The song features a memorable guitar and bass riff, and sustains this riff for almost the entire length of the song. The riff is used as the basis for extended keyboard and guitar solos, which are interrupted in the middle by an extended drum solo, one of the first such solos on a rock record.
The lyrics are simple, and heard only at the beginning and the end. The song title was originally "In the Garden of Eden", but in the course of rehearsing and recording singer Doug Ingle slurred the words to the nonsense phrase of the title.
The song is significant in rock history because, together with Blue Cheer and Steppenwolf, it marks the point when psychedelic music produced heavy metal. Later 1970s heavy metal and progressive rock acts like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin owe much of their sound, and even more of their live acts, to this recording.