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| It piles on quite a bit, actually... |
The Hit
To repeat a joke I should have saved for this post, I’ve associated Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with an episode of The Simpsons since it aired. And that’s not entirely unfair either: whatever reception it received upon its 1968 release – in a word, “rampant,” e.g., In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the album, was the first record to ever go platinum in-house at Atlantic Records (though there’s some controversy around that involving a falling out between Iron Butterfly and Atlantic’s legendary founder, Ahmet Ertegun) – it has, since then, devolved into something very close to a punchline, 17-minutes of classic rock excess, etc. Going the other way, as Wikipedia credits “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with “…providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music.”
Another part of the song’s history was the somewhat widespread belief that the song’s title was just a mumbled crack at “In the Garden of Eden.” In (one-time*/third?) bassist, Lee Dorman’s take, that’s not so far off:
“From the premise of in the Garden of Eden, what we did with the music was to chronologically go through a bit of history: the birth of Christ and all the tribal things. Some of that first screeching part is supposed to be dinosaurs, and then the next part is a keyboard part, then we get into another guitar part, it’s more rhythmical now, and that goes into the birth of Christ—‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’—you hear that keyboard part, just a couple of bars, and you go ‘I know that!’ and it’s gone.”
Well, off you go. You’ve got 17:04 worth of song to deconstruct. Chop chop.
To repeat a joke I should have saved for this post, I’ve associated Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with an episode of The Simpsons since it aired. And that’s not entirely unfair either: whatever reception it received upon its 1968 release – in a word, “rampant,” e.g., In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the album, was the first record to ever go platinum in-house at Atlantic Records (though there’s some controversy around that involving a falling out between Iron Butterfly and Atlantic’s legendary founder, Ahmet Ertegun) – it has, since then, devolved into something very close to a punchline, 17-minutes of classic rock excess, etc. Going the other way, as Wikipedia credits “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” with “…providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music.”
Another part of the song’s history was the somewhat widespread belief that the song’s title was just a mumbled crack at “In the Garden of Eden.” In (one-time*/third?) bassist, Lee Dorman’s take, that’s not so far off:
“From the premise of in the Garden of Eden, what we did with the music was to chronologically go through a bit of history: the birth of Christ and all the tribal things. Some of that first screeching part is supposed to be dinosaurs, and then the next part is a keyboard part, then we get into another guitar part, it’s more rhythmical now, and that goes into the birth of Christ—‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’—you hear that keyboard part, just a couple of bars, and you go ‘I know that!’ and it’s gone.”
Well, off you go. You’ve got 17:04 worth of song to deconstruct. Chop chop.
The Rest of the Story
* First, I have never seen a band with such an unstable line-up. To give an example, this little note is from Iron Butterfly’s earliest days:
* First, I have never seen a band with such an unstable line-up. To give an example, this little note is from Iron Butterfly’s earliest days:
“Jerry Penrod replaced [Greg] Willis after the band relocated to Los Angeles in the summer of 1966. [Jack] Pinney eventually left to return to school. Bruce Morse then replaced Pinney until Ron Bushy…came aboard when Morse left due to a family emergency.”
By the middle-late career (circa 1985) it gets even darker:
“…bassist Kurtis Teal, took [Lee] Dorman's spot for the ‘Phoenix Tour’ in the fall of '85, which ended in late November, shortly after which, Teel suddenly died of a heart murmur on December 2. The group then disbanded once again due to managerial problems.”
This band had four good years with a stable line-up – 1967-1970 – when Doug Ingle and Bushy teamed with Dorman and Erik Brann. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” blew them up big enough to where they could tour with the biggest names in the business – e.g., Jefferson Airplane and, later, Yes – and it looks like they had an open invite to just about every festival that happened…with one historically notable exception. They’d been booked to play Woodstock, but, when they struggled to get to upstate New York, their then-manager got on his high horse, and demanded that a helicopter be sent to Port Authority post-haste to get them up there. Woodstock Production Coordinator John Morris (apocryphally?) responded by telegram as follows:
“For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come."
