Steppenwolf – Born To Be Wild (Easy Rider) (1969)

“Born To Be Wild” was a huge hit for Steppenwolf, going to #2 in America, where it spent three weeks behind “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals. Released on their first album, it was their third single, following “A Girl I Knew” and “Sookie Sookie,” which both flopped. Most people knew the band through “Born To Be Wild,” but they developed a strident fanbase (known as the “Wolfpack”) thanks to the album, which got a lot of airplay on FM underground radio stations.

With the line “heavy metal thunder,” this became the first popular song to use the phrase “heavy metal,” which became a term for hard rock. William Burroughs is credited with coining the phrase, as he used it in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine, describing his character Uranian Willy as “the Heavy Metal Kid.” Burroughs told The Paris Review: “I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there’s something actually metallic in addiction, that the final stage reached is not so much vegetable as mineral.”