Iron Butterfly - Biography
By Jeff Hunt
There is an exotic African hardwood called wenge. It’s deep brown, almost black. It’s poisonous to humans. A carpenter friend turned me on to it. You have to use a vacuum filtration system if you work it in a woodshop, and take extra precautions to not get splinters. In Africa, they boat out on the lake with chips of wenge, then throw them in. All of the fish float to the surface, completely stupefied, and the fishermen simply haul them in.
When I was assigned Iron Butterfly, and was told it was an Icon-status entry – the highest, 1,500 words – that’s how I felt.
Stupefied.
I mean, it just cannot be done. Not only are 1,500 words on Iron Butterfly physically and intellectually impossible, they’re morally unconscionable. The Geneva Convention prohibits it. I’ve spent days trying to devise an angle or thesis or anything that would get me through 1,500 words on this @#$% band.
[sigh]
Okay. Iron Butterfly. Iron Butterfly is a band formed in San Diego in 1966. It is the most notorious one-hit-wonder act in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, due to the sheer, colossal, monumental, epic, tortuous, monotonous, abjectly useless stupidity of that one, sole, single, solitary, moronic hit:
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."
And, okay: I was totally wrong. I just found something on the intraweb that is going to make it easy for me to meet the word count on this piece. In fact, I’m about to blow it away by a thousand words. Iron Butterfly Never. Broke. Up. It has blown through a zillion members, playing the RV and Boat Show circuit for all these years. It’s not even a band, it’s a license to play ONE SONG until the end of time. I mean, look at the ridiculous list that follows. It’s one of the most desperately pathetic things I’ve ever encountered.
I take it back. It’s not that Iron Butterfly never broke up – it never even existed. It’s like the only thing that exists is that wretched flipping song. It entered our dimension through some appalling, Lovecraftian portal in 1968, like Cthulhu or some such @#$%, and it’s never going to leave. It lives deep in the ocean, and waits for the humans to summon it via ritual invocation at the RV and Boat Show.
Go ahead, look! Really. Follow the logic. Some desperate sadsack is going to be singing this abominable flipping thing IN THE 34th CENTURY.
