Fuck Iron Maiden, I'm Still Into Iron Butterfly

Fuck Iron Maiden, I'm Still Into Iron Butterfly

from: inna-gonna-diahrea, baby
dialup04210.intersatx.net
03-08-10
19:22

Me & Larry Trub saw the Iron Butterfly LIVE at the old Convention Center Arena in 68 or 69, promoting their LP "BALL". They played all the obscure songs off of the Innagadadavida LP, too, i. e. Side A, the side I didn't like. What surprised me was how good those songs sounded live, compared to on the album. FLOWERS AND BEADS was one I truly hated on record, but it was actaully GOOD when they sang it. Probably the best was MY MIRAGE, a spooky song about Doug Ingle's hallucination on a wall. One of the facets of Iron Butterfly's musical personality was a trend I considered quite NEFERIOUS at the time, light little love songs playing major seventh chords on the Vox Continental organ. Kind of a Sha-La-La type thing. I always hated love songs anyway, I considered it an aboumination for a band to waste my time by making me sit thru all that crooning and whining, just so I can know some guy really loves his girl THAT much. Big deal. Go tell HER about it. Sing the song to HER. I don't wanna hear about it. Its too mushy. Its embarrasing. Yeah, she is a fine girl, I understand that perfectly. Its the SONG I hate. Its the singer's overblown floorshow, with lights, drums, and sing-a-long chorus, a big hoopla extravaganza expression of how stiff the singer's weenie is getting over this one dippy chick wearing a headband and holding a flower. NOW I'm a grown man, I understand the value of a sweet child who's into free love. Back then, I was into music for music's sake, primarily to be combined with massive amounts of psychedelic substances. I wanted the lyrics to be about THE DRUGS, not THE LOVE.

I remember I took my InnaGadaDaVida album to my music theory class at Churchill High School, to show the teacher, Tony Esquevel, the new "form" that psychedelic rock was hashing out, the extended mind exploration version of a pop ditty, a meandering ego indulgence for each rockstar as he takes his in-concert solo improvisation, (I can't seem to recall what they call that in the classical world... I used to know this shit. Is that a CADENZA? Yeah, a cadenza. That's when the STAR dazzles the assembled throng by just making it up as he goes along. Franz Lizst used to do that at his gigs.) When I look back now at the "theory" behind Doug Ingle's Vox solo, I have to laugh. Key of D, minor of course, gee... its all the white notes, just lay your fingers on them and crawl like a millipede.

Note: the color of the keys on a Vox Continental are reversed, so one would be playing all the black keys, as opposed to the white keys.

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