If you know how acrostics work, the bottom line really comes to the fore.
The rest of Iron Butterfly’s history amounts to a long bleed of diminishing returns. To rephrase that as a challenge, I defy you to read the entire section of their Wikipedia page titled, “Reunions (1974-2011),” and not lose interest. (Feel free to count how many paragraphs you can get through; they're short too).
Because I like ending these posts on a high (for the most part), both Dorman and Ingle come off as smart, interesting and engaging people in the bigger interviews I’ve read (that said, Dorman has very interesting things to say about Ingle and the composition and credit around “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”). Better yet, once you frame their time and place, Iron Butterfly really does feel like one of those bands that opened bridges to new genres. I want to go back to the quote at the end of the first paragraph of this section – e.g., the part of “hard rock and heavy metal.” To me, that's the future informing the past. Ingle gives a better take with this:
“So, there was an identifiable sound and yet during that 3 to 4 year period, we had been called underground, acid rock, psychedelic and then heavy. So much for handles…Def Leppard once accredited us as being the father of heavy metal. The only reason I shy away from that reference is simply because I'm not convinced that I really like where heavy metal has gone.”
That’s his judgment on metal, by the way, not mine - even if I don’t listen to it much, I’ve got no beef with where “heavy metal has gone” – but I do take his point. The shorter version: “acid rock,” and even “psychedelic” and “heavy” together, sound closer to the mark to me. To put that another way, Def Leppard doesn’t sound much like Iron Butterfly. For me, that’s a good thing: I don’t like much of what Iron Butterfly put down – not least because it flies perilously close to parody, only without entertaining, never mind amusing…
…and for the hundredth time, please don't let that offend you. Taste is taste: if you like Iron Butterfly, 1) keep on doing it, and 2) you’re not alone. They’re still touring – and with God knows what line-up (and despite an impressive number of mortalities) – and, while the old duffer, original fans still show up, it was genuinely fun to read this from Ingle:
“We get emails [to our official site] all the time. I’d say that 15% of our emails are from people under 16 years old, which to me is a large margin. We get 15,000 hits a month.”
About the Sampler
The blunt truth is that I found Iron Butterfly’s catalog so forgettable, that I wound up turning over five songs of a 15-song sampler to two off-shoot bands: Rhinoceros (formed by original Iron Butterfly member, Danny Weis (guitar), and second-gen bassist, Jerry Penrod) with “Back Door” and “Monkee Man,” both closer to roots rock than psychedelic. The other, Captain Beyond, is a bigger, better stretch (formed by Dorman and…fuck-it-I’ve-lost-track-gen guitarist, Larry Reinhardt), what with the genuinely decent Zeppelin-meets-70s-easy listening number, “Sufficiently Breathless,” plus one step closer to metal with “Raging River of Fear,” plus another step closer to metal with “Fantasy.”
The Iron Butterfly portion of the sampler takes at least one song from each of the four “real” Iron Butterfly albums – for the record, Heavy (“Gentle as It May Seem,” “You Can’t Win," and “Iron Butterfly Theme”), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (the title track (duh), and all of it, and “Most Anything You Want” (think this is the one with The Doors-esque snippet), of which, it’s a good example of their worst), Ball (“In the Crowds” and “Filled with Fear”), and Metamorphosis (“Shady Lady,” which I mostly find funny). While none of those songs come meaningfully close to sounding like all the others – whatever their faults, Iron Butterfly had a wide enough variety of tones – but they all sound like Iron Butterfly. If you like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” you’re in luck: they’ve got four albums worth of material in that vein…
…and, when you’re done, you’ve got Rhinoceros and Captain Beyond to go through. cha-ching.
Source(s)
Wikipedia – Iron Butterfly
Classicbands.com interview with Doug Ingle (always undated with that site)
Craig Morrison, with Lee Dorman (2001; also, very solid)
Perfect Sound Forever, undated, also very good read from Barry Stoller, and damn strong on context
Wikipedia – Captain Beyond
Wikipedia – Rhinoceros
If you know how acrostics work, the bottom line really comes to the fore.
