My Mirage

great tune, but i have no idea what it means. im guessing they were stoned, since it was the sixties

My older brother bought this album (In-a-gadda-da-vida) when it first came out (1968?) and spent two years playing the title track over and over again. Then, one day, I started playing his records myself and flipped the damn disc over (yeah kids... we had TWO sides to a disc back then!) to play the other side... Great tunes! Especially this baby, MIRAGE. I used to listen to this over and over again in my early adolescence. It's about the PERFECT GIRL. You know, the one you DON'T HAVE... at least not yet. She exists only in YOUR MIND; she's a MIRAGE. But don't you want others to see her too? In YOUR place? I think that's when I started to take drawing seriously...

Yes, it's a strange one. What drug-inspired 'mirage' did our singer see? Something good enough to invite friends over for, so it seems. I've always imagined some Roger Dean-esque landscape conjured by acid that transfixed our singer to the point that he actually wanted it painted or some such. Perhaps it was just about getting friends over for an acid party on the assumption that, once stoned, the mirage would become real for all of them. And they would be living the mirage as 'beautiful people'. No guesses why Iron Butterfly were regarded as an acid rock band.

This song is about one of the band's friends who was run over and, thus, died. It was inpsired by some artwork Doug Ingle did on the wall of the band's house, which helped him conceptualize the idea for "My Mirage."

For me, it has a bunch of creative psychedelic lyrics in the song, but probably the other best song from the album. All I gotta say is that the 60's were pretty hippish with lots of psychedelic pop music in the late 60's, and the organ on this song is just great.

I guess it is just about some hallucination that Doug Ingle had during an acid trip that he wanted to recreate in reality by painting it on the wall.