{"id":330756,"date":"2025-12-06T03:45:18","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T03:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/330756\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T03:45:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T03:45:18","slug":"john-sebastian-documentary-charts-lovin-spoonful-woodstock-kotter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/330756\/","title":{"rendered":"John Sebastian Documentary Charts Lovin’ Spoonful, Woodstock, ‘Kotter’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn one form or another, John Sebastian<\/a> knows you remember his songs. He knows that if you\u2019re of a certain age, you recall \u201cDo You Believe in Magic\u201d and \u201cSummer in the City\u201d with his band the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful, or \u201cWelcome Back,\u201d the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter, the John Travolta-led sitcom of the Seventies. He knows you may recognize \u201cWelcome Back\u201d as a post-pandemic song used in ads by Applebee\u2019s, Major League Baseball, and more, or recall how it was sampled in Mase\u2019s rap single of the same name. Or maybe you\u2019ve heard MonaLisa Twins\u2019 indie-pop remake of \u201cDid You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Sebastian is also well aware of the sometimes painful fact that not enough people may know the name John Sebastian. \u201cI\u2019m sort of, how would you say \u2026 I\u2019m the opposite of the guys who have all the different awards,\u201d Sebastian, 81, tells Rolling Stone from his home in Woodstock, New York.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike many of his peers from the Sixties, Sebastian has never written what he calls \u201ca fucking memoir,\u201d which could be one reason his name doesn\u2019t always ring a bell, even to his generation. But he did decide to sit down for interviews for I\u2019ll Paint Rainbows All Over Your Blues, a just-completed Sebastian documentary by directors Todd Kwait and Chris Andersen that revisits the highs (sometimes literally) and lows (the notorious Spoonful drug bust) of his life and career. \u201cI guess my reaction was just glad to have somebody interested,\u201d Sebastian says about cooperating.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the doc proves, Sebastian\u2019s career has been a particularly quirky one. The son of a classical harmonica player and radio actress and writer, Sebastian cut his teeth as an accompanist in the early Sixties New York folk scene \u2014 befriending Bob Dylan and many others along the way \u2014 and then co-founded the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful. After the group collapsed, Sebastian became a symbol of the Woodstock generation thanks to his semi-stoned appearance at that festival and in the accompanying movie. Since then, he\u2019s returned to the mainstream occasionally (that Kotter song) but has largely stuck with the American roots music that was also his own roots, touring and playing with the likes of the late Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tFeaturing interview with peers like Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Arlo Guthrie, Michelle Phillips<\/a>, and Spoonful bassist Steve Boone, I\u2019ll Paint Rainbows All Over Your Blues does, in its way, explore some of the obstacles Sebastian faced. In conversation and in the film, he exudes the same beatific, genial, and bespectacled vibe he exhibited dating back to the Spoonful days; then and now, he\u2019s never been an archetypal wild-and-crazy rocker. Film footage of Sebastian with his father is a reminder that Sebastian also didn\u2019t quite have the requisite angst required by many rock stars of his generation. \u201cI\u2019m looking at old home movies of my dad getting off the plane and hugging and kissing me, and I said, \u2018This is why I\u2019ll never be Bruce Springsteen,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cThat whole route was not for me. My father loved me, like an Italian father.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSebastian\u2019s last-minute performance<\/a> at Woodstock also branded him, for better or eventually worse, as a tie-dyed troubadour of his time, although he says he wasn\u2019t as stoned as the legend has it. \u201cAs time goes on, it\u2019s an inclination for people to make me higher than I was,\u201d he says. \u201cAs a New York guy, I didn\u2019t just start taking things I didn\u2019t know about. However, if you put me in mud for a few days and go, \u2018Well, this isn\u2019t LSD, more like DMT,\u2019 I would\u2019ve said, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019ll see what it can do.\u2019 That was before anybody told me this would be a good idea to get up and play in front of a few hundred thousand people.\u201d (Many years later, Sebastian says, he was approached about a career as a kids folk singer along the lines of Raffi: \u201cI said, \u2018Guys, I smoke dope, and I\u2019m not going to look like I hide it.\u2019 I think that was good, because it only took about 10 minutes for them to figure out I wasn\u2019t their guy.\u201d)<\/p>\n

