While we could stretch back as far as 18th-century composer Giuseppe Tartini’s hellish Devil’s Trill Sonata, Grohl offered his two cents on just where metal’s seeds were sown, selecting Iron Butterfly’s colossal ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ as the moment rock sincerely went heavy.
“What I consider to be one of the first metal songs,” Grohl told Q. “The riff and the groove are dirgy and sinister. The whole track is so spooky and haunting. I heard it as a young kid and it freaked me out. It reminded me of bad things and still does.”
While ostensibly a cosmic love song, Satan’s serpentine presence is felt throughout ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’s amorous wanders across Eden’s uncorrupted paradise. As soon as Doug Ingle’s opening organ ripples cascade out of the speakers, his twinned keyboard skulk grooving along with Erik Brann’s bedevilled guitar riff sets a strange tone for the rest of the piece, a song that feels like heavy metal if posturing without its obvious markers and tropes.
Psychedelia plays an essential role in metal’s genesis. Across the late 1960s, the fuzzed-out assault pumped out by The 13th Floor Elevators, Cream’s use of arresting pedals, or even The Doors’ summoning of volatile lysergia all helped burnish metal’s steely bludgeon in the next decade. While much attention is lavished on Ron Bushy’s two-odd-minute drum solo, Lucifer’s string pulling works its dark magic during ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’s eerie swagger around that immortal, trippy riff.
The 17-minute ode to carnal transport occupies the entire second side of 1968’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album, and towers over their work as their defining hour. It’s not just Grohl who can spot metal’s wriggling birth amid Iron Butterfly’s heady acid rock, Jimmy Page taking notes when first coaxing his Led Zeppelin project to the doom and stoner bands decades later namechecking the San Diego band’s heavy, grooving chug as a key influence.
