Hehe...had to bump this one, really brought back memories and for some reason I missed it a month ago...
In A Gadda Da Vida was one of the first cover songs I learned with my band in high school, and the first song I learned on drums. Solo included. It was supposed to be In A Garden Of Eden, singer was so drunk it came out the way you hear on the album, so they changed the name to match and the rest is history.
Lee Dorman (bass) and Rhino (lead guitar) went on to join Rod Evans (Deep Purple's 1st vocalist) and Bobby Caldwell (Johnny Winter's drummer) and formed Captain Beyond, incredible band and the first actual supergroup. The 1st Capt Beyond album is still one of my favorites, I keep a copy on cassette all the time so I don't wear out my very hard to find album. Definitely worth a listen if you're a Butterfly fan. If you can find it. I never managed to get my hands on a copy of Sufficiently Breathless, the 2nd one, so I don't know about it, but the reviews I've seen didn't score it well. I've seen reviews way wide of the mark plenty times though...
Strangely enough, I was never a big Iron Butterfly fan, In A Gadda was the only song I really was exposed to, I was only able to listen to radio at the time, no such thing as FM so it was top 40, and that was crap like Tommy Roe, Partridge Family and other such ilk that I was quickly losing interest in, but it was the only rock n roll around...till a friend put on a Grand Funk album one day and life was never the same again...then I immersed myself in the immortal white album...(yeah I know that was backwards, but I had to borrow them and sneak them into the house, my father would throw screaming fits if he heard rock at all in HIS house...I wasn't allowed to own or listen to it untilI was in high school and really rebelled...refused to let him tell me what I could listen to, he hated me for it forever)
So I got into a lot of this later on, after I joined the military and was exposed to friends' album collections. Moby Grape, Atomic Rooster, Captain Beyond, Crack the Sky, Southerland Brothers and Quiver, Genesis, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, Rush, Queen, and so on...but never did listen to Iron Butterfly much for some odd reason, as much as I like Lee Dorman and Rhino...