“In a Gadda Da Vida” by Iron Butterfly

Doug Ingle wrote "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", its title a bent version of "In the Garden of Eden", and Iron Butterfly stretched it across the entire second side of the album that shares its name: just over 17 minutes of churning organ, fuzzed riffing and hypnotic stomp, with Ron Bushy hammering out a drum solo of about two and a half minutes in the middle.

A 45 trimmed to under three minutes gave the band its only top-40 hit, peaking at number 30, while the album went to number four and has sold over 30 million copies. An eight-minute edit later turned up in the 1986 film Manhunter, VH1 ranked it the 24th-greatest hard rock song in 2009, and it's often counted among the very first heavy metal recordings, an influence on plenty that followed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.