Long after British pop-rock band Transvision Vamp split up, vocalist and producer Wendy James encountered Iron Butterly via hip-hop – and it was love at first listen, as she told Prog.
“Iron Butterfly came up on my radar because of hip-hop. I moved to New York in 2002 and got heavily into East Coast hip-hop. As a musician and a producer of my own material, I was interested in how rap groups utilised these amazing samples, mainly from 70s soul.
I was doing geology of how they put their music together and their production values were so much more impactful than a typical white rock’n’roll record.
Then Nas’ song Thief’s Theme came up and I was like, ‘That main riff has to be a sample – no way did they write that!’ I started digging around and it was In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly. I went round to my friend’s house and said, ‘Have you heard this track?’ and he went, ‘Of course! Everyone knows it!’
Then I did my research on Iron Butterfly. Singer/organist Doug Ingle wrote the song, and he was so drunk when he was recording it – slurring it so badly – that ‘In the Garden Of Eden’ came out as ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’
If you’ve had a couple of drinks or some drugs, you can stick your head in the speakers and really get into it
I think that’s amazing – but I’ve never done that myself. I love alcohol, but I don’t use it when I’m writing and recording; I always keep a straight mind because otherwise I can’t make accurate decisions.
Iron Butterfly were booked to play Woodstock but they had problems travelling there. So their manager called the festival organisers and said, ‘Send a helicopter and we’ll be there on time.’ The organisers replied back using an acrostic where if you took the first letter of each line in the telegram it spelled out, ‘FUCK YOU!’
Obviously, I’m a fan of the song, and I actually sampled it myself – a little bit from the drum solo in the middle made this beat for a song called Let’s Not Keep Fucking Up. That lyric is taken from Grace Slick at Altamont, where she was trying to calm down the audience.
That drum beat is phenomenal! It’s a fantastic, heavy riff that you can trance out to. If you’ve had a couple of drinks or some drugs, you can stick your head in the speakers and really get into it.”
