, particularly women ask her, \u201cWas it all roses and rainbows? You guys are still together. What\u2019s the secret to your marriage\u2019s longevity?\u201d She\u2019ll look them straight in the eye and say, \u201cThe secret is not getting a divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Rocket science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We\u2019re very much lifelong partners. We have much, much in common in terms of our interests and where we direct our energy and passion and time. The other hand, rather, she has certain intuitive traits that for whatever reason elude me, and I\u2019m more analytical and more logical in some ways. We\u2019re a good fit. It\u2019s the yin and the yang together. We hope to remain like that until we are no longer vertical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>I have a question about this. When you met her, was your eyesight at the time, did you have to explain to her you won\u2019t be driving or something like that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah, you\u2019re right. Just like my thing that I mentioned earlier, when you\u2019re a 12-year-old and you\u2019re fantasizing about becoming a rock-and-roller on the other side of the ocean and being told, \u201cSure, kid,\u201d when I moved in with her, she was a very young, desirable, good-looking woman, some of her friends, there\u2019s an old snide remark in the industry, which is, \u201cWhat do you call a musician without a girlfriend? You call them homeless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I went back to this other girl that I had been living with, to get some of my belongings to bring those over to Jutta\u2019s place, when I showed up at this other girl\u2019s place, there was another guy sitting there already, playing the guitar. I said, \u201cHello, who are you?\u201d He says, \u201cMy name is Neil Young. I just came in from Winnipeg and I\u2019m joining this band called The Mynah Birds.\u201d I said, \u201cOh, cool. I just joined this band called The Sparrows.\u201d In other words, all of us folkies were always looking for a kindhearted woman to put a roof over your head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I moved in with Jutta and we had been together for a while, they were all telling her, \u201cYou got a legally blind, penniless musician, and that\u2019s your future. I think you can do better than that.\u201d Of course the conventional wisdom, they were absolutely right. The chances of all of this working out the way it did, you\u2019d probably get better odds winning the lottery, if you go to Vegas, they would give you better odds for that, but like I said earlier, sometimes you just have more luck than good sense. It all worked out just fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>That\u2019s great. How did you keep your focus? How did you, I keep going back to that song, but your eye on the chart, through all that has gone on with the early Steppenwolf to John Kay and Steppenwolf? What kept you focused?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That\u2019s an interesting story, question rather, because I\u2019ve had to contemplate that before. I\u2019ve never felt the need to go see a shrink. I seemed to always get over whatever emotional speed bumps there were. I suspect that the same deeply rooted passion for certain things, be it music, be it a sense of justice, being easily enraged by injustice, that I think is also the touchstone of other things where anger is the motivator and the engine. In the case of Steppenwolf, was very successful, we had various albums, some more commercially successful than others. It wasn\u2019t all roses and rainbows, but on the whole, it was a segment of my life that was pretty special, obviously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Then came time when the obligations to the band, because of being its primary songwriter and lead singer and front man and all that, became such that I wanted time for the private me, which meant my family, our daughter, who was hardly ever seeing me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When I pulled the plug on Steppenwolf in the late \u201970s, after a rejuvenating period in the mid-\u201970s on a different label, our little family went in our little family van all over the Southwest. We spent a lot of time in Hawaii, on Maui and stuff. That was quite nurturing and very good for me, but I was also, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m gonna do a solo album, this and that.\u201d It was on pause to a certain extent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Then the news reached Jerry Edmonton, the original drummer and co-founder of the band, and friend, that a couple of ex-members of the band were out there using the name Steppenwolf. Then all sorts of boring details as to lawsuits and other things involved, but the news that reached us was generally from fans, saying, \u201cWe went to see what was called Steppenwolf, and it was horrible. People were throwing stuff at them. They\u2019re trashing the name.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We tried to put a stop to these activities, using the legal system, lawsuits and so on. Again, it would take too much time to go into the details. Let\u2019s just say that the results, I kept saying, \u201cThis legal system is limping along like a turtle with a wooden leg. We\u2019re not getting anywhere here with these lawsuits.\u201d It was like whack-a-mole. You\u2019d go after them in this state, they\u2019d pop up in another state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Finally, out of sheer desperation and anger, I had a number of musicians with whom I had been playing as the John Kay Band, I called Jerry and I said, \u201cMan, I want to go out there as John Kay and Steppenwolf, because I want to resurrect the name and rebuild it. We\u2019ll work out something, so you participate financially.\u201d He was already into his photographer and artist mode. That was fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>In 1980 I went out there, driven by the outrage and anger of, \u201cYou guys are destroying something that you didn\u2019t build. I was the one who called everybody up to see if you wanted to what became Steppenwolf, and I\u2019m going to go out there and compete with you guys on the same low-level clubs you guys have played the name down into, see who wins.