The May issue of Acoustic Guitar includes my interview with John Sebastian of Lovin' Spoonful fame, who recently released a nice duo set with David Grisman. The story is posted online. Here Sebastian talks about growing up in the thick of the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early '60s...
"Within maybe two years of this first contact between David [Grisman] and me, at 18, there were two really important things. One was my father did a television show that included Lightnin’ Hopkins. It also included Joan Baez, who was unheard of at the time. I sat under a camera and watched Lightnin’ Hopkins as far away as I’m sitting to you right now, and that knocked my block off. My dad said, 'I saw you leave home that day'--he told me that 20 years later. Lightnin’ needed someone to carry his guitar around and talk to the club owners and just be a New York guy for a Texas guy, so that’s what I did for a year or so.
"John Hurt was also coming to the Gaslight Café about once every six or eight weeks, and I became his occasional guitar carrier and harmonica accompanist. What I really wanted to know about was the guitar. The harmonica had been with me since I was five, and I was getting fluent on the little diatonic. But the guitar was a whole other mountain, and John Hurt was at the top of the mountain. So eventually I began to make friends, and he was a very receptive teacher. He was very different than Lightnin’, whose background had been street singing--you don’t teach somebody a song that’s going to come at you across the street from where you’re trying to make your living. John played guitar at parties and on back porches; his world was more of an agricultural world that had recreation on the weekends. Lightnin’s world was recreation. I learned a lot from both men--it wasn’t all about the fretboard."
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