Forty years after the fact, we’re still scratching our heads in wonder. The 60’s music revolution produced so many iconic songs, even those who were there have difficulty explaining the phenomenon.
Even John Sebastian — who was 21 when his first hit with the Lovin’ Spoonful (1965’s “Do You Believe in Magic?”) hit the Top 10 — has a hard time diagramming just how so many young people made so much memorable music so quickly.
“This is hard to put into context for younger people,” he admitted by phone from his home near Woodstock, New York. “In the beginning, it was not the attitude of ‘I’m going to be a big star.’ This all occurred a few years before the idea that you could make a really victorious living – not just a living — out of playing music.
“The company we kept was much of a stimulus as anything,” he continued. “Being in the bull ring with the Beatles and the Beach Boys… that was really the competition, and it made you work harder.”
“Daydream.” “Summer In The City.” “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice.” “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” That song about magical, groovy music making you feel happy “like an old time movie,” and more. The Greenwich Village-spawned Lovin’ Spoonful cranked out an astonishing number of enduring gems, hits that predated the feel-good “San Francisco sound” by months or years.
Along with that success came a bit of miscasting, Sebastian said. While the media portrayed them as rockers, the r&b and folk-inspired Spoonful just wanted to “roll.”
Writing and recording their own music also set them apart from many of their peers.
“That was just who we wanted to be,” recalled the singer/guitarist/harmonica player. “We thought of playing 80 million sessions with (session drummer) Hal Blaine as sort of, ‘Well, that’s great, but that’s not being a great live band.’ We hadn’t played all these sets a day in Greenwich Village coffee houses for nothing!”
This case of mistaken identity played a role in Sebastian leaving the band in 1968.
He didn’t mind leaving the throngs of screaming teenage girls behind, he said.
“There were factions in this music explosion; (the performers) weren’t ‘all the same,’” Sebastian emphasized. “It was to our tremendous disappointment that people were mistaking us for a ‘Beatles-type’ act. The whole thing of screaming girls and so on, it didn’t fit us the same way as perhaps it did the English acts. And it even frustrated the Beatles enough that they quit touring; not touring wasn’t an option for the Spoonful.”
Seven years later, Sebastian struck gold again when he wrote and sang “Welcome Back” for a new TV show initially called “Kotter.” Surprisingly, he wasn’t surprised by the composition’s instant success.
Chuckling, Sebastian ventured that “perhaps it was the fact that left over from the Spoonful was an overconfidence that was totally out of scale with might have been expected of a folk singer in an ‘Alice Cooper world,’ if you will.
“Once I realized what the subject was, I knew I could I write a good song about it,” he added. “My experience as a dyslexic kid made it easy to be sarcastic about school, teachers, a lot of stuff that’s sort of the subtext of the song. I didn’t think it was going to be the biggest TV theme song ever, but I knew I had something. It had some hooks in it.”
Since The Lovin’ Spoonful’s heyday, Sebastian has enjoyed a prolific career. Writing and performing music for solo albums, films, Broadway musicals and children’s movies have kept him constantly working. In recent years, he’s been busy collaborating with ace mandolinist David Grisman.
With so much new material to perform, does it bother the singer that the distant past revisits him every time he takes the stage?
“No, not at all,” Sebastian answered. “(The hits) are the height of a curve, not the size of a mountain. You might have to take a step up and say, ‘In order to play whatever I have in mind to share with an audience, I also have to play some songs that they expect.’ That’s a small price to pay… the hits are a calling card, a foot in the door.”
Those “calling cards” are quite a legacy. In 2010, one still associates John Sebastian and The Lovin’ Spoonful with happy moments, music that makes you feel good.
You could almost hear a shrug on the other end of the phone as Sebastian modestly countered, “Isn’t that what music is supposed to do?”
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