Rock epic of the month: "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (Iron Butterfly) 1968

Rock epics of the month is a series of posts where I'll look back on classic examples of what I think is the greatest excess of rock and roll - the rock epic.

Some of you are thinking, 'It had to happen.' Some of you are thinking, 'Couldn't he have avoided this one?' Some of you are thinking, 'It took him long enough.' And some of you are thinking, 'This is just too obvious.'

To which I say, 'Der,' 'No he couldn't have,' 'I was getting around to it,' and 'Sod off you wankers. And the horses you rode in on.'

Yes. The classic Iron Butterfly song, or I. Ron Butterfly song, if you really want, was a drug-addled hoot when it was released back in the day, and it's still one incredibly silly and indulgent piece today.

Heavy metal, as we now know it didn't really come into being until the power metal bands of the late seventies and early eighties. But it's history is shrouded in all sorts of stories.

Some say it started with The Who when Pete Townshend went berzerk with a series of windmill power chords. Still others like to cite The Kinks' classic rifforama from 'You Really Got Me'.

Some say it was white boys playing the blues loudly, such as the early work of Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds. Others again like to cite the work of Jimi Hendrix, Cream (which also featured Clapton) and even The Doors.

And then there are the pure psychedelicists, who will go straight to the louder end of the psychedelic spectrum to where acts like Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly sat.

Whatever, we all know where it went from here. There was the Led Zeppelin faction, with their fairies at the bottom of the garden and bustles in your hedgerows. There was the Black Sabbath faction, with all Tony Iommi's riffing and Ozzy Osbourne's internal demons. There was Deep Purple's work, which partly paved the way for prog rock. And there was the totally out there amped up post-psych of Blue Öyster Cult and the totally pedestrian musical stylings of Grand Funk Railroad.

But Iron Butterfly will always be remembered for this, the one tune that everyone remembers them for - a tune that clocks in at 17:05, and the title track off their second album.

'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' was so long that it took up the entire length of side B. The name of the tune apparently comes from a drunken conversation that singer and keyboardist Doug Ingle had with drummer Ron Bushy where Bushy wrote down what he thought Ingle had said, and thus the tune was no longer titled 'In The Garden Of Eden' any more.

The band, completed at this stage by Eric Brann on guitars and Lee Dorman on bass, recorded this monster epic as a jam in the studio where everyone has their moment.

It starts off with the signature horror-movie organ at the start, before launching into the main riff, which, to 1968 society, must have seemed like one of the heaviest things imaginable. The tune only really strays from the main riff in a couple of spots, mainly during the choruses, but also a bit during the breakdown in the middle. Dorman manages to stay in the groove most of the way through without sounding too bored.

It eventually re-assembles itself to come back for another verse and chorus near the end, but by this stage, you're either thanking the gods of rock and roll, or falling asleep.

The breakdown itself is truly epic, and longer than the rest of the tune: There's more than one organ solo. And more than one guitar solo. And even a drum solo. This is one tune that will have you punching the air and giggling as you play it loud to annoy the hell out of your girlfriend, or cringing in a corner hoping that no one catches you listening to it.

There simply is no middle ground here. It's either monumentally offensive and stupid, or it's a glorious slab of medium-octane rock that you can air organ to.

Iron Butterfly did nothing else of note.

Boney M, incidentally, covered this tune. And like everything else that Boney M did, it too, was utter rubbish.

This tune comes in two parts, with some visuals, which are pretty boring, so you might prefer just to listen.

Part 1 ends just after the drum solo, and Part 2 picks up with the second (or is it the third?) organ solo.

Enjoy, or not.

Part 1:

Part 2:

So bad it might be good

We all love a good disaster flick.

Sometimes we just want to watch because even though we're grossed out by it, we're still fascinated and often, we just cannot turn away.

Some of you might know, or have guessed that I will simply run a mile in order to avoid watching Australian Idol. I simply despise most of it, and it's frightfully hard for me to watch.

If I'm not cringing in embarrassment for these talentless kids, I'm complaining about the two vacuous hosts, and a particular judge who has been disqualified by Ralph magazine from ever winning their prestigious (if dishonourable) "Wanker of the Year" award again, because he's won it too many times.

I can physically feel my brain shrinking whenever I watch this show.

But last Sunday night's show was apparently bad enough for me to describe it as a DISGRACE!!!™. I'm reliably informed that it was so bad that Channel Ten are looking at axing the show altogether. It's apparently one of those historical moments you will be able to say to your grandkids in years to come, "I saw that. It was terrible."

It was Rock night.

Yeah, OK. It's a no brainer to turn to me and say, "Dikkii. You know that teenyboppers do not rock. Der." I know this. However, I'm just curious as to exactly how bad it was. I will be patrolling YouTube this evening when I get home from work trying to find bits of this disaster to watch.