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We from 1980 on went out there 20 weeks at a time, five shows a week, overnight drives 500 miles, playing in the toilet circuit of bars, where some of them, you wouldn\u2019t want to enter those clubs without a whip and a chair. It was just horrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The mantra was, \u201cYeah, three years ago we were headlining in arenas. That\u2019s not the point. If there are 300 people here tonight at this club who are not above being here to hear us play, and we\u2019re certainly not above us playing for them, so the mission is every night we gotta send people home smiling and telling others, \u2018You missed a really good show,\u2019 and all you can do is grit your teeth that that will eventually,\u201d because we ran into, we distinctly remember, a club on the outskirts of Minneapolis, St. Paul. During the soundcheck time, relatively young guy came over and looked me straight in the face, said, \u201cYou\u2019re not John Kay. He wouldn\u2019t play a shit hole like this.\u201d That was the level to which the name had been played down into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>That really got me aggravated. I said, \u201cI\u2019m gonna kick their butt, not by \u2026 The lawyers are still fighting over this and that, but in the meantime, we\u2019re getting great reviews and we\u2019re going town by town, state by state.\u201d By 1984, after relentless touring in the States, also twice in Canada, by that time we had also released a couple new albums, twice in Europe, once in Australia, we in essence put what we called the bogus Steppenwolf bands out of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>While we were at it, since we were somewhat damaged goods, we said, \u201cThen we\u2019re gonna learn how to mind the store ourselves.\u201d That\u2019s when we had our own music publishing company, our own recording studio, our own merchandise corporation, our own tour bus, huge truck with a triple sleeper, 105 cases of gear, and on and on. To give you an idea of how tight a bond was formed, our entire crew, all four members have been with me for over 30 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Oh wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We took the reigns into our own hands and learned. I did not want to become a paralegal or para-accountant or any of those other things. Almost everybody in our 12-member organization, bus drivers, everybody, wore multiple hats, selling merchandise during the show or whatever. They were all quality people, and we learned how to fend for ourselves, and not just survive, but at a certain point, thrive. We knew exactly where the money was coming from and where it went. Nobody was running off with our loot to Ecuador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>What suggestions would you have for someone today who is interested in music like you were, driving your passion from Little Richard, Chuck Berry, all those people that inspired you to follow your passion? What suggestions in today\u2019s music world would you give to them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Unfortunately, I wish I had some kind of a magic formula to impart to them, but obviously every situation is vastly different, is really I think in the end, I know people who are tremendously talented, vastly more talented than I am, who are not necessarily doing well. I\u2019ve experienced in the early days where someone whose primary talent was to show up at every opportunity to pitch what they had to offer. It\u2019s one of those, \u201cDid you go to that audition yesterday, this morning, or whatever?\u201d \u201cI had a really late-night last night. I\u2019ll go to the next one.\u201d How many opportunities are gonna come your way? It\u2019s one of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The other thing is, do you have the fire in your belly to handle the ego-destroying rejections, because there are probably hundreds, if you were to take a poll of \u2026 Well-known singer-songwriter Nora Jones, that first album, which I love, was rejected I think by every label in town twice. There are stories like that all over the place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>How do you pick yourself up every morning after, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, it\u2019s just not radio-friendly,\u201d or, \u201cYou don\u2019t really fit into our whatever.\u201d You need to have a pretty intense flame of passion about what you are and what you have to offer. You need to be able to handle \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>You may be the one that wins the lottery, where the first attempt reaches the right set of ears and you\u2019ve got a partner in your career moving forward, but most likely you will be like so many of the baby acts these days, and some who have been around already for 10 years plus, which is you have to learn how to wear a lot of different hats, the social media stuff, the pitching your music on YouTube or whatever, to endlessly tour in clubs, to build a following, four of you sleeping in the van with the gear, whatever. It\u2019ll burn you out if you\u2019re not made of something that can handle those rigors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Meantime, you have the temptations of, \u201cI want to have a private life too,\u201d depending on whether you\u2019re a female or male, an artist, \u201cI met somebody I want to share my life with. At some point we want to have children. This band isn\u2019t getting me anywhere.\u201d There are all these things that are strikes against your ability to prevail in this, unless you are one of those who\u2019s willing to take those beatings out there, in terms of the rejection and being often the response that you get from reviewers or whatever is not always positive, particularly if you\u2019re still in the process of really finding and tweaking who you are and what you have to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>If you\u2019re a singer doing other people\u2019s stuff, that\u2019s one thing. If you are a writer and you really have something to say, that may be an advantage in the sense that if it resonates, you may find what we found in the early days, which is, \u201cWow, you\u2019ve become our musical spokesperson. When I play that song, it is my inner voice, having been give voice, by your voice.