Doug Ingle, the lead singer and last surviving member of psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly, has died. He was 78.
The band was best known for its 1968 song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a huge inspiration for the progressive rock music of the following decade.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Iron Butterfly’s best-known song.
Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today
Ingle’s son Doug Ingle Jr confirmed his father’s passing in a statement provided to Fox News.
“My father passed away Friday evening May 24, 2024,” the statement read.
“It is a huge loss and a crack in our family’s universe which will be a challenge navigating this new reality.
“Dad was a truly wonderful person to know and be around.
“He had a comical wit and always fast with comebacks that would cause spontaneous laughter making it sometimes hard to have a serious conversation.
“He will be missed.”
A cause of death was not given.
On Facebook, Doug Ingle Jr wrote that he announced the news with “a heavy heart” but added that his father had died “peacefully in the presence of family”.
“Thank you dad for being a father, teacher and friend,” he wrote.
“Cherished loving memories I will carry the rest of my days moving forward in this journey of life.”
Doug Ingle was the last surviving member of Iron Butterfly.
Born in Nebraska, he co-founded the group in California in 1966, but the band was relatively short-lived.
Most of its success came with the 17-minute five-second FM radio smash In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.
Their 1968 album, named after the hit single, spent 81 weeks in the top 10 in the US.
For a while it stood as the bestselling album in Atlantic Records’ history and the album went on to be certified quadruple platinum.
Their next album Metamorphosis was released in 1970, but the band, also comprising drummer Ron Bushy, bassist Lee Dorman and guitarist Erik Brann, broke up the following year.
Iron Butterfly reunited in the mid-1970s, but Ingle did not join the lineup.
However, he did perform on stage with the band several times over the decades before retiring from performing in 1999.
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Beyond the epic length, the biggest piece of lore surrounding the band’s best-known song had to do with its wilfully silly title.
It was basically a slurred version of “In the garden of Eden”, as allegedly misheard by drummer Ron Bushy when Ingle was first presenting the song to the band.
On a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, called Bart Sells His Soul, Bart snuck a version of the organ-driven song into his church’s worship service, credited to I. Ron Butterfly.
“Hey, Marge, remember when we used to make out to this hymn?” whispered Homer.
Besides being covered by Bart Simpson’s church congregation, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was covered by Slayer (on the soundtrack for the film Less Than Zero), the Residents, Boney M and the Incredible Bongo Band, whose version was twice-sampled by the rapper Nas.
It also appeared memorably in Michael Mann’s thriller Manhunter.
Part of the reason the track ended up being 17 minutes long is that, when Iron Butterly arrived at the recording studio, engineer Don Casale asked the group to play through the song so he could set his levels.
They jammed through the extended version heard on LP as a practise run, unaware that Casale had hit “record”; that epic jam, of course, ended up being the master take.
– with NBC News