In the meantime, here's the show reviewed with extreme prejudice here at Bland Canyon, where our intrepid blogger concludes that:

"The best performance of the night comes from a singing germ on the Domestos
ad.

Yes, when a 3D germ that sings about vomit is the most entertaining part
of the evening, it's fair to say our final 11 is perhaps less talented than we
originally thought. But hey, we're stuck with them now so let's just sit back
and enjoy the bloodbath, shall we?"

I might also add that based on the selection of tunes here, today's young kids wouldn't know rock if it woke them up with capsicum spray.

This episode might join the rarified air currently holding Peter Jackson's first three movies, Vietnamese neon loungeroom Buddhist shrines and the infamous Hello Kitty "neck massager" as being examples of things that are so bad they're totally excellent.

Why I don't buy the "sportspeople are role models" argument

The "sportspeople as role models" argument is one that has long grated with me.

And it's not just because the sporting prowess of wet cement together with a lack of motivation and interest led to me putting my sporting career on hold until the next life. Sure, I would have loved to have had a career at centre half-forward for the Swans, but for my innate uncoordination and getting into things like music and finance instead.

The worst part of the argument for me is that the whole discussion about this appears to have been engineered for the benefit of entities other than concerned parents, sportspeople themselves, sporting administrators and politicians.

Step forward sporting goods companies.

The inherent phoniness of the argument is made manifest when one considers that there are kids out there who do not have their favourite sportsman or woman on the wall. Apart from a brief period in the mid-eighties when I read surfing magazines, I was one of those kids.

I don't actually remember the surfers who graced my walls. Barton Lynch might have been one. I would be surprised if the the great Mark "Occy" Occhilupo and Tom Carroll weren't others.

I might have had the odd poster of the Australian Cricket Team up on my wall when I was even younger.

But my fling with professional sportsmen on my wall was a brief one.

After this, I stopped with the sportsmen outright, and started putting rock and rollers on my wall. I would have been about 12 or 13 years old.

Favourites that I recall were INXS and U2 in the early days, Hunters & Collectors and Midnight Oil a little later on, and then finally outfits like The Stems, the Hoodoo Gurus, the Violent Femmes and The Stone Roses through my final years of high school.

I always wanted an Iron Maiden poster - their album cover artwork was considered a holy grail throughout my dorm at school. I particularly loved the cover of their Powerslave album, but I digress.

If we're to accept that sporting heroes are role models, the best place to start appears to be what or who kids put on their walls. Around the dorm where I lived in my final years of high school, there were quite a few footballers - maybe on a third of the walls. I remember one guy had a prized poster of Robert DiPierdomenico and another of Leigh Matthews.

One guy had his own shrine to Stephen Silvagni with a few of Stephen Kernahan as well.

How then did my posters of rock and rollers fit in? Well, I don't for one second accept that I thought of them as role models and a quick search of the news at Google doesn't even mention musicians at all.

But the thought has crossed my mind about half a dozen times that posters for sportspeople are suspiciously plugged as appropriate for kids all too frequently, and a quick look at the ones in the stores that stock posters seems to have the answer:

Much like the posters of surfers that I put up in my early high school years, it appears to be impossible to get a poster of a sportsperson that doesn't contain a prominent logo of a sporting goods company in the corner.

Nike is the worst offender. In the early nineties, the promoted the bejesus out of Michael Jordan to the point that many Australian kids wore Nike sporting apparel with his image on them. But if you asked any Australian kids about Jordan specifically, or basketball generally, you would draw a blank. Basketball is simply a fringe game outside of North America, and Jordan happened to be photogenic.

It wasn't long before Nike discovered that the best way to sell to the rest of the world was to go for local sporting celebrities.

The face of Nike in Australia was Shane Warne - quite possibly the greatest spin bowler that world cricket has ever seen, or at least until Muttiah Muralitharan came along. Nike didn't stop there.

They hit serious paydirt when they sponsored Ronaldo and the rest of the Brazilian national football (soccer) team in a year when Brazil were unstoppable in winning a fourth world cup and they then managed to re-create this in 2002 when Brazil did it again.

And the posters of surfers always had their sponsors figuring promptly as well. Show me a poster of a surfer without a Billabong or Rip Curl logo in the corner and I'll show you a magazine logo instead.

But the whole argument that sportspeople are role models appears to be somewhat contrived, particularly when no one takes the notion seriously that musicians gracing other kids walls might also be.

I put it to you that sporting goods manufacturers drive the debate around this. If not then why don't musicians ever get a look in?

For the record, my role model, if I had one when I was growing up, was my dad. I don't think I ever had a poster of him on the wall. And I don't think that I'm different to many others.