\u201d If you\u2019re one of those who\u2019s able to put in words what moves you most, and there are lots of others out there that take your music as their personal soundtrack, then it may still be a long slog uphill, but usually that sort of thing spreads readily on social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We have the Wolf Pack. When we played our official 50th anniversary, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the formation of the band, when we played that official concert to commemorate that at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee last August, and the Wolf Pack fan club was notified of that. We had over 300 Wolf Pack fan members coming from all over North America and at least close to 70 or 80 of them coming all the way from Europe. They all know each other. They\u2019re all like the Dead Heads. They have a passion that they share with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>If you are able as an artist to reach people in that kind of way where what you have to offer becomes more than just sheer entertainment, then I think your chances of making a go of it are pretty good. Some of more or less my contemporaries that are still writing, still out there, still loved, John Prine, John Hiatt, if you are one of those, or you\u2019re aspiring to become one of those, I wish you a lot of good fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Sarah McLachlan song Angel, it has moved millions to tears. One of the verses that basically I\u2019m paraphrasing, about when you\u2019re always being told you\u2019re not good enough, you\u2019re basically having the door slammed in your face all the time, and the self-doubt creeps in and nobody seems to get what it is you have to offer, those kind of things, they\u2019re hard on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>You wouldn\u2019t want to be a writer, artist, player, whatever, singer, if you didn\u2019t have some degree of ego that says, \u201cHey, I\u2019ve got something to offer, something to say. I\u2019m up here. Do you like what I got?\u201d That\u2019s rooted to some extent in your ego. If you have that ego under control, wonderful. The ego also gets damaged and gets hurt when they say, \u201cYou suck.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>There are kids out there on the social media platform, as we all know, who not necessarily are doing anything with music, they\u2019re just wanting to be acknowledged as existing in their bedroom somewhere in Ames, Iowa, where there\u2019s nothing except a strip mall, and they get the trolls ranting about them and denigrating them to the point where kids are committing suicide as a result of it. The ego is a fragile thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>You have to ask yourself, \u201cIf I\u2019m going to enter that world of making music and wanting the approval of others, once I\u2019m outside of my family and friends circle, it\u2019s not all gonna be smooth sailing.\u201d You have to ask yourself, \u201cAside from challenge in the music area, do I have the stamina to survive and get through and just grit my teeth and take some of the headwinds and prevail?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Well said. We were talking before we got this interview with you. Thank you so much, because we listened to some interviews that you\u2019ve done. I was thinking, \u201cWow, I wish we could have this conversation with him.\u201d It\u2019s just been awesome. Something that came to mind, you were mentioning all these, John Prine, John Hiatt, these people, and yes, I\u2019m glad Neil Young wasn\u2019t homeless back then, but one of the things that comes to mind is \u2026 I just lost my train of thought trying to get that Neil Young thing in there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Not to worry. My train takes detours all the time. Let\u2019s talk about trains. I am on a train of thought as we sit here. That train of thought was launched when I came across a marker in the middle of Tanzania that said, \u201cMichael Grzimek,\u201d and from the dates chiseled of his birth and death, he must\u2019ve been about 25 when he died. The plaque simply says, \u201cHe gave all he possessed, including his life, for the wild animals of Africa.\u201d I thought, \u201cWow, now that you know what we\u2019re losing, the beauty of this place, the wonderful creatures here, and the people that fight so hard to protect it, what will you do to lend a hand?\u201d That was a moment that launched a train of thought that I\u2019m still on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Your train of thought about Neil Young, he joined this band called the \u2026 The ironic thing was the band that he joined, which was a straight competing band with The Sparrows that I had joined in Toronto, Canada, his band, the Mynah Birds, and his lead singer was Rick James, who later went on to do Super Freak and all those other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Oh Rick James.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The idea that Neil and Rick were in the same band at some point is hard for some people to grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s astounding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>I think that train just came back to me. It was Harry Chapin had an album and a song called Last of the Protest Singers. When I was listening to your stuff, researching you some more, I\u2019ve had your albums and stuff, but I was just going in like, \u201cWow, where have I been? I haven\u2019t been paying attention to this stuff.