The Idler

A butterfly in the garden

The story behind proto-metal band Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, the serial killer’s tune of choice. By ANDREW MALE

“If one does what God does, often enough, one becomes as God is.”
Hannibal Lektor in Manhunter (He was later renamed “Lecter”)
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey, don’t you know that I love you?”
Iron Butterfly

What drives a man to kill? In the first volume of his best-selling Hannibal Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon, author Thomas Harris addresses the issue in his character portrait of the novel’s chief serial killer, Francis “Tooth Fairy” Dollarhyde. Dollarhyde’s soulmate on all his killing sprees is the romantic visionary and mystic, William Blake. The Blake etching which inspires Dollarhyde to kill is “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In The Rays Of The Sun”. In the picture a mythological blood-red dragon hovers over what appears to be a supine woman in the throes of some strange ecstasy. The killer’s violent interpretation of this painting is that Blake is telling him to transform outward creation into religious vision - to transform a Gomorragh back into an Eden by Swedenborgian metamorphosis. He turns the women into the dragon. As a portrait of the serial killer’s mind there’s none better but when director Michael Mann made Red Dragon into the 1991 movie Manhunter, he had bigger things on his mind. How would a naive Blakean serial killer live and, more importantly, what music would he listen to? Well, he’d reside in a hip designer flat out in the middle of the Everglades with wall-height prints of the planet Mars, abstract designer furniture and nothing in the kitchen but some big knives. And when Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) takes a young blind lady (Joan Allen) back to his pad for that final delusional Blakeian sacrifice what does he play on his Centrex eight-track cartridge player but the full-volume, full-length 17 minute version of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.

“You’re scaring me with this music!” screams his captive, “Why are you doing this. It’s ugly.” Boy, is she right. If ever we were unconvinced of Dollarhyde’s evil and insanity, this is the clincher.

Only a maniac would choose to listen to the full length version of “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”. Mann’s implication is also that this music has led Dollarhyde to his fate. On paper, it looks like such an innocent little song. These are the lyrics: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, honey/don’t you know that I love you?/In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby/don’t you know that I’ll always be true/Oh, won’t you come with me/and take my hand?/Oh, won’t you come with me/and walk this land?/Please take my hand! After that the lyric sheet just says “Repeat” and, ominously, “Solos”. A sudden, grinding needle-sharp metal riff ushers the song in. “In-A-Gada-da-Vida” is heavy metal made by the devil himself, taking an innocent little tale of Edenic innocence (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida = In the Garden of Eden. Duh) and corrupting its very soul. Unfortunately, the album that contains this meisterwork, also called In-A-Gadda-da-Vida offers no clues to such devilry. The first side of the album is filled with naive bubblegum psychedelia about groovy girls, with titles such as “Flowers And Beads” and “My Mirage”, all seemingly played by drunken hippies wearing boxing gloves and the worst drummer in the world.

Ironically, the song’s origins are far removed from the crypto-blasphemist metal beast it became. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was written by the Iron Butterfly’s lead singer and keyboard player Doug Ingle. Ingle, the son of a church organist, had originally written it as a short little country folk song called “In the Garden of Eden”.

“‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ was like a country ballad when we first heard it,” says Lee Dorman, “but by the time the band got done with it… well, you can see what happened.” Dorman and Bushy had gone to Ingle’s house to hear this little religio-country track but, as Dorman puts it, “Doug had been up for a day and a half. Plus he had been drinking some wine.”

As to the magik corruption of “In The Garden of Eden”, Ron Bushy lays claim to that: “I was supporting the band by making pizza,” he says. “I came home at three in the morning from working one night and Doug played me a song he was writing. He polished off a whole gallon of Red Mountain Wine as the evening wore on. He played this song on the keyboard and he was so drunk that it came out as ‘in-a-gadda-da-vida.’ I thought it was real catchy so I just wrote it down phonetically. The next morning we woke up, looked at the writing, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ and decided to keep the title.” As the group became more comfortable with the song and its concept, it grew longer and longer in performance.

“We were about eight minutes into it,” recalls Dorman, “Then we got an opportunity to go on the road with the Jefferson Airplane, and by that time, “Vida”, which we called it, was up to ten, eleven, twelve minutes and moving along. When the tour got to New York, it was time to record.

“The song then took on a life of its own,” says Dorman. Although the album’s production was credited to Jim Hilton, it was veteran engineer Don Casale (The Rascals, Vanilla Fudge) who actually recorded the date. “I had a good half reel of tape left,” recalls Casale, “and Ingle said, ‘You’d better get another reel of tape.’ I said, ‘I’ve got plenty left.’ He said, ‘Trust me, you’re gonna need a new reel.’”

Executives were wary of putting a 17-minute song on an album. They wanted pop songs. “We said, ‘What are you going to cut out?’” says Dorman. “There’s only about a minute and a half of lyrics, the rest is instrumental. No way. It was like a sonata, if you will. It’s an expression of the music.”

Vida would never would have succeeded without the help of FM radio, whose free-form stoner “Ten records back-to-back for all you heads out there!” style had just taken off. The track became an “underground” sensation with the kinds of DJs and kids who thought they were smashing the system by listening to a song that was longer than three minutes. The album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida eventually stayed on the Billboard chart for 140 weeks, including 81 weeks in the Top 10. It became the first album certified as a Platinum Record for sales of more than a million copies. To date, it has sold over 25 million copies worldwide.

The pressures of playing “Vida” every night soon took its toll. “It was pressure, pressure, pressure and we were just burned out,” said Dorman. “Doug was burnt, Ron was burnt. We quit out of our own volition.”

Doug went off to write ballads while Rhino and Dorman went even heavier with Captain Beyond, one of America’s loudest bands.

“We lost a lot of money,” said Dorman. “Three Dog Night lost a lot. The Monkees lost a fortune. Nobody knew any better.”

Although there were subsequent reformations and line-up changes, nothing recorded by Iron Butterly ever approached the devilish depths of “Vida”. For the curious, a recent reissue of the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album contains a live eighteen minute version and an extra five minute single version in addition to the 17:05 minute original. However, if you really want to go over the edge, into serial killer territory, then there was this recent advert on the internet from one-time Butterfly member Mike Pinera: “‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ has inspired Mike Pinera to explore the deeper mysterious meanings of this multi-platinum song. His many years performing with Iron Butterfly gives him special inside knowledge of the hauntingly melodic music. Join him as he takes you through the many moods, seasons, and life-times that come to us all.” Of the tracks listed, one in particular intrigues. It’s called “Trilogy” and features three sections: “In the Garden”, “In A Gadda Da Vida Revisited” and “In the Garden of Eden”. You have been warned.