The Sunday Musician

Yesterday Dean wanted to know what motivated musicians, and I thought maybe today I'd come at it from a different angle, something a little more personal.  This story is from around the time I first played organ in the Baptist church (my first church gig!)

Christmas Eve of 1971 sucked. All the snowy wonder had gone - we’d moved, I’d grown up, and it was raining. I longed for Christmases past: the attention I got when I was 9 years old, the magic of unopened gifts, games with extended family after Christmas dinner at my grandparent’s. But I was 15; no longer treated like a child, unable to be charmed with a $25 gift, and the only cousin without a driver’s license. My cousins, I knew, would all leave me the next day, driving off to see their friends after dinner and leaving me to a mind-numbing afternoon with the old folks. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just the way it was. The magic was disappearing, and I longed for it. I knew I couldn’t go back, but which way was forward?

That Christmas Eve we didn’t visit the other side of the family like other years. (Another stomp on my emotional solar plexus) We stayed home, and when that got boring, Mom and Dad decided it’d be fun to go to Meijer Thrifty Acres and look at garden hoses, or curtains, or something else that was apparently magic for them.

While they wandered the aisles, I flipped through the record bins; Three Dog Night, Grand Funk, The Guess Who, somebody named ‘Elton John’. And then…discounted to $2.99, was a record I’d heard legends about – Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-a-gadda-da-vida . The drum solo as long as a regular song! One whole side taken up with one whopping 17 minute cut! The magic poked it’s head around the corner and waved.  I had to have the record. I parlayed the rain, the lack of seasonal activity and my long face into sympathy from my parents, and they bought the record. My dad was always a soft touch when it came to me and music.

Back home, down in my basement room, I cued up the vinyl and read the liner notes: Eric Brann – a 17-yr. old prodigy on guitar. Doug Ingle on organ, his father a church organist. The cover was a live shot of the band onstage, and I wondered at the equipment as only a 15 year old male can do. It was hopelessly romantic, in the broader sense. Had they been girls, it would have been romantic in every sense.

I got lost in the song. It was dark and moody, and I’d never heard anything like it. The organ intro, so full of portent, the huge, husky voice of the singer, the incredible distortion on the guitar, the long, rambling passages…I couldn’t envision the environment in which they’d recorded, how they wrote the song, how they thought up the parts. Rain drummed against the window as Ron Bushy drummed through his historic solo. I was transported. Midway through, the organ played a haunting solo, which seemed to me at the time to perfectly fit my lonely Christmas Eve mood. Christmas changed.

In-a-gadda-da-vida became for me an anthem for losing my childhood. It marked a sea change for me. For years afterward I couldn’t hear it without that forlorn, rainy Christmas Eve rushing back at me.

Twenty-five years later I saw a copy of the CD someplace and bought it. Back home I listened through the headphones, and when the organ solo came, I heard something I’d completely missed back in ‘71; right in the middle of Ingles’ organ solo, he improvises around the melody of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’, then actually plays it nearly note for note on one entire pass. I couldn’t believe it. It had stuck with me all these years as a Christmas memory, unconnected (I thought) to the holiday except by chance and circumstance, and here was a Christmas song right in the middle of it!

Such a relic of the 60’s this is. Dark, edgy, experimental. Inspired in places, dumb in others. As a whole, though, really quite a recording. The times in which it was created are long gone, or mostly gone, and without the context it sounds pretty dated. For me, though, it’s magic. For the full effect, listen to it through headphones.

No apologies here – I still get tingles in several spots:

6:23 The bass plays his goodbye lick, and the drums are on their own, like a ship pulling out of harbor.

9:08 The organ creeps in.

11:23 ‘God Rest’ starts.

12:37 The band rushes back in. The drum fill that ushers in the big sound is probably the high emotional point of the song.

13:10 The bass kicks off a wonderful, rhythmic section with it’s Eastern Indian organ riff, and elephant noises from the guitar. A little travelogue right in the middle of the song.

15:18 Ingles shouts ‘Three-four’ to bring the drums out of the tom-tom groove and back to a two-four beat.

16:25 Ingles ‘hut hut’ to signal the next change.

Part 1:

Part 2: