John Sebastian Documentary Charts Lovin’ Spoonful, Woodstock, ‘Kotter’

In one form or another, John Sebastian knows you remember his songs. He knows that if you’re of a certain age, you recall “Do You Believe in Magic” and “Summer in the City” with his band the Lovin’ Spoonful, or “Welcome Back,” the theme song to Welcome Back, Kotter, the John Travolta-led sitcom of the Seventies. He knows you may recognize “Welcome Back” as a post-pandemic song used in ads by Applebee’s, Major League Baseball, and more, or recall how it was sampled in Mase’s rap single of the same name. Or maybe you’ve heard MonaLisa Twins’ indie-pop remake of “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”

But Sebastian is also well aware of the sometimes painful fact that not enough people may know the name John Sebastian. “I’m sort of, how would you say … I’m the opposite of the guys who have all the different awards,” Sebastian, 81, tells Rolling Stone from his home in Woodstock, New York.

Unlike many of his peers from the Sixties, Sebastian has never written what he calls “a fucking memoir,” which could be one reason his name doesn’t always ring a bell, even to his generation. But he did decide to sit down for interviews for I’ll 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. “I guess my reaction was just glad to have somebody interested,” Sebastian says about cooperating.

As the doc proves, Sebastian’s 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 — befriending Bob Dylan and many others along the way — and then co-founded the Lovin’ 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’s 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.

Featuring interview with peers like Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Arlo Guthrie, Michelle Phillips, and Spoonful bassist Steve Boone, I’ll 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’s never been an archetypal wild-and-crazy rocker. Film footage of Sebastian with his father is a reminder that Sebastian also didn’t quite have the requisite angst required by many rock stars of his generation. “I’m looking at old home movies of my dad getting off the plane and hugging and kissing me, and I said, ‘This is why I’ll never be Bruce Springsteen,’” he says. “That whole route was not for me. My father loved me, like an Italian father.”

Sebastian’s last-minute performance at Woodstock also branded him, for better or eventually worse, as a tie-dyed troubadour of his time, although he says he wasn’t as stoned as the legend has it. “As time goes on, it’s an inclination for people to make me higher than I was,” he says. “As a New York guy, I didn’t just start taking things I didn’t know about. However, if you put me in mud for a few days and go, ‘Well, this isn’t LSD, more like DMT,’ I would’ve said, ‘Yeah, I’ll see what it can do.’ 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.” (Many years later, Sebastian says, he was approached about a career as a kids folk singer along the lines of Raffi: “I said, ‘Guys, I smoke dope, and I’m not going to look like I hide it.’ I think that was good, because it only took about 10 minutes for them to figure out I wasn’t their guy.”)

Then, 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. “I can only say I was madly in love,” he says now, “and it permitted me to get pretty goofy sometimes.” At a point where “nobody wanted me” after his post-Spoonful albums didn’t sell, Sebastian was asked to write the theme song for a sitcom about urban toughs in high school called Kotter. The producers loved “Welcome Back” 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.)

Throughout the documentary, Sebastian also brings up what he calls the “Spoonful curse,” 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. “Our timing as a band was somewhat peculiar,” he says. “When 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, ‘Hey, this is like Americana!’”

Anyone 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’t see was an entire rehearsal of the temporary reformed band. “We’re doing a rehearsal, and the Spoonful clicked in, like, wow,” he says. “We hadn’t played in eight or 10 years. Nothing wrong. Finished the whole set. And we said, ‘Boy, that’s, great. Were you filming?’ And they go, ‘Well, we had to save film.’”  

Then 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.

But 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. “I was not even in the town where my bandmates and brothers got busted,” says Sebastian, who was in Los Angeles at the time of the arrests. “And 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, ‘Oh, 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?’”

As Sebastian tells RS, with evident melancholy, “I still am suffering the results of those decisions made way back when. That was the thing you couldn’t erase.”

Due 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. “We were the best friends of John, Michelle, and Cass [Elliot],” he says, “but they knew, and we knew, that they couldn’t invite us” thanks to the band’s tattered reputation. (In the second issue of Rolling Stone, Ralph J. Gleason wrote a sympathetic rebuttal to the backlash, calling the episode a “terrible, tragic thing”: “If 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.”

In 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 to follow. Sebastian says he relinquished any ownership to the Spoonful name when he left, which he sees now as a mixed blessing. “It could have helped me financially,” he says, “but I guess I didn’t attach much value to what would be the enormous nostalgia market for all of our contemporary bands.” (He says he’s seen the current Spoonful and that they’re “very good,” although he has tweaked them for not fully re-creating the finger-picking guitar weave that he and Yanovsky perfected.)

Two 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. “I had to sell it,” he says, “because when you do the math and find out you couldn’t make that money in a year working every day times eight, you start to go, ‘Jesus, I guess I should be thinking about my family here.’ It isn’t a great move, because as time goes on, everything is just skyrocketing in the world of monetizing the arts. But it’s a decent move.” Last year, the jacket he wore onstage at Woodstock sold at a rock memorabilia auction for $64,000.

Now that he’s finally laid out his life on film, what does Sebastian hope people will take from I’ll Paint Rainbows All Over Your Blues? “I really don’t know,” he shrugs. “Except to say this guy was there. Some of you noticed. Some didn’t. But here he is.”