Hall of Shame: Iron Butterfly – Sun and Steel (1975)

Can you actually call this Iron Butterfly? Wunderkind Erik Braunn may be back after missing the last outing, and Ron Bushy is still competently hitting drum heads with two sticks, but glaringly missing are Doug Ingle and Lee fuckin’ Dorman, two of the most talented (if not the only talented) members of the band. Gone is the buttery, breathy (over the top) vibrato of Ingle, replaced by Braunn doing his best Ian Gillan impersonation, and all that spooky imagery replaced with MOR love-you-to-the-moon-babe tripe. Gone is the riding, gliding, punchy bass of Dorman, who completely destroyed the low end on the first four records. While the previous Butterfly seemed to be in on the joke, like they were having a go at their audience with some of their ridiculous lyrics and carnivalesque Vox Continental organ riffs, this iteration tries so hard at an earnest attempt for a serious record you genuinely feel embarrassed for them.

When Mike Pinera and Rhino came into the fold after the departure of Braunn and cut Butterfly Bleu, a bluesy exploration into more rootsy hard rock (is that a thing?) it seemed like it would be the last we’d hear from this 60’s holdover (except for every time you come across the 18 copies in the record store dollar bin of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or on the radio every five minutes…it’s always on somewhere, right?). While Bleu may not have had some of their strongest work, but it was still clearly Butterfly, driven through a filter of white boy blooze and a less-psychedelic sidelong title track. But the sheer audacity half a decade later to revive a personal favorite of mine into a mid-70’s go-nowhere half-metal half-snoozefest is enough to make any blue-eyed white American male feel like rioting if he wasn’t too Luded or too stupid from buying all that KISS merchandise. Nah, he doesn’t remember the first Butterfly at any rate, the white American male is too busy worshipping Peter Frampton.

*cough* anyway: The album is a meandering mess. One minute you’re thinking it’s gonna be okay; maybe a riff or two that will get you going, but only to have some bullshit balladry kill your Butterfly buzz. Its true, in between the Heavy Metal Metanoise are some pretty fucking awful slow numbers, namely “Beyond the The Milky Way,” a travesty which even features a saxophone solo. On a fucking Iron Butterfly album. Far be it from me to be too critical with expanding far-out musical avenues and fusing styles, but when you turn Hard Rock pioneers known for being as heavy and as psychedelic as their name suggests into a third-rate Elton John “Tiny Dancer” ripoff, who the hell do you have to blow to get back your old copy of Heavy?

Keyboardist Bill DeMartines sounds like he just discovered the Moog yesterday when he decides to inexplicably go that route, but his honky-tonk piano a la Mickey Lee Soule of ELF is competent enough, as are his B3 lines. Emerson he ain’t, but he fakes it okay. I can’t comment on Phil Kramer’s bass because it’s pretty buried in the mix. That’s fine, it’s a knife in the gut thinking of Lee Dorman being absent anyway. Ron Bushy plods along as usual, no “mind-expanding” (see: “numbing”) drum solos here. Braunn tries to fashion himself as something of a guitar god, I assume to recapture some of the novelty of being all of 16 when he wrote the famous Da-Vida riff, but with contemporaries like Ritchie Blackmore consistently kicking asses, his shredding just doesn’t have the same chutzpah it used tah.

Tracks like “Scion” definitely bring back some faint glimmers (even if they are Deep Purple riffs in disguise) of the previous incarnations of The Butterfly, and it may be the best track on the album. Which begs the question: When you have a scimitar flying out of a sun directly at you on the cover, why would you want to serve up some schlock like half of this album is? (i.e.: “Watch the World Goin’ By,” an unbearable acoustic shitshow). Why not just stick to the Hard Rock that got you to where you are? Because this ISN’T Iron Butterfly. This isn’t “Unconscious Power,” or “Possession,” or “In The Time of Our Lives.” This is a goldanged imposter. In age when a small army of former bandmates are suing for rights to use the names of their past incarnations, how did they get away with this? I like to think Ingle and Dorman are laughing somewhere, integrity intact.

by Blake Thomas