Italian Driving, the solo project of filmmaker and musician Alfred Thomas Catalfo, revisits Steppenwolf’s 1969 protest suite Monster/Suicide/America through a recording and video spanning American history. The song confronts public complacency, political corruption and the erosion of civic power.

A 57-year-old protest song should sound dated. Monster sounds current enough to embarrass the present. Italian Driving treats the survival of its questions as a political failure: America has changed its slogans and media while the central complaint keeps its address. Compressing the original nine-minute suite into less than five minutes turns reflection into confrontation. Its three movements bind grievance and national self-examination into one sustained argument. Hard guitar accents increase the pressure, though the questions aimed at America carry the greatest force.

American symbols and political conflict move through the video. Several references pass before their meaning fully develops, and the visual density competes with the lyric. The strongest images focus the song’s accusation on public memory: brief, selective and shaped by spectacle. Respect for Steppenwolf remains audible, while Italian Driving gives Monster a harder contemporary temperament. The cover earns its existence through urgency, compression and an argument with the present. In our interview, Catalfo discusses that radical restructuring, the historical imagery behind the video and the uncomfortable reason every lyric still fits.

Which lyric hit you hardest?  

It really wasn’t just one line—and that is what I found so astounding.  Every line still fits. Every single one.  The passage that struck me most personally was the one about  people becoming complacent, their votes losing their meaning, and  “law and order” becoming an echo of what they have been told. To  me, it describes what happens when people stop paying attention,  stop learning about the issues, and allow themselves to be distracted  by the “flashing lights” if you will and unimportant things. Complicated  questions are reduced to slogans that can fit on a hat, while people  repeat things they have heard online without ever checking whether  they are true.  

As a lawyer, I also cannot hear that passage without thinking about  the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision and the profound  effect it had on the American political power structure by permitting  corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent  political advertising and elections. It made the warning in the song  feel even more immediate.  

The other lines that always hit me are the questions John Kay asks  directly of the country: “America, where are you now? Don’t you care  about your sons and daughters?” Fifty-seven years later, the fact that  we are still asking it is both remarkable and frightening.  

What makes your recording distinctly Italian Driving?  

I love Steppenwolf’s “Monster.” It’s an epic song with three distinct  movements—almost three songs in one—and John Kay is one of my  musical heroes. The original runs nine minutes and sixteen seconds. 

Producer Drew Yount and I wanted to bring it under five minutes  without removing any lyrics or sacrificing any of those three  movements. Finding a way to do that while preserving the integrity of  the song was our most important decision.  

We also chose not to begin quietly and gradually build, as the original  does. I wanted the guitars to hit hard immediately and the tempo to  feel urgent—not merely to shorten the song, but to make it sound as  though the warning were happening right now. That gave my vocal  performance a different energy. Instead of recounting history from a  distance, I felt as though I were delivering an alarm.  

I could also picture much of the video before we recorded the song. I  knew how I wanted to interpret many of the lines visually, so we  worked to give the entire recording a cinematic quality. The music  and the video were really developing together in my mind.  

Was there a memorable viewer response?  

What surprised me most was discovering how many people had  never forgotten this song. “Monster” is relatively obscure now, and, as  far as I know, it has not been covered in more than fifty years. Yet I  began hearing from people who had always loved the Steppenwolf  recording and still kept it in their music collections.  

They were genuinely excited that someone had brought it back, and  they embraced our version rather than treating it as an intrusion on  something sacred. That meant an enormous amount to producer  Drew Yount and me. When you reinterpret a song you deeply admire —particularly one with this kind of history—you hope that the people  who love the original will recognize that your version comes from the  same place of respect and conviction.  

Their responses also made me realize that the song had not really  disappeared. It remains alive in the memories of people who  understood it, and know the world has made it urgent again. 

What had the steepest learning curve?  

Filmmaking and visual storytelling have presented the greatest  challenge, although they were part of my creative life long before  Italian Driving. I have written, produced, and directed nine short films  that have won awards at prominent festivals, and one was featured  on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List (“Ten Things We Love This  Week”). The first two Italian Driving videos, for “Pacific Coast  Highway” and “Pirate Radio,” both original songs, have received more  than 500,000 combined views on the Italian Driving VEVO channel.  

But “Monster” was different in both scale and responsibility. I wanted  to cover the entire sweep of American history—and address many of  the fundamental issues confronting the country today—in less than  five minutes. Every image had to communicate immediately, connect  to the lyric, and carry historical and emotional meaning.  

The real challenge was not figuring out how the music and visuals  belonged together; I have always experienced them as intertwined. It  was learning how to make every visual choice carry the same  urgency, density, and emotional weight as the song itself. With  “Monster,” the images had to move as quickly as the music while still  giving the audience enough to absorb. Italian Driving has given me  the opportunity to bring those instincts together—to create songs and  films that are conceived as one piece from the beginning.  

What comes next?  

The next step for Italian Driving is hopefully the release of an album  called What’s Behind Me Is Not Important. Each song has its own  character, emotional landscape, and visual possibilities.  

“Monster” was an especially ambitious collaboration between music  and filmmaking, but it is part of a larger creative process that began  with the nine short films I wrote, produced, and directed. Those films  

gave me the opportunity to explore visual storytelling on a broader  scale. Italian Driving allows me to bring that experience into a musical  context. The album will give me the chance to continue developing  that relationship between sound, image, and story while revealing  more dimensions of the project.

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