Do You Believe In Magic?
So you wanna be a rock ‘n roll star, and your rapidly ascending single is providing a foothold that may allow you to ascend to a lofty peak. But its clever lyric and hooks aren’t enough to get you all the way up the mountain. Through force of personality, brilliance, or the simple ability to reveal a distinct aspect of the common culture, the premiere acts give us more: characters that hop off the delivery medium and become a part of our lives. Not everyone’s an Elvis, but that’s ok; how many snarling sex symbols does a generation require? Fortunately, nice guys don’t always finish last. Sometimes they reach the top of the hill and stay there for quite some time. Enter, stage left, John Sebastian, the principle writer and lead singer of The Lovin’ Spoonful, author of this month’s Classic Track, “Do You Believe In Magic?”
A trunk baby of sorts, Sebastian’s father was a classical harmonica player who took the family with him on tours of Italy when John was a young boy. His mom Jane was a copy writer who had already outgrown her job at NBC in Cincinnati and headed off to the New York by the age of 17. So had her childhood pal Vivian Vance, the comic actress who would rise to fame playing the level headed neighbor of Lucille Ball on “I Love Lucy.”
“Viv was the coolest person in the world,” says Sebastian. “She and mom were best friends, mid-western girls who came to the city to find success. In a few years Viv was progressing through summer stock and theater, and mom was still writing, but had gotten married. We lived in Greenwich Village and had a summer place in Huntington, LI. One day Viv drives up, gets out of the car and hands me a toy shotgun. She shows me how to shoot it and I go completely nuts for the thing. Mom starts yelling at Viv, saying “I told you not to get him guns, we don’t want to encourage violence.” Viv looks at me, then mom, and says, “Oh, shit, Jane, when he grows up he’s gonna like me better anyway!”
Sebastian split his high school years as a long hair getting hassled by blue bloods at the Blair Academy, a private school in New Jersey, and, in a somewhat odd incongruence, hanging out with artists back on the block during the off season. The Village gave Sebastian first hand exposure to the best musicians in the fully blown folk universe, including Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives. As a member of the Even Dozen Jug Band, The Mugwumps, and eventually, The Lovin’ Spoonful, Sebastian would take elements of folk, jug band (its half sister) and rock, and toss them together to create his own sound.
Sebastian eventually teamed up with guitarist Zal Yanovsky, another local luminary in the New York folk scene. Along with drummer Joe Butler and bass player Steve Boone they formed a group. Taking a line from a Mississippi John Hurt song, they called themselves The Lovin’ Spoonful. A rapid rise, however, wasn’t in the cards. Led by The Beatles, the British Invasion was in full throttle, and record execs-a visionary lot in no era-couldn’t imagine that the Spoonful’s folk influenced sound would attract a sizable fan base.
“We were turned down by every record company in New York City,” says Sebastian. “But we’d play each night. For awhile we were working at a club that was mainly for beatniks. The crowd would snap their fingers in mild appreciation of what we were doing. Hardly the rock n’ roll audience of your dreams!
“There were some odd cabaret regulations back in those days, and one of them outlawed dancing. People in these clubs didn’t routinely dance anyway like they did uptown at the Peppermint Lounge. But this one night, while we were playing our set, a girl started dancing by herself. It wasn’t the Lindy, but some new, personally expressive set of movements, the kind of dancing you were going to see at Woodstock in a few years. We looked at each other, and without saying a word shared a common thought: our moment had arrived. Sure enough, the following week the audience had changed. Those 50 year old beatniks had drifted off, replaced by a horde of 16 year old girls. I took that memory, and in the next couple of days started to work on an idea that would become “Do You Believe In Magic?”
A novice in the recording area, Sebastian had been looking for unusual sound combinations, and that curiosity would inform the songs he wrote, including “Do You Believe In Magic?” “I played auto harp and knew it had never been used on a pop record. I’d been screwing around with the idea of taping a ukulele contact microphone to the back of the auto harp, and hearing its amplified sound was a real Eureka moment. I realized instantly that this could be the heart of a new sound.
