How a Jug of Carlo Rossi Wine Inspired a Legendary Rock Song
Iron Butterfly’s 1968 hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is a simple, somewhat nonsensical, and exhausting tune. Clocking in at just over 17 minutes, it has just one verse and chorus, with only nine lines of lyrics for the whole song. The vast majority of the track consists of longwinded guitar, drum, and organ solos. Yet, the song’s catchy, hypnotic bass line and mysterious title have made it both a signature anthem of the psychedelic era and Iron Butterfly’s only hit single.
Based on the song’s few lyrics, it appears that it’s a love song, but it’s hard to tell who or what the track is dedicated to. Is “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” a person? A place? While the song’s cryptic name might sound like some form of butchered Spanglish, it’s actually no more than a slurring of words caused by a night of drinking cheap wine straight from the bottle — one that turned an otherwise basic phrase into something incomprehensible, trippy, and a perfect refrain for a song of its time.
The track’s inception dates back to the same year it was released: 1968. The band had only formed two years prior in San Diego, and after relocating to Los Angeles, Iron Butterfly got steady work playing various nightclubs around town. The group secured a record deal with Atlantic Records subsidiary ATCO Records in 1967 and released its debut album “Heavy.”
According to a 2020 interview with Iron Butterfly drummer Ron Bushy, he was working as a pizza maker at the time to help support the band. One night, he came back to the group’s shared home in L.A.’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood to find lead vocalist and organist Doug Ingle playing his Vox keyboard next to an empty gallon-sized jug of Carlo Rossi’s Red Mountain brand wine.
Nowadays, the brand lives on under the Carlo Rossi name, but parent company E. & J. Gallo (now Gallo) did away with the “Red Mountain” branding in 1975. As anyone who’s tried any Carlo Rossi wine knows, the stuff isn’t fine wine by any stretch, but it’s relatively inoffensive and — most importantly — it’s cheap. According to The Los Angeles Times, the price of a standard bottle of Red Mountain wine was only 49 cents in the ‘60s, so Ingle was getting sauced on a budget.
Despite noticing that his bandmate had fallen under Carlo Rossi’s spell, Bushy asked Ingle what he had done that day, and the organ player performed the rough draft of the soon-to-be smash hit. “It was hard to understand him because he was so drunk,” Bushy told “It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine.” “So I wrote it down on a napkin exactly how it sounded phonetically to me: ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’” Supposedly, Ingle was really saying “in the Garden of Eden,” but the group kept the misheard mishmosh instead.
After shelving the track for about a year, the band started rehearsing it and performing it while on tour with Jefferson Airplane for three months. Although the song was originally a minute-and-a-half-long ballad, the band repeatedly rearranged it and buffered it with numerous extended solos, eventually turning the tune into the 17-minute jam session that went on wax. “Immediately after the tour we went into the studio called Ultra Sonic Studios and recorded ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ in one take,” Bushy said in the 2020 interview. “The engineer Don Cassel said ‘Come in and listen.’ The song was done.”
The band’s second album, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” came out in June 1968 with the title track occupying the entirety of the vinyl record’s B-side. A radio edit of the song was also released, clocking in at a much more digestible two minutes and 52 seconds. That year, the single peaked at No. 30 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 list. And in 1993, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gave the album a quadruple Platinum certification for selling over 4 million copies in the U.S. since its release.
The band went on to put out four more studio albums during the late ‘60s and mid-’70s, but none achieved the same commercial success as “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Over the decades, the album’s title track has been covered by the likes of funk group the Incredible Bongo Band, and thrash metal band Slayer; sampled by rapper Nas; and even featured in an episode of “The Simpsons.” If it weren’t for that jug of wine, it’s possible that the song would’ve never taken off like it did. Although we can’t be sure of that, we can confidently say that “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is certainly a more unique grouping of words than “in the Garden of Eden.”
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