R.I.P. Doug Ingle

Vocalist and organist for Iron Butterfly. He once guzzled a gallon of wine right before he attempted to sing his groovy new song about the Garden of Eden for his bandmates and it came out as "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Andrew Hickey just released a bonus episode of his History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast on Iron Butterfly the day before Ingle died, so that was some timing.

This one presents a bit of a challenge for me, for my radio show. I'm confident that quite a few of my listeners will expect me to give tribute to this guy. I can even anticipate that one or two will call me at the station about it.

But I'm not willing to devote 17 minutes to any band's stand-out track, no matter who requests it. And I've had my ear bent, more than once, with the rest of the In-a-Gadda-da-Vida album. It's crap.

On the other hand, I see that Ingle went on to a later band called Stark Naked & the Car Thieves. I'll have to investigate their work. Hopefully, that group's collective imagination didn't stop just at their name. Maybe Ingle sobered up by then, too. (A gallon of wine, in one sitting? Holy jeez. And I see he was the last survivor of the original lineup. Makes me wonder what kind of habits the other three guys had.)

There's always the single version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" which I believe is under three minutes.

Whaaat…?! And lose the drum solo?

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

I did include a track from Stark Naked & the Car Thieves in last night's set. It was a much more presentable piece of music than anything I've heard from Iron Butterfly.

As I recall, the neighbor who gave me his record collection included a copy of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida in the cache. Upon finishing the epic track, I knew I need never hear it again ... and upon listening to side two, it went straight to the used-record-store pile.

And holy jeez, I can't believe what I'm reading about the album on Wikipedia. Eight million copies sold in the United States? Thirty million sold worldwide? Biggest selling album in history at the time? I guess you had to be there ... and by "there," I mean "severely baked for much of 1968."

Is it any worse than Vanilla Fudge's second album?

I couldn't tell you, steevee. Listening to VF's first album was enough to dissuade me from investigating further.