MUSICAL MUTINY - "Iron Butterfly, Fantasy, The Grit" (1970)

I've got a Psychedelic Saturday Night Special for you that you can thank Tom Moody for. It was Tom's comment that he left on "Pagan Island" that clued me into this happening little flick from 1970 called "Musical Mutiny." "Musical Mutiny" was another one of  Bakersfiel Barry Mahon's wonderful ideas, and is really not much more than a long musical video with a tiny lame story to try and tie it all together, but it's not what it's about, it's who it's about!

 

The star of the show is the Southern California classic psychedelic band call Iron Butterfly. Why they insist on calling them 'The' Iron Butterfly is anybody's guess!

One of the other acts in the movie are a fairly interesting band called Fantasy that was from Florida, and had kind of a Big Brother and the Holding Company thing going on.

 According to the Prog Archives website,

"the band was fronted by a Billy Robbins, and one day, he went missing, and eventually was found dead." Billy Robbins was replaced by a 16 year old Jamene Miller that you will see in the movie. Jamene died in 2008 at the age of 55.

As far as I can tell, Fantasy only put out this one album, and you can get a copy on Discogs for about $13.00 including postage!

It's pretty hard to find out anything about The New Society Band these days, but it looks like at least one member still performs as Rockin' Ron and the New Society Band today.

Likewise about the band called The Grit who perform their song on a merry go round!

Leave it to Barry to come up with "A Fabulous Musical Smogasboard" like this.

(For the record, the proper spelling of the word is Smörgasbord.) Maybe Barry thought it was a cross between a musical buffet and a surfboard!

Nothing worse than a bunch of bored hippies!

"It's a "Musical Mutiny!"

And it's all happening at "Pirate's World" in Dania, Florida!

 This is about the weirdest ride I've ever seen!

A Horseacoaster I guess!

This is what passed for entertainment before rock and roll came along.

The few minutes of a story line will make you wish Barry had picked out another song for somebody to perform, or found another group!

"Pirate's World" was a 100 acre amusement park that opened in 1967, and everybody thought it was pretty cool until Walt Disney World opened in 1971. After that they declared bankruptcy in 1973, and were completely out of business by 1975.

Here's another shot of The New Society Band.

 Here's a pretty good shot of lead singer Doug Ingle of Iron Butterfly!

You can watch just their performance of "Soul Experience" which is one of my favourite songs on the always amazing Internet Archive!

"Musical Mutiny" is only 74 minutes long, and the last seventeen minutes and five seconds is Iron Butterfly doing the full version of  "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Hit It!

 This crowd could have just as easily been at a Sea World show!

So, thanks Tom, and for the rest of you, the best part is that this whole movie streams on YouTube for absolutely nothing, so stay home and watch it! You might feel better about the world for a couple of minutes!!