Iron Butterfly Drummer Ron Bushy Dead at 79

Jason Newman
Sun, August 29, 2021, 2:58 PM·3 min read

Ron Bushy, the steadfast drummer for hard rock group Iron Butterfly who appeared on the group’s 1968, 17-minute rock opus “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” died Sunday at the age of 79. A cause of death was not immediately disclosed.

“Ron Bushy, our beloved legendary drummer of Iron Butterfly, has passed away peacefully, with his wife Nancy by his side, at 12:05am on August 29th at UCLA Santa Monica Hospital,” the band said in a statement. “All three of his daughters were also with him. He was a real fighter … He will be deeply missed!”

Bushy was the only original member to appear on all six of the band’s albums, beginning with 1968’s Heavy through 1975’s Sun and Steel. He continued performing with various incarnations of the band for decades following their commercial peak.

While the group released their debut album to some commercial success — though every member besides Bushy and singer Doug Ingle would leave the group following its completion — it was the follow-up released the same year that earned them rock immortality. The title track from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, whose title was based on Bushy’s mishearing of “In the Garden of Eden,” remains part of the rock canon; a bellwether of the genre’s more bombastic, psychedelic side of the late 1960s.

“‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ was written as a slow country ballad, about one-and-a-half minutes long,” Bushy told It’s Psychedelic Baby magazine last year. “I came home late one night and Doug [Ingle] had been drinking a whole gallon of Red Mountain wine. I asked him what he had done, while he has been playing a slow ballad on his Vox keyboard. It was hard to understand him because he was so drunk … so I wrote it down on a napkin exactly how it sounded phonetically to me: ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.’ It was supposed to be ‘In the Garden of Eden.'”

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