“I’d failed miserably romancing girls at summer camp with the Duane Eddy greased back hair routine, and now I knew why. It just wasn’t me! I’d come back from New Jersey, where we were playing the sax and guitar song book-“Raunchy,” “Ramble,” those kinds of tunes-and come back to the city, where all of the young women who were friends with Joan Baez, or influenced by her, hung out. They thought those tunes were so déclassé! That’s when I started finger picking and learning to play the auto harp.
“Anyway, when I finished writing “Do You Believe In Magic?” I was certain that it was going to be a hit, but I wanted it to have something unusual about it. The regular auto harp tuning doesn’t allow for the minor 7th chords that climb in the intro of the song, so I retuned it for that section. However, when we went into Bell Sound, the hot two track recording studio in mid-town at the time, we knew that the auto harp on its own was too thin, so Jerry Yester (who would eventually replace Yanofsky in the group) doubled it on the piano. We buried the piano part and used it create the effect of a huge auto harp.
“We recorded ‘Magic’ back in 1964, and it was the first example of a scheme that developed between Zal, our producer, Erik Jacobsen, and myself. We’d start out with familiar sounds, add something else, and then mix them together so that the listener couldn’t quite tell what the instrumental combination was. That was our personal dawn in the mysterious and magical use of technology.
“We’d been playing live long enough that we didn’t make mistakes, but we instantly realized that we could use this three track recorder to create something new, so we experimented. For example, we’d double a guitar lick with a set of orchestral chimes, and then bury the chimes far enough under the guitar so that they wouldn’t be heard as a separate instrument. The result was the chime-iest guitar I’d ever heard!
“The process of recording was pretty strange to us. Remember, engineers were still wearing white lab coats at that time! Zally, who was the personality in the group-I just looked at my shoes and wrote the songs-was also the mover and shaker, and he was listening intently to what we were discovering. I remember that Zally was recording his guitar solo, and the engineer burst into the studio and told him that he couldn’t play so loud because the needle was going into the red. Zally digested that and tracked another take, which the engineer thought was great. He asks Zally how it felt, and Zally says “We need more red!”
“By the way, the Guild Thunderbird that Zally played was not a very popular guitar at the time. He loved it because it was very twangy. A single coil instrument which Zally played through a Fender Super Reverb, he felt that its sound resembled that of a pedal steel guitar, and one of his goals was to sound like a pedal steel.
“Do You Believe In Magic?” was one of four songs that we recorded during that session, and like the others the band was tracked in one pass. The idea was to record the things you wanted to project most out of the mix last. We were kind of doing a kindergarten version of what Phil Spector became known for. Half of the magic of the wall of sound-at least the way we worked-was that the process of layering sounds and bouncing tracks would compromise the sounds that were already there and accent the newest thing you were putting on.
“After we tracked the band we added Jerry’s piano part, and then an acoustic part of mine. I played this part as loudly as I could, knowing that it would get buried beneath the drum track. But that was ok, we used this guitar part to help create a bigger sounding drum track.
“The vocals came last. I think my lead was done in five or six passes. Towards the end someone said ‘Give me a little Dion,’ which was our signal for the Italian guy doing doo wop bit-which I qualify for! That’s where the gospel tail comes from. Then we began to work on the backing vocals. As would become the norm for The Lovin’ Spoonful, backing vocals were executed by me, Zal, and Joe Butler. Joe lent a very legit quality to our background parts, which we doubled a few times.
“Mixing was really Erik Jacobsen’s area. I know that we’d drag our feet and end up spending too much money at first. Erik had extremely good ears for mixing. When we were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I tried to point out that it was Jacobsen that would put these Scandinavian ships together out of our raw material. He and Zal had a bit of a friendly war going on between them. Zal was always trying to be spontaneous, and Erik was trying to capture the perfect performance, which required repetition.”
Banjo player turned Beatles fan, Jacobsen was intent on creating something new in the studio. “Bell Sound was the hot place,” says Jacobsen. “It was a mastering room as well as a recording studio. Big Dom mastered all of the Rolling Stones singles that would be sent over from England. A lot of Latin groups worked at Bell, and there always seemed to be a group leaving when we came in. One time I saw some beautiful girls dancing in front of the band that was recording. They’d been brought in for inspiration!