\u201d That\u2019s what popped into my head was that song, Last of the Protest Singers, from Harry Chapin. It was like, \u201cWhoa, this guy\u2019s good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>I think the pendulum, one of the advantages and also disadvantages of being somewhat longer in the tooth is that if you pay attention during the years that you are granted, you see how unfortunately humanity does not learn from its mistakes, because each subsequent generation is busy with the here and now, and don\u2019t necessarily learn from what has happened in the past. Usually that degree of ignorance is something that enables the same dark side of humanity to raise its ugly head again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>When things get dire, when things start to disintegrate around you, when people are worried about their future, very often that\u2019s when all of a sudden, music that\u2019s more than just, \u201cWe can dance to this,\u201d or, \u201cThis is like an ear worm I can\u2019t get rid of. I\u2019m constantly humming this melody,\u201d but something that says something, there is usually a rekindling of that kind of thing, whether it was the Rage Against the Machine, or as we are talking right now there are a number of young bands out there who are in various ways through their lyrics in essence saying the status quo is not good enough. In fact the status quo is never good enough, and the moment we treat democracy as a spectator sport, we get what we got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well said, John. We\u2019re speaking with John Kay. John is best known perhaps for his role as the lead singer, guitarist, and front man for the iconic band Steppenwolf, but as we\u2019ve learned this afternoon, John is so, so much more. John, we\u2019d like to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to meet with us on Blind Abilities. For one, and I think Jeff would echo my thought, we are very, very happy that you have continued to feed the fire for the last 50-plus years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Thank you very much for those kind words. I would like to say something to those who may be listening to this and who may be or have been Steppenwolf and\/or John Kay supporters through attending our performances or buying our records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We would not have lasted for 50 years without that kind of support. Whereas the hit singles have stopped coming after so many years, from \u201968 onward, the albums continue to sell and the seats in our venues continue to be filled, because we made a connection during those early years with our music and our lyrics, whether it was the Vietnam veterans who had listened to our music on the tiny little single-speaker cassette decks in the bush when they were hunkered down for the night, or whether it was the college students that were demonstrating on the campuses during the Monster album against the war on Vietnam, whether it was the biker community that liked our music because of the film Easy Rider or whoever they are or were. They hung in there with us, through the ups and the downs. The longevity of Steppenwolf is directly attributable to their loyalty. We owe them a great debt of gratitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John, you still have a couple concerts coming up here that you\u2019re beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>We\u2019ve got six more dates. They\u2019re listed at Steppenwolf.com. Our next one actually will be our farewell performance, so to speak, at Sturgis, the annual biker mecca. I think there\u2019s one just outside of Minneapolis at Prior Lake, a couple of state fairs, New York and Salem, Oregon and so on. Probably I\u2019m missing two or three, but they\u2019re available at Steppenwolf.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>We\u2019ll put that link in the show notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We would encourage our listeners to check that out, and if at all possible, make your way to one or more of those shows, as this will be your last opportunity, perhaps, because John said earlier, that the wolf is merely going into hibernation, which might denote a temporary nature. Is there a possibility there, John?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Listen, the last 10 years of John Kay and Steppenwolf performances really were \u2026 In 2007 it had been 40 years. I said to the guys, \u201cIt\u2019s long enough. I have all these other things to do with our foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>In 2008 my wife and I went even further afield, mountain gorilla tracking. Then the obvious hit us, \u201cWait a minute, we\u2019re supporting more and more of these people and NGOs, and at this rate our foundation\u2019s gonna run out of funds very soon, unless \u2026 \u201d I called up the guys in the band and the crew, and I said, \u201cI have this idea. If we play say a dozen or so roughly dates a year, so that my wife and I can take our share of the net proceeds from those performances, we can keep our foundation funded.\u201d They said, \u201cWorks for us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>For the last 10 years, that\u2019s what we have been doing, meaning that I\u2019ve been doing it primarily because it benefits the foundation, and in turn 15 or 16 other NGOs that we support annually financially. That is gonna be somewhat offset hopefully by this Born To Be Wild: From Rock Star To Wildlife Advocate speaking tour thing that I\u2019m planning to engage on. The Wolf is going to no longer be out there playing dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>To grab something absurd out of the air, if the Sultan of Brunei was to call and say, \u201cMy son is just a Steppenwolf fan, and we\u2019ll pay you a million dollars if you, just one more time for us,\u201d hey, what can I do with a million dollars? How many animal protection organizations can I help? That kind of thing. I\u2019ve in fact done a couple of things where I\u2019ve sat in with other bands because it was a fundraiser for worthwhile things. I\u2019m keeping my options open. With respect to the agency accepting offers and the normal venues and all of that, that is not what we\u2019re planning to do after October the 14th, because I suspect that my other interests are going to occupy me fully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>In fact, I\u2019m going to I guess it\u2019s an annual folk music festival conference in Montreal to do a little guest spot and some other things, because I have some solo acoustic performances, again as fundraisers and so on. I enjoyed going back to what for me is like the early days, before there was Steppenwolf, or the idea of perhaps playing a selected group of festivals in Europe and North America as a solo performer, I may do that to not get too stale with respect to, \u201cWhat\u2019s that thing in the corner there? Oh, it\u2019s a guitar, yeah. Do I still know how, which end is which?