What's in a name? The reflection of a tosser possibly?

May 23rd – There will always be bands that, no matter how popular they become you just don’t get. For the life of me and to this day I can’t work up any enthusiasm for The Four Tops and it’s not for lack of familiarity either. We used to sprinkle our set with some of their popular stuff as a sweetener, to allow the audience to dance a little instead of standing round the edge of the dance-floor listening to a musical tirade emanating from a group of anal-gazing prog-rockers, a gang of fully-committed (we should have been) long-hairs.

Thing was, y’see, many of the gigs we did relied on the audience dancing so they’d consume more alcohol (although how anyone can sink more than two Babychams is beyond me) and so perk up the bar sales. If the pub owner saw serried ranks of morose looking folk all gathered around a single array of empty glasses two things would happen.

1) He’d be over to the stage with a couple of mates suggesting we rearrange our repertoire and

2) It’d probably be last time we’d be offered the gig there if the dance-floor wasn't a heaving mass of sweaty bodies within ten seconds of this facial-rearrangement trio’s ultimatum.

Trouble was we were a heavy-duty, psychedelic rock band complete with costume and attitude eager to showcase our own material albeit with a sprinkling of popular covers. Now I know there’s been a shift in the meaning of the word, attitude, from now to then. Then (60’s/70’s) attitude consisted of standing on stage looking slightly bored, massively arrogant and in a torment of pain and effort over such things as doing a lead break or singing a high note or hitting the cymbals; now attitude just consists of doing a Justin Bieber.

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was, to all intents and purposes, a seminal piece of progressive rock; it certainly hoisted Iron Butterfly to super stardom. The album from whence this track came is a gateway allowing the listener to get as close as a cat’s chin to a cat’s whisker in their search for the sound of the sixties. The title track has the mesmeric, repetitive trance beat, the vocals are louche (very Doors) and the subject matter (Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) is sufficiently intellectual to attract the pop-cognoscenti to its pollen. All the ingredients are there so what it is about the song and the band that just seemed so…made-up for my taste?

Well, for one and as far as this particular track is concerned, it’s the lyric. I bet they must have sweated embryos gathering these pearls of wisdom together; embryos. It would seem they possibly ran out of time (or money) and so had to rush to do the vocal track of an early morning after a particularly heavy night on the bong. Trouble was they omitted to write down the lyric so they sent Doug Ingle (vocalist and organist) into the booth with a fond fare-thee-well and an instruction to ‘make some shit up’. My guess is that, just like a toaster can become the focus of attention to an over-eager, party-going smoke inhaler as he/she stands in the host's well-dressed kitchen dazed and confused through too much weed, so the rest of the band were so far out of it to be ‘wowed’ by his seeming lyrical perspicacity…Mr. Ingle, it would seem, was their toaster. 

As for the band, well, you must remember that I knew about them from the get-go so none of my feelings come from hindsight. I was a cocky little drummer boy back then (some would say I still am…but without the drummer codicil). I can remember discussions in the band about Iron Butterfly (and others) and the one overriding thing I had about them was that any band who took on a tambourine player into the line-up and announced it to the press as if every band should have one really were a bit UTOA. What sort of mollified my ire and allowed me to arrogantly write them off as unworthy of my effort was that the name of the tambourine player was Darryl DeLoach and it turns out it was through his parents that the band got the garage to practise in at no cost…DeLoach's parents owned it. Now, I don’t know ‘bout you but… 

After that little announcement they felt sort of stained in my psychedelicher-than-though attitude; but the last laugh lies with them. You see, on this day in 1971, Iron Butterfly, this band I’d written off as just a group of patsy’s with pretensions to poetry, broke up, but their album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida? It went on to sell 30 million copies and is included in the top 40 best-selling albums of all time: as I’m so fond of saying, what do I know?