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It was all about priorities. We didn’t know when we bought the tickets
to see Iron Butterfly, being teens and not projecting too far ahead, that America’s astronauts would be landing on the moon that night.
We went to the show anyway. Tickets cost money, and it was Iron Butterfly. Though I was torn, of course. I wanted to see a man take
a step onto the moon on TV, like the rest of America. Sure. I was seventeen at the time, (which tells you how old I am) and “In A Gadda Da Vida” was a huge underground radio hit. I think it made it onto the regular radio in a shortened version, but we didn’t care about that. It was all about the long jam in the middle, man. We’d discovered cannabis recently (disclaimer – this in no way endorses, or does not, endorse cannibus, it is merely recounting historical anecdotal data) and we had kicked back any number of times after “toking on joints,” (which in the language of the time meant blowin’ a stick of chronic) to listen to the whole second side of the “In a Gadda Da Vida” album, which contained the long version of the song. We all wondered exactly what it meant,
the title of the song, and only in later years was it revealed that it was intended to say “In a Garden of Eden,” like everybody thought, but singer Doug Ingle was so stoned when he wrote the song that he couldn’t pronounce it correctly, and it stuck. Such are the accidents that create true greatness.
The above mentioned Doug Ingle stopped the proceedings at some point that night, and talked to the crowd about the astronauts landing, saying things like, (loosely translated from foggy memory) “Oh wow, man, you know, like I can’t believe it, the moon, you know??” and “It’s really heavy, you know, like, there’s a guy up there… I really wanted to see it on TV but like… ah… we’re playing and everything so that’s just how it’s all happenin’, man…”
And so it was, 40 years ago today. For me, there were two categories in life. Music and everything else. Generally, when possible, music trumped the rest. And sometimes, for me, it still does. When the signs of present civilization have gone to dust and rubble, when the very last looming Trump Tower is a long lost faded memory, when the ego driven exploits of mankind and all the relentless scurrying across this giant world... all
so busy, all so important... when all of it is as forgotten as Ozymandias, someone will still be singing Beatles songs. The music of the earth just might redeem the long, wretched history of humankind and make a decent case that we aren’t really the miserable animals we so often appear to be.
Not that “In a Gadda Da Vida” is a great example of that, or a classic, expect maybe as a period piece. It’s indulgent, the jam is musically meandering, long boring drum solo - though there's some lovely little bits of church music organ and fairly good guitar playing. But it changes a lot, which was the point. It took you along a journey of ever-shifting musical terrains. Though a trippy garden of Eden! And stoned, those sound journeys could seem downright profound, at least at the time.
As far as people still singing Iron Butterfly songs in the distant future... probably not. Though it’s possible “In a Gadda Da Vida” could show up
in some Tarentino-ish, cutting edge movie in the year 2432. By then, that quaint little landing on the moon might not be celebrated quite so often… but likely instead will begin to become, like Wilber and Orville Wright's flight (who? the children say…) slowly relegated to the dusty bins of history.
Like I said, it’s all about priorities, which, in case you haven’t noticed, keep on changing.
Will Brennan
The night of the moon landing 40 years ago, I was watching Iron Butterfly
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