Iron Butterfly

Recently, I was listening again to Iron Butterfly after several months, or maybe years, of not doing it. I have two of their albums:"In-a-gadda-da-vida" (1968) and "Iron Butterfly Live" (1970). The "in-a-gadda..." album was their most successful album. The members of the band in these two albums were: Doug Ingle (organ, vocals), Ron Bushy (drums), Lee Dorman (bass and vocals, he was years later a member of the band called Captain Beyond, a band included in Progarchives), and Erik Brann (AKA Erik Braunn, guitar and vocals, he died two years ago). I like both albums very much. The "In -a-gadda..." album has songs which have very good arrangements, mainly in the organ, which sounds very influenced by church organ music. Erik Brann was  also a very good guitarist (the back cover notes say that he was 17 years old in 1968!) also doing very good arrangements played along with the organ. Bassist Dorman was very good, sounding sometimes like John Entwistle and Chris Squire. Drummer Bushy plays a very good drums solo in the long (17 minutes) "In-a-gadda-da-vida" song. Do you consider this band as Progressive or at least as "Pre-Progressive"? The arrangements in the songs and the inclusion of the 17 minutes song makes me think that at least they influenced some Prog bands with their arrangements. I don`t know if the "In-a-gadda..." song was the first Rock song which passed the 10 minutes in lenght. What do you think of this band?

By the way: in 1971 this band toured with YES (which were touring in that year for "The YES Album"), and sometimes both bands jammed at the end of the concerts. The Iron Butterlfy line-up changed (Brann was replaced by two guitarists after he left in 1969, one of these guitarists, Rhino, also played with Captain Beyond) and they were touring for their "Metamorphosis" album. They split after this tour with YES.

I saw them three weeks ago at the Lorelei Festival south of Koblenz (Germany), and they spent roughly half of their set doing In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida!!!

OK , but they did not stand a chance with the rest of the line-up.

My favourite songs from the "In-a-gadda..." album (apart from the album title song) are: "Most Anything You Want" (very good guitar and organ arrangements), "Termination" (particularly the guitar arpeggios at the end of the song) and "Are You Happy?".

The current line-up of Iron Butterfly only includes Ron Bushy and Lee Dorman from the sixties, plus two new musicians. I found their official website and they are now touring, in Europe, I think.