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Gibson, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Yeah. That\u2019s really what\u2019s in my life right now. Steppenwolf after 50 years deserves at minimum a very, very most likely permanent risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>John, we were curious if you could say the opening lines to Magic Carpet Ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>To say them? Yeah. \u201cI like to dream right between my sound machine.\u201d It was one of those weird things. I\u2019ve written songs that I wasn\u2019t happy with the lyrics for a long time and I was hemming and hawing and it took weeks and finally, \u201cI think this is it.\u201d Magic Carpet Ride, because we had such a cool, bouncy track, that one I wrote in 20 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>20 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s lasted 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>The gift that keeps on giving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Both of you, thank you for your time and interest and your well-researched and prepared interview questions. All my best to the two of you, as well as to your listening audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>Thank you, John Kay. Thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pete Lane:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank you so much, John. Appreciate that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>John Kay:<br>Have a good weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<br>You too. Wow. Just wow. Such a great interview. Such a great time talking with John Kay and learning about his passions. Be sure to go check out Steppenwolf.com and click on the link for John Kay and learn more about his Maue Kay Foundation, and if you can, support it, and let him know. Send him feedback about all that he\u2019s doing. You\u2019ll find all these links in the show notes. His last concert is coming up October 14th down in Kansas. My experience at Prior Lake at Mystic Lake Casino, seeing John Kay was no less than fabulous, because he is not different on the stage than he is in this interview. He\u2019s the same guy. He comes on. He talks to the people, sings the songs, leaves a message with them, and just a great time. I want to thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed. Until next time, bye bye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Music] [Transition noise]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>-When we share<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>-What we see<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>-Through each other\u2019s eyes\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2026We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jeff Thompson:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter at Blind Abilities. Download our app from the App Store, Blind Abilities. That\u2019s two words. Or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Contact Your State Services<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by&nbsp;<a>email<\/a>&nbsp;or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Contact:<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>You can follow us on Twitter&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.twitter.com\/blindabilities\">@BlindAbilities<\/a><br>On the web at&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/\">www.BlindAbilities.com<\/a><br>Send us an&nbsp;<a>email<\/a><br>Get the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/app\/blind-abilities\/id1085849859?l=es&amp;mt=8\">Free Blind Abilities App&nbsp;on the App Store<\/a>and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=com.blindabilities.android.blind&amp;hl=en_US\">Google Play Store<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Give us a call and leave us some feedback at 612-367-6093 we would love to hear from you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Check out the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/607027582712671\/\">Blind Abilities Community<\/a>on Facebook, the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/BlindAbilities\/\">Blind Abilities Page<\/a>, and the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/jobinsightsgroup\">Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impaired<\/a>&nbsp;group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<!--powerpress_player--><div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_8293\"><audio class=\"wp-audio-shortcode\" id=\"audio-6778-3\" preload=\"none\" style=\"width: 100%;\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"audio\/mpeg\" src=\"https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3?_=3\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3\">https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div><p>https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/blindabilities\/JohnKayMusiciansSpotlight.mp3 In the first part of our Musicians Spotlight Series, we bring you John Kay from Steppenwolf Fame which brought us such great hits as Born to be Wild, Magic Carpet Ride, The Pusher and 50 years of John Kay music and his work with NGOs helping Elephants survive as they, too, were Born to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4000,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,529,514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bapresents","category-musician-spotlight","category-transcribed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rcRg-1Lk","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3997,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=3997","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":0},"title":"John Kay: From Rock Star to Elephants, We Were All Born To Be Wild #Steppenwolf to #MaueKayFoundation #VisuallyImpaired (Transcript Provided)","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"October 7, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Show Summary (Full Text