“Alan Lorber, who was an arranger in town at the time, came by and helped us with the vocal arrangement on the ride out. Harry Yarmark was the engineer on the session. There was no such thing as a splicing block back then, just a guy with a pair of scissors cutting tape that someone else held at a certain angle!
“Once we finished the four song demo we shopped it around, but nobody wanted it! I owned the acetate for about ten months before Kama Sutra became interested. We kept being told that no one had heard a sound like this and that it was terrible!”
To the surprise of everyone except the group and its producer, “Do You Believe In Magic?” raced up the charts when it was released in 1964, topping out at #9. In a flash, the nice guy who had been given noogies at school was being afforded the full star treatment. “Within two weeks,” says John Sebastian. “We went from playing high schools to being headliners at the Crescendo, the wildest club In L.A., which would become The Trip a few years later.
“Then we get invited to play the Rose Bowl on a bill with Herman’s Hermits, The Bobby Fuller Four, the Beau Brummels and the Beach Boys! We take a plane from New York to the west coast, rent a car and head out to the Rose Bowl. We reach the gate, get out of the car, knock on the gate, and present ourselves to the security guard.
“A few minutes later we’ve met these stars we’ve idolized and been thrown out on stage. We’re playing through Beatle amps that we’re totally unfamiliar with and our sound is terrible, but it doesn’t matter because the screams of a million girls are drowning us out completely! We finish our four song set, get back in the car, and---I never imagined just how many teen-aged girls could fit on the top of car! Next thing I know the collar of my shirt is digging into my neck because someone’s trying to pull it off, and I see a pair of scissors coming at me, wielded by another girl who’s trying to cut my shirt off!”
Beatle-maniaish hysteria followed the Lovin’ Spoonful for the next several years. How did it feel? “Wildly inappropriate!” Sebastian says with a laugh. “Ok, I wasn’t going to complain if our music attracted beautiful young women, but we thought our sound was something that you snuggled up to, the opposite of the edgy attitude that inspired such idol worship. I know how this is going to appear, but while we loved the English groups, their approach to the audience was very different from ours. It was superior: they were going to ROCK the crowd. Ours was more of an exchange based, gentler art.”
“Do You Believe In Magic” reached the #9 spot on the pop charts, but the Lovin’ Spoonful were just getting started. Over the next several years they would etch their brand into the popular culture with a string of hits that included “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice,” “Daydream,” "Nashville Cats,” and “Summer in the City.” Featuring sunny lyrics and well tooled melodies that matched Sebastian’s ever present smile, the group offered an alternative to the imperious icons who visited America from distant lands. Seasons change, though, and so did the group’s fortunes.
I can’t say it was overwhelmingly hard to drop off the mountain when the end came, at least not for me. I was lucky; I had a career as an accompanist [see: the harmonica solo on CSN&Y’s “Deja Vu”) and then a solo career [“She’s a Lady,” “Rainbows All Over Your Blues”]. Still, to sink from those heights below the competition, yeah, to an extent that was the part of the fall that I hated. But it was also liberating; I wanted to play with Steve Stills again, and I’d heard about this incredible 16 year old drummer named Dallas Taylor who had a great feel. I was excited about all the possibilities.”
Fusing together elements of folk, jug band and rock, the Lovin’ Spoonful created a sound and collective persona that was entirely their own. Back in the 60’s, did John Sebastian feel he was writing a style of music he’d imagined but never heard? “Yes, I think so. They’re giving me an award next week, inducting me into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and someone asked who I’d like to have introduce me. I said Irving Burgie. He’s the perfect songwriter! A Brooklynite, Burgie was introduced to West Indian music by his mother, who was born in Barbados. Burgie wrote Calypso classics like Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” from his home in New York. He was writing about a past that he didn’t actually experience, giving us a fantasy of his homeland.
“I was doing the same thing, except that Irving’s yearnings were culturally accurate and mine weren’t. I wasn’t in the South in the 1930’s listening to Sleepy John Estes; that influence wasn’t immediately available to me. Reaching back to the blues and jug band material, I like the notion that maybe I provided access for others to something that I reached for but couldn’t quite touch.”