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\n\tThen, as the film chronicles, came the idiosyncratic career choices, starting with the way he followed up his Woodstock appearance with albums like The Four of Us, which was centered around a side-long suite (prog folk?) recounting a cross-country trip with his wife, Katherine, and two friends. \u201cI can only say I was madly in love,\u201d he says now, \u201cand it permitted me to get pretty goofy sometimes.\u201d At a point where \u201cnobody wanted me\u201d after his post-Spoonful albums didn\u2019t sell, Sebastian was asked to write the theme song for a sitcom about urban toughs in high school called Kotter. The producers loved \u201cWelcome Back\u201d so much that the name of the show was changed to include that phrase. (Sebastian currently lives in the house he purchased with that money.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout the documentary, Sebastian also brings up what he calls the \u201cSpoonful curse,\u201d which manifested itself in many ways. He maintains that the band, which hopscotched around pop, jug band music, blues, country, and folk, was ahead of its time. \u201cOur timing as a band was somewhat peculiar,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we were doing what we were doing, nobody got it. When we were no longer a band, all of a sudden, about eight years later, people are saying, \u2018Hey, this is like Americana!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnyone who saw One-Trick Pony, the offbeat 1980 Paul Simon film about a fictional rock star, might have caught a glimpse of a reunited Spoonful. But in another instance of bad luck, Sebastian says that what we didn\u2019t see was an entire rehearsal of the temporary reformed band. \u201cWe\u2019re doing a rehearsal, and the Spoonful clicked in, like, wow,\u201d he says. \u201cWe hadn\u2019t played in eight or 10 years. Nothing wrong. Finished the whole set. And we said, \u2018Boy, that\u2019s, great. Were you filming?\u2019 And they go, \u2018Well, we had to save film.\u2019\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen came that day in 1966 when Boone and lead guitarist and cutup Zal Yanovsky were busted for weed in San Francisco. With the Canadian Yanovsky facing deportation, which would also mean the end of the Spoonful, the two agreed to take an undercover cop around and introduce them to friends, in the hopes the cop would make a bust. As a result of those machinations, Boone and the late Yanovsky (who are both seen in the doc discussing the bust) got off. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut word of the incident made its way to the underground press, which branded the band as informers and even (in one alt-newspaper ad) instructed women not to sleep with them. \u201cI was not even in the town where my bandmates and brothers got busted,\u201d says Sebastian, who was in Los Angeles at the time of the arrests. \u201cAnd then the next thing that happened was in San Francisco, everybody was so anxious to have a virtue-signaling thing. Nobody ever managed to say, \u2018Oh, so, these two guys were in San Francisco, and those two other guys were in Los Angeles, so we only promise to not fuck half of the Spoonful?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Sebastian tells RS, with evident melancholy, \u201cI still am suffering the results of those decisions made way back when. That was the thing you couldn\u2019t erase.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tDue to the arrests, Sebastian says the Spoonful were not invited to play the monumental Monterey Pop festival in 1967, despite his friendship with festival co-organizer John Phillips and his band, the Mamas and the Papas. \u201cWe were the best friends of John, Michelle, and Cass [Elliot],\u201d he says, \u201cbut they knew, and we knew, that they couldn\u2019t invite us\u201d thanks to the band\u2019s tattered reputation. (In the second issue of Rolling Stone, Ralph J. Gleason wrote a sympathetic rebuttal to the backlash, calling the episode a \u201cterrible, tragic thing\u201d: \u201cIf what Zal and Steve did was a sin, then it is our sin too. They are victims, just as the man who was fingered is a victim. Just as we are all victims.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn one way, at least, the Spoonful were ahead of their time. A version of the band still exists and tours, with only one founding member (Boone) involved, paving the way for many classic-rock bands<\/a> to follow. Sebastian says he relinquished any ownership to the Spoonful name when he left, which he sees now as a mixed blessing. \u201cIt could have helped me financially,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I guess I didn\u2019t attach much value to what would be the enormous nostalgia market for all of our contemporary bands.\u201d (He says he\u2019s seen the current Spoonful and that they\u2019re \u201cvery good,\u201d although he has tweaked them for not fully re-creating the finger-picking guitar weave that he and Yanovsky perfected.)<\/p>\n

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\n\tTwo years ago, Sebastian did sell his publishing (from his Spoonful songs to solo tunes) for an undisclosed sum to the independent music publishing company AMR Songs. Unlike many of his peers, Sebastian is frank about the reasons why he made the deal. \u201cI had to sell it,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause when you do the math and find out you couldn\u2019t make that money in a year working every day times eight, you start to go, \u2018Jesus, I guess I should be thinking about my family here.\u2019 It isn\u2019t a great move, because as time goes on, everything is just skyrocketing in the\u00a0world of monetizing the arts. But it\u2019s a decent move.\u201d Last year, the jacket he wore onstage at Woodstock sold at a rock memorabilia auction for $64,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow that he\u2019s finally laid out his life on film, what does Sebastian hope people will take from I\u2019ll Paint Rainbows All Over Your Blues? \u201cI really don\u2019t know,\u201d he shrugs. \u201cExcept to say this guy was there. Some of you noticed. Some didn\u2019t. But here he is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one form or another, John Sebastian knows you remember his songs. He knows that if you\u2019re of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,184996,136,184997],"class_list":{"0":"post-330756","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-john-sebastian","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-the-lovin-spoonful"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}