Transcript Below) \u00a0 John Kay reveals his journey from escaping the Iron Curtain, getting on with limited vision, his passion for music and his love and commitment for wildlife and especially elephants. Ironically, I first learned about John Kay being legally blind from Dan Gausman, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BlindAbilities Presents&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BlindAbilities Presents","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?cat=17"},"img":{"alt_text":"Image of John Kay singing, taken from T-Shirt","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/JohnKay-image-254x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6808,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=6808","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":1},"title":"Musicians Spotlight Series: Brian Snowman Powers: Sound Engineer, Teacher and Musician, It\u2019s All About the Sax!","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"July 4, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Full Transcript Show Summary: As part of the Musician\u2019s Spotlight series, we are proud to bring you Brian Snowman Powers. Brian is a sound Engineer, Teacher and Professional Sax Musician. Here is our interview with Brian Snowman Powers from 2018: Brian powers grew up with the challenges of bullying and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BlindAbilities Presents&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BlindAbilities Presents","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?cat=17"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo of Brian Snowman Powers playing the Saxophone on stage.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Photo-of-Brian-Snowman-Powers-playing-the-Saxophone-Live-on-Stage.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7658,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=7658","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":2},"title":"A fearless musical vision playing without abandon and one of the most awarded\u00a0\u00a0Fiddle Players ever &#8211; Meet Michael Cleveland","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"October 5, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Podcast Summary: Our guest on Blind Abilities today is Michael Cleveland. Michael is a fiddler who specializes in bluegrass music, although his repertoire spans a variety of genres and multiple styles of music. he wows other Bluegrass musicians including the best in the business, in fact, Michael may just be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BlindAbilities Presents&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BlindAbilities Presents","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?cat=17"},"img":{"alt_text":"Michael Cleveland smiling and playing his fiddle.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/MichaelCleveland-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6782,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=6782","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":3},"title":"Musician Spotlight Series: The Complete Story of Johnny Hiland: Legendary Guitarist, , Legally Blind and a Chicken Pickin\u2019 Good Person, Too!","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"June 23, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Full Transcript Show Summary: As part of the Musician Spotlight Series we are proud to bring you Johnny Hiland. Johnny is one of the fastest guitar pickers in the world and his playing will surely reinforce that thought. Here is our interview with Johnny Hiland recorded in 2019. We hope\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"BlindAbilities Logo A black square with white initials, B A.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2031,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=2031","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":4},"title":"Welcome Cheryl Spencer: NFB16  Convention  update &#8211; the Spencer Report","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"July 4, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Pete Lane introduces a new BlindAbilities Team member, Cheryl spencer. Cheryl brings her NFB Convention Blog entitled: spencer\u2019s spotlight. Check out Cheryl\u2019s recurring article in the monthly digital newsletter, The Blind Perspective, at TheblindPerspective.org Stay tuned for more from Cheryl and her Convention Blog, and good luck to Rus Davis\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;BlindAbilities Presents&quot;","block_context":{"text":"BlindAbilities Presents","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?cat=17"},"img":{"alt_text":"BlindAbilities Logo A black square with white initials, B A.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Blind-Abilities-Logo.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":7475,"url":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?p=7475","url_meta":{"origin":6778,"position":5},"title":"Tech Abilities: Bunnies, Elephants and Rabbits, BATA Bada Bing Bada Boom. Clusiv, PC\/Mac, Twitter Alt Text, Back Tap, Zoom Invites and more Tech Tidbits and News","author":"Blind Abilities Team","date":"July 25, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Podcast Summary: Serina, Callie and Jeff cool down in the Blind Abilities Studio and dive into Clusiv, PC\/Mac, Google Workspace, Fruit Freshness and expiration dates. Twitter's Alt Text reminder launched and a lot more Tech Tidbits and news from around the scorching planet Earth. Hopefully, you are staying cool and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Tech Abilities&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Tech Abilities","link":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/?cat=524"},"img":{"alt_text":"The TechAbilities Logo-Dark Sunglasses with TA and BA bold letters in each lens.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blindabilities.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/TechAbilitiesLogo.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6778"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7086,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions\/7086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blindabilities.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}