AAs the first decade of rock music came to an end, John Sebastian was in a good position. With his band The Lovin' Spoonful he had given the first and quite satisfactory American response to the British Invasion. From the country of origin of the blues, defied the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Animals. After young English people popularized the blues, young musicians from the East Coast responded. They knew all the ingredients that had made young rock interesting: bluegrass, blues and rhythm and blues, folk from the Appalachians. Authentic and fresh in its own way. And like the Beatles songwriters Lennon/McCartney, Sebastian mastered the art of saying important things about the time in three minutes.
With the rich experience of their own musical traditions, they had strong roots to absorb the impulse from London. “He was huge,” Sebastian once told faz.net in an interview at his home in upstate New York. “The only thing the Spoonful wanted to avoid was imitating the Beatles just for the sake of imitation and adopting a British accent.”
Sebastian had Italian roots and grew up in New York's Greenwich Village district. All the music of his country came together in Washington Square Park, on one corner Delta blues from Mississippi, on the other bluegrass from the Appalachians. But a vacuum had arisen in pop music at the beginning of the sixties. “At least for a time we had lost Elvis, as well as Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry – all for different reasons,” Sebastian said. But the young people were bored by the hit factory from Philadelphia. “This circumstance created an appetite for other music. They were in Greenwich Village at Washington Square Park.”
He succeeds in creating the prototypical big city song
His hits like “Daydream”, “You're Still A Mystery”, “Darling Be Home Soon” and “Do You Believe in Magic” could be heard everywhere. “Summer In The City”, which uses motifs from a poem by his brother Mark, is one of the indisputable classics of rock music of the 1960s with the catchy organ intro that bassist Steve Boone came up with and the dirty electric guitar. One of the prototypical songs about life in metropolises. “But at night it's a different world, go out and find a girl – come on come on and dance all night, despite the heat it will be alright.”
About his influences, he said in the interview: “I heard everything. When it comes to music, I've always been an omnivore.” There was only one label that he and his teammates had little use for: folk rock. “Zal Yanovsky and I hated that term because we weren't imitating Pete Seeger. We weren't trying to save the world or be protest singers.” But after two of his teammates were arrested after drug discoveries and after the creative momentum was lost, the Spoonful, named after a line from a song by blues musician Mississippi John Hurt, broke up again on.
Neither the band nor Sebastian managed to replicate the artistic growth of the Beatles and Stones at the end of the decade, the creative push through psychedelic influences, the stretching of song structures. This wasn't noticeable when Sebastian appeared on stage in August 1969 without an invitation because, as he had always been in recent years, he was there when big things were happening (such as playing bass on Bob Dylan's Transitions album “Bringing It All Back Home”) to play). There was a break to be bridged. And Sebastian performed songs from his upcoming first solo album such as “I Had A Dream” and “Rainbow All Over Your Blues”.
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