The rest of Iron Butterfly’s history amounts to a long bleed of diminishing returns. To rephrase that as a challenge, I defy you to read the entire section of their Wikipedia page titled, “Reunions (1974-2011),” and not lose interest. (Feel free to count how many paragraphs you can get through; they're short too).
Because I like ending these posts on a high (for the most part), both Dorman and Ingle come off as smart, interesting and engaging people in the bigger interviews I’ve read (that said, Dorman has very interesting things to say about Ingle and the composition and credit around “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”). Better yet, once you frame their time and place, Iron Butterfly really does feel like one of those bands that opened bridges to new genres. I want to go back to the quote at the end of the first paragraph of this section – e.g., the part of “hard rock and heavy metal.” To me, that's the future informing the past. Ingle gives a better take with this:
“So, there was an identifiable sound and yet during that 3 to 4 year period, we had been called underground, acid rock, psychedelic and then heavy. So much for handles…Def Leppard once accredited us as being the father of heavy metal. The only reason I shy away from that reference is simply because I'm not convinced that I really like where heavy metal has gone.”
That’s his judgment on metal, by the way, not mine - even if I don’t listen to it much, I’ve got no beef with where “heavy metal has gone” – but I do take his point. The shorter version: “acid rock,” and even “psychedelic” and “heavy” together, sound closer to the mark to me. To put that another way, Def Leppard doesn’t sound much like Iron Butterfly. For me, that’s a good thing: I don’t like much of what Iron Butterfly put down – not least because it flies perilously close to parody, only without entertaining, never mind amusing…
…and for the hundredth time, please don't let that offend you. Taste is taste: if you like Iron Butterfly, 1) keep on doing it, and 2) you’re not alone. They’re still touring – and with God knows what line-up (and despite an impressive number of mortalities) – and, while the old duffer, original fans still show up, it was genuinely fun to read this from Ingle:
“We get emails [to our official site] all the time. I’d say that 15% of our emails are from people under 16 years old, which to me is a large margin. We get 15,000 hits a month.”
About the Sampler
The blunt truth is that I found Iron Butterfly’s catalog so forgettable, that I wound up turning over five songs of a 15-song sampler to two off-shoot bands: Rhinoceros (formed by original Iron Butterfly member, Danny Weis (guitar), and second-gen bassist, Jerry Penrod) with “Back Door” and “Monkee Man,” both closer to roots rock than psychedelic. The other, Captain Beyond, is a bigger, better stretch (formed by Dorman and…fuck-it-I’ve-lost-track-gen guitarist, Larry Reinhardt), what with the genuinely decent Zeppelin-meets-70s-easy listening number, “Sufficiently Breathless,” plus one step closer to metal with “Raging River of Fear,” plus another step closer to metal with “Fantasy.”
The Iron Butterfly portion of the sampler takes at least one song from each of the four “real” Iron Butterfly albums – for the record, Heavy (“Gentle as It May Seem,” “You Can’t Win," and “Iron Butterfly Theme”), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (the title track (duh), and all of it, and “Most Anything You Want” (think this is the one with The Doors-esque snippet), of which, it’s a good example of their worst), Ball (“In the Crowds” and “Filled with Fear”), and Metamorphosis (“Shady Lady,” which I mostly find funny). While none of those songs come meaningfully close to sounding like all the others – whatever their faults, Iron Butterfly had a wide enough variety of tones – but they all sound like Iron Butterfly. If you like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” you’re in luck: they’ve got four albums worth of material in that vein…
…and, when you’re done, you’ve got Rhinoceros and Captain Beyond to go through. cha-ching.
Source(s)
Wikipedia – Iron Butterfly
Classicbands.com interview with Doug Ingle (always undated with that site)
Craig Morrison, with Lee Dorman (2001; also, very solid)
Perfect Sound Forever, undated, also very good read from Barry Stoller, and damn strong on context
Wikipedia – Captain Beyond
Wikipedia – Rhinoceros
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