Last year, after we watched “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix, I asked my wife if she wanted to try playing chess. I learned in Junior High School but played very little after that. She said ok and we bought a nice chess/backgammon set and the “Idiot’s guide to chess” book. We sat down two times reading and going over what we read on the chess board. She never talked about it again. We played backgammon a few times though. I kept winning and she stopped talking about that too.
Drummer Prodigy Nandi Bushell Finally Jams with Foo Fighters
It finally happened everyone! No, we’re not talking about the release of Winds of Winter, but something equally epic: a jam session featuring the Foo Fighters and 11-year-old virtuoso drummer Nandi Bushell. And good gravy did Bushell blow the doors off the place. That place being the 17,500-seat Forum in Los Angeles, which looked to have been packed to the max.
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!”
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.’”
A drastically edited version of the song became a radio hit, helping the album go to Number Four on the Billboard 200 and becoming one of the biggest-selling albums of the year.
Bushy’s primal drumming would go on to influence many of his peers. “Ringo [Starr] and Paul [McCartney] came to see us at Royal Albert Hall,” Bushy said last year. “Ringo took me out to dinner and drinks and said to me, ‘I hope you don’t mind I stole a part of your drum solo’ in ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ [for the Abbey Road track “The End.”] I told him not at all. ‘I took it as a compliment coming from you.’”
The oft-covered song — everyone from the Residents to Slayer to the Incredible Bongo Band released versions of it — remains a pop culture staple, famously appearing in The Simpsons in 1995 and as sample fodder, via the Bongo Band’s version, for Nas’s 2004 song “Thief’s Theme” and 2006’s “Hip Hop Is Dead.”
So I hope you have 17 minutes to spare…
And of course The Simpsons version. I never get tired of this one.
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