MAN WHO GAVE US THE MOST POPULAR, LONGEST DRUM SOLO HAS DIED
As a young disc jockey, Iron Butterflies song “”In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was not only a great song to play on the radio…it was a great “bathroom song”. If the disc jockey needed to go to the bathroom, you needed a long song to play. “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was 17 minutes long. But the main thing we liked about the song was the incredibly long and masterful drum solo – running about two and half minutes long. We’ve learned today that the drummer who gave us that solo, Ron Bushy, has died.
Born on Dec. 23, 1945, Ron Bushy joined Iron Butterfly back in 1966 and was the only member of the band to be featured on all six of their albums.
Best known for his drum solo on the band’s 1968 hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” from their second studio album, Bushy would go on to perform on their third and fourth albums — 1969’s Ball and 1970’s Metamorphosis — until the band went their separate ways in 1971.
According to drummer Ron Bushy, organist-vocalist Doug Ingle wrote the song one evening while drinking an entire gallon of Red Mountain wine. When the inebriated Ingle then played the song for Bushy, who wrote down the lyrics for him, he was slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be “in the Garden of Eden” was interpreted by Bushy as “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.
Even though nearly all of Iron Butterfly’s songs were quite structured, the idea of turning the minute-and-a-half-long ballad into an extended jam emerged very early; Jeff Beck claims that when he saw Iron Butterfly perform at the Galaxy Club in Los Angeles in April 1967, half a year before the band recorded their first album, their entire second set consisted of a 35-minute-long version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”
