01 Most Anything You Want
02 Flowers And Beads
03 My Mirage
04 Termination
05 Are You Happy
Its “strictly chickenshit” organ may have “bored to death” Rolling Stone in 1968, but Iron Butterfly’s second album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was a monster US hit and the first album ever to be certified platinum (for sales of a million copies) in America (it’s now sold 30 million).
The sound of summer 1968, these days its reputation is predicated on the sprawling title track, which takes up the whole of the second side of the vinyl version. A cultural phenomenon, the track is far from the sole positive on an album where dysfunctional psychedelia meets a pumping garage sound – like listening to Led Zeppelin on the wrong drugs.
As the band’s name laboured to suggest, their riffs caught the moment flower-power first flirted with heavy metal. They epitomised the burgeoning counter-culture almost unconsciously. That title track was a studio soundcheck, fortuitously taped while they waited for the producer to arrive, and its refrain a slurred mondegreen.
While its near-gothic meanderings owe a bass-line debt to Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love, it still prowls and growls with stoner certitude. Often overlooked is the fact that other songs, such as Most Anything You Want and Are You Happy, have a tingle of inspiration too. My Mirage and Flowers And Beads are also effective. The dark side of hippy ideology. From: https://www.loudersound.com/reviews/in-a-gadda-da-vida-iron-butterfly
