20 QUESTIONS A SPOONFUL OF HONEY


JOHN SEBASTIAN was the leader of The Lovin’ Spoonful – the buoyant quartet whose best songs endure as eternal sunshine pills. BILL DeMAIN discusses subverting jugband music, the hits,Woody Allen and “that” festival.


Shindig!: The Lovin’ Spoonful broke through in 1965, which was an amazing year for pop music – Rubber Soul, Highway 61 Revisited, Kinda Kinks. What does ’65 mean to you?


John Sebastian: I can’t imagine a better time to be writing songs and making music than in ’65. Part of the excitement of it was the competition. You just had to look around at Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, John Loudermilk and all these Nashville guys and go, “I’m never going to kick this guy’s ass” (laughs). And then in ’66 I got more BMI awards than Holland-Dozier-Holland. That really was the high watermark. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a moment as important as that in my life.


SD: When you see the ‘60s being depicted in movies and TV shows today, do you feel like they ever get it right?


JS: Two words – I cringe (laughs). It’s so hard to depict it, because it isn’t moral and isn’t politically correct. Good things don’t always


“We thought, “These Beatles, they’re going to be gone in six months.”We didn’t have prescience about everything.”


happen to good people. For example, The Doors movie was really revealing to me about the imperfections of trying to reproduce history. I was struck by how a simple portrayal by an actor of a character can throw you off by a mile as far as to what that person was really like.


SD: Your upbringing in New York City seems ideal for a budding songwriter. Your dad was a musician, your mum was a comedy writer, and they had a lot of famous friends. How did that affect your creative pursuits?


JS: My father was very good friends with Burl Ives and the famous illustrator Garth Williams. Between the two of them, they would always show up with some disreputable third party. One time it was Woody Guthrie, and he ended up at our house for about a week. Another time, it was Josh White, Jr. All of my mother’s friends spent their time


dissecting jokes, so that what was revealed was, “Here’s the funny part, here’s the set-up, here’s the punch line.” To understand those distinctions proved to be very valuable.


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SD: How did you discover the jugband music that become the key to The Lovin’ Spoonful sound?


JS: I was listening to these Gus Cannon tunes. A lot of them had the leftovers of hokum and vaudeville of the ugliest type, which was incredibly derogatory. This was a time when white guys in blackface would make up rude songs about black folks. As a musician I was responding to the music. I would look at these things, and think, “Nobody wants to hear these words, but I could rewrite them.” I found myself doing it to entire verses, and songs. Out of that came the possibility of writing my own songs.


SD: What was your concept for The Lovin’ Spoonful?


JS: Zally [Yanovsky, bass player] and I came out of accompanying folk singers, preceded by playing in rock ’n’ roll bands. What we wanted to do was incorporate as many types of American music as we could. The only thing off-limits was imitating The Beatles. We considered that the death knell as we saw other American groups doing it and trying to pass for English, which was the wrong way. Anyway we thought, “These Beatles, they’re going to be gone in six months.” We didn’t have prescience about everything (laughs).


SD: And didn’t The Beatles become Spoonful fans?


JS: Yes, to our tremendous delight. They thought that we had something singular. McCartney has been incredibly gracious about saying that ‘Good Day Sunshine’ was directly modelled after ‘Daydream’. I now have a rehearsal tape of The Beatles in which they’re trying to work out ‘Daydream’. George is saying, “No, it’s not a D7th.” You hear John muttering in the background, “Fucking tunesmiths.” He’s saying it in kind of admiring way (laughs).


SD: In the early days, while the Spoonful was playing a residency at The Night Owl Cafe, was there a moment when you knew that the band was going to happen?


JS: There was one gig. It was in the midst of these beatniks, chess players, jazz fans and other disinterested parties that were there as leftovers of the previous scene. All of a sudden, we saw this young girl dancing. Suddenly it wasn’t the Lindy Bop. Zally and I nudged each other that entire set, watching her dance and we were reacting to how great it was to suddenly sense that if this girl could


find us, the rest of the audience would find us.


SD: Wasn’t that girl the catalyst for ‘Do You Believe In Magic?’


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