Saturday, January 20, 2018

in a gadda da vida is awesome.

When I was 19 I bought Iron Butterfly's In A Gadda Da Vida on vinyl - partly out of curiosity, somewhat as a joke, mostly because it was only a dollar. At a time when I was swept up in noisecore and black metal, Iron Butterfly's (bell)bottom-heavy psychedelic rock was neither angry nor evil enough for me. Plus, due to its pop culture infamy, the song itself was something of a joke in 1998 - at 17 minutes, and with a built in drum solo, it represented the self-indulgent ostentatiousness of rock music prior to punk's cultural ascendance. "In A Gadda Da Vida" is simultaneously Iron Butterfly's signature song and an indictment of them.

As I get older, I find myself turning more and more to music that is itself much older. While making my journey through the seminal albums of the psychedelic era, a return to Iron Butterfly became unavoidable. And so I delved once more into the world of bell bottoms and black light posters.

It turns out, "In A Gadda Da Vida" is awesome.

Revolving around its famous riff (perhaps the heaviest one written before Black Sabbath had a chance to enter the studio), the song features a sophisticated interplay of guitars, electric organ, and the rhythm section, along with atmospheric guitar effects that only reveal themselves on repeated listens. It's the Pleiades Dust of its day. And the drum solo, though long, is remarkably restrained - this is no John Bonham "Moby Dick" freak out. When the other instruments return - starting with the keyboards, in menacing "Tubular Bells"-like fashion - it's as ominous a moment as you'd expect from the period between the Summer of Love and the Manson Family murders.

You can trace the song's influence on metal through the years - from Sabbath's own slow, crushing riffs (rooted in the blues as much as psych rock like Cream and Iron Butterfly), to Iron Maiden's embrace of epic compositions ("Rime of the Ancient Mariner" being one of many patience-testing songs in the band's catalogue), to the aforementioned Pleiades Dust, which is in many ways a progressive death metal update of "In A Gadda Da Vida", creepy guitar effects and all. When doom/drone titans Sabazius turned in their 11 hour meisterwork The Descent of Man, they took Iron Butterfly's audacity to its (il)logical extreme. And of course, it has to be mentioned that Slayer were coaxed into recording a cover for the Rick Rubin-produced Less Than Zero soundtrack, about which they remain embarrassed to this day.

Iron Butterfly is often cited as a major influence on the development of heavy metal, their fuzzed out guitars and slow, muscular riffs being antecedents for the genre, hammered into its present form by Sabbath not long after. But more than anything, what you find is the songcraft, musicianship and a love for extremes that's on display in every grind, doom, drone, death, and black metal band that came after them. A monster emerged from the Sixties' mists, and even though its true parents were Black Sabbath, Iron Butterfly deserves credit for at least wet-nursing the little bastard.