In‐A‐Gadda‐Da‐Vida

Apparently I am in the minority here, but Iron Butterfly blows.

Listen, I love a good long epic song, but the one song anyone can name on this album is 17 minutes of ass.

An argument could be made that this isn't even within the top 20 albums of 1968 let alone making the cut of albums you MUST hear before you die.

2 stars just for what could be considered its influence on heavy music.

bem mediano, nada demais
mas a música de 17 minutos até que eh bacaninha, vai. deve ser bom pra ouvir drogado.

I only know this band through the title track, which I've heard several times, but not for a long time. But I thought this was a really hard rocking band but it turns out - not so much.

Song 1: pretty dance-hippie with plenty of 60s rock organ. It's really more of a pop song than a rock song. It's not at all what I expected when I hit play.

Song 2: More pop! If you told me this was the title song to a Brady Bunch type of TV show I'd believe you with no hesitation.

Song 3: I have been gravely mislead. Was this band big with the teeny bopper American Bandstand crowd? This is just shitty hippie pop music.

Song 4: OK, it's still a bit light in the ass, but I can at least hear some rock stylings here. It's like they're reaching for something and they haven't quite gotten there.

Song 5: Last song before the main event and now we're talking! The first 30 seconds actually sounds like Rock and Roll! Then the singing starts and I've been let down, again. Still, this is the rocking-est song so far. As an aside, I know it was a different time, but the mix is goddamned awful. It's so tinny and thin, there's almost no bass, and the kick drum sounds like a little puff of air. The guitar has its moments, but the real star of this album is the organ. They really made sure it was predominately front and center.

OK, here we go: Song 6, the title track, the money maker. I've never heard the 17 minute album version, so is this song enough to save the album?

No. It is not.

Look, it's a decent song, but being 17 minutes certainly doesn't help it, especially when what seems like 10 of those minutes id the most rudimentary drum solo I have literally ever heard.

This album sold more than 30 million records and was, in fact, the bestselling Atlantic Records album until Led Zeppelin IV blew it out of the water. Still, 30 million records is a metric fuckton of records sold, and it goes to show that in the old days, if you had one banger you could make a killing selling records, because people had no choice but to buy the whole thing.

I appreciate that this album had the decency to only be 36 minutes long, but not as much as I appreciate the fact that I never have to listen to it again.

Wait a minute, this sounds like rock and or roll

I’m at a 4.5 that I’ll bump up to a 5.

I’ve vaguely heard of Iron Butterfly before, mainly as it relates to the title track. I didn’t think I’d ever heard it before, but it hit me right as I saw the title that Weird Al threw the track’s chorus into one of his polka medleys. That’s all I knew of it though – a remarkably small taste. It’s a hell of a track once you get to it, though, and absolutely a highlight for 1960s rock, feeling like the extended solo on Light My Fire & somehow pulling even more out of it.

There are 19 minutes before that track though, and… I really liked most of them. “Most Anything You Want” is a really strong opener that sets the tone, with a fun interpolation of “Light My Fire” in there. He also sounded like Rick Astley to my ears, so that was kinda fun. For Track 2 and 3 though… there’s a cardinal sin to my ears that has me at a 4.5; both “Flowers and Beads” & “My Mirage” essentially loop halfway through. I can partially excuse it for the former, since it does at least have a fun outro & a catchy melody that stops it from being too much of a bother. The latter, however, is inexcusable, mainly since it’s a slower track that already takes about 2:30 of repetition to get through before the first loop, his vocal style feels like it’s stretching for time, and I have absolutely no idea what the lyricism means. It also doesn’t help that both tracks are back to back, so hearing the same looping trick done twice in a row after I was already bothered by it the first time did not help the pacing of the album at all. Thankfully, “Termination” has a really cool afterlife-y atmosphere that feels like a breath of fresh air, & “Are You Happy” is a very strong & very energetic entree to the main course that is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.

I’m not really sure I can say too much about the track, since it’s one that deserves to be heard rather than read about, but the sense of journey & progression that comes through the track, with each member getting a little showcase (most fun to my ears on both the extended drum / organ solos) is super cool. In a way, it sort of goes nowhere, but that would be doing a disservice to how complex / technically sound each solo is, especially for 1968. Of all the really long tracks we’ve gotten so far throughout the 657 albums we’ve done, this one might be the one that’s flown by the fastest. Part of that is just getting a lot more used to / appreciative of long tracks, but I got totally lost in the grooves here and before I knew it, I was 13 minutes into the track with only a light scattering of “this sounds cool” notes. It’s a track that obviously lifts this album to a 5 by itself, and honestly, it could lift up higher if there’s even more intricacies to it that my brain just didn’t catch on this first listen.

