Artist · chart history
Iron Butterfly
Band San Diego United States Active 1966–2012
Iron Butterfly formed in 1966 in San Diego, United States and was active until 2012. Iron Butterfly has 33 chart appearances on 33 radio countdowns from 15 stations on RockLists, spanning 1991–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “In a Gadda Da Vida”, which appears on 32 lists with a best position of #38. The station that charted Iron Butterfly most often is Q104.3 (New York, NY), with 5 appearances.
Iron Butterfly formed in San Diego in 1966, and two years later they unleashed "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", a lumbering psychedelic epic with a riff heavy enough to dent the floor. That riff pointed straight at hard rock and heavy metal, and critics have since credited the band as one of the first to weld a hard, distorted attack to trippy, open-ended jamming. The album of the same name, their second, keeps on selling, and it earned them the first in-house platinum album award Atlantic Records ever handed out.
The lineup of that era had Doug Ingle, Ron Bushy, Erik Brann and Lee Dorman, and it didn't hold for long: Brann was gone by 1969, when Mike Pinera and Larry "Rhino" Reinhardt arrived, and Ingle and Dorman left in 1971. Brann came back in the mid-'70s alongside bassist Philip Taylor Kramer, but the band made no new records after 1975, even as various lineups kept reviving the name. On rock radio the one song has never needed help.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Iron Butterfly on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | In a Gadda Da Vida | 32 | #38 | – | – | |
| 2 | Scorching Beauty | 1 | #397 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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