So, yeah, this certainly lived up to the acclaim for me. I can only vaguely understand the 2.93 on the site; if that repetition on tracks 2 & 3 hit that badly, or if the Doors-esque instrumentation didn’t click right, then fair enough, but it just feels like robbing yourself of enjoying a roller coaster ride because you saw a few drops of rain. This is a very good album; even with one half-flop to my tastes (the first half of “My Mirage” isn’t *that* bad), the title track alone is worth the price of admission, and the journey to get there is pretty good all the same. This is an easy bump up to a 5, and I liked it a lot.

The title track is what is front and center on this album, but I think side A deserves some credits as well here. I don't like the intro song, but after that there's a streak of nice songs. It's a nice showcase of the downright demonic sounding guitar work and jamming that will happen on the other side, while still conforming to a regular song structure. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is the true centerpiece here though. A regular single, stretched to it's absolute limits and filled with solo's like only the 60's could do. The production here is famously ass, but that does give the album a certain charm. Landmark album here.

1.83

This version is superior: https://youtu.be/ulDC1w1ydLI

Jeg har som mange tenkt på mr. I. Ron Butterfly som et one hit wonder. Det tror jeg stemmer, men plata er overraskende god. Det er litt antydning til Black Sabbath, men av en eller annen grunn høres det samtidig ut som om Elvis skulle gjort et forsøk på psykedelisk rock. Viber med det

I've massively under-appreciated 60s music! Another really good album :)

The first half of this record is fairly disposable psychedelic rock — competent but forgettable, the kind of late-60s filler you’d expect to find in any bargain-bin psych compilation. Then comes the second half: the infamous 17-minute epic 𝘐𝘯-𝘈-𝘎𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘢-𝘋𝘢-𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘢, supposedly a drunken slur of 𝘐𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘥𝘦𝘯. It lurches forward on a massive organ riff, fuzz guitar, and a pounding drum solo, equal parts hypnotic and absurd.

Pop-culture sealed its legend when 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘴 reimagined it as the church hymn 𝘐𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘥𝘦𝘯 by I. Ron Butterfly in 𝘉𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘴 𝘏𝘪𝘴 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭. That joke sums up the track perfectly — it’s overblown and ridiculous, but also undeniable fun.

As an album, it’s lopsided: one iconic jam surrounded by mediocrity. Still, that jam alone secured Iron Butterfly a place in rock history.

Big dumb fun heavy psychedelia with a massive organ sound, gnarly fuzz tone, lots of bluesy shredding, one of the most memorably stupid riffs of all time, and buckets of self indulgence.

OK but all Simpsons jokes aside why does the first song actually sound identical to Light My Fire

I have this album but had not listened in a while. It is as I remembered, In a gadda da vida is the standout track and the other songs, while supremely psychedelic, are less memorable. I love the darkness of this 60s offering, its like Bach trying to expand his mind.

Hard to score as the title track is sooo good. But it will have to be a three.

Ein Album mit einem riesigen Schatten: Der gleichnamige Titeltrack ist legendär, der Rest eher belanglos. Psychedelischer Zeitgeist ja – musikalisch ausgewogen, eher nicht. Ein Klassiker, aber kein Meisterwerk.

I mean this was fun. Liked it.

The first five songs existed somewhere on the spectrum of meh/fine. The title track has a good riff, no denying that, but at 17 minutes it wears out its welcome. When we faded out to a drum solo (and not, say, to a still-overwrought-but-permissible conclusion) around 6:40 I clenched up in fear of what the next 10 minutes had in store for me. When the guitar came in around 12 minutes I thought about how other grand rock epics like Stairway or Free Bird manage to fit all these ideas into 8-9 minutes. Then I went back and tried to figure out where the song should have ended. I’d say 2:30, but I could also allow 3:20. Everything after that is unnecessary.

Cheesy psych pop for the most part. The album version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is amusing. Very surface level Doors-ish stuff.

The first half of the album was forgettable.

Every review was revering the final track, the 17-minute legend, the one and only title track, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

....Shit, I think everyone gets misled by the runtime into thinking it's a masterpiece. I waited the entire duration for something interesting to happen and it just *never came*. It's all a series of instrumental noodling sections - if you were to separate each section into its own track, nobody would talk about this. It's just not that good

I'll give it its props - Termination and Are You Happy were very decent, and the bass guitar throughout the album was pretty fucking great!

With that said, maybe it's my fault for getting baited by the reviews, but my disappointment is unmeasurable. This is not an album I'd come back to either way, so for that reason I exercise my right to be a hater 😭

Most of these tracks just seem like filler alongside in-da-gadda-da-vida, though there is no denying the titular 17min track is outstanding. 3/5