MILT THOMAS

Editor’s note: John will appear at the Emerson Center on Saturday, March 14. This is the transcript of a conversation with him a few weeks ago.

MT: John is well known for his ’60s band The Lovin’ Spoonful and solo work including the theme from the hit TV show, Welcome Back Kotter. Now you had a more famous band before The Lovin’ Spoonful, the Even Dozen Jug band.

JS: (Laughs) Yes, fame and fortune just fell in our path. I lived in Greenwich Village in New York and cut my teeth musically working with the likes of Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin and Mississippi John Hurt.

MT:  Now, many people don’t know who John Hurt is and the important role he played in your musical future.

JS: Yes. Well, John showed up in Greenwich Village about ’63 or ’64 and happened to hear me play harmonica with Tom Paxton, who was opening for him. Then he asked me to play with him and that grew into a real friendship. He had a tune called “Coffee Blues,” a thinly veiled tune as many were at this time, with an introduction about how he always had his cup of Maxwell House coffee cause it’s good to the last drop. Then he’d sing “I love my baby by the lovin’ spoonful.” So that is where we got our name.
MT: When people identify music by its national origin, they think of American music as bluegrass, folk and country music. Rock n roll is distinctly American although some may think it originated in England. In fact you had a famous quote that you were grateful to the Beatles for reminding us of our rock and roll roots, but we wanted to cut the English middleman out so to speak and making this ‘new’ music American music.

JS: Yes, that does sound like a quote from me.

MT: You had seven top ten hits all during the height of Beatlemania. The Beach Boys might be an equivalent from an American band and certainly Motown. You were right up there though.

JS: Well, thank you for noticing. And you should let your audience know that when I come to Vero I will show up with a couple of guitars, a harmonica and do my show alone, no 20+ year olds hired to sit in with me. I do a one guitar rendering of a lot of material that originally had like eight different overdubs of two guitars.

MT: You probably created those songs on guitar, right?

JS: Almost always with very few exceptions and I don’t play those only because I don’t carry a piano.

MT: Back in the day you played a Gibson Guitar and you were a Gibson artist.

JS: They never subsidized me. Actually I played an instrument they had stopped producing and thought of it as a thing of the past.

MT: Our paths actually crossed at the National Association of Music Merchants Trade Show one year in the 70s. As we discussed prior to this interview, you were there as an artist and I was working for the company.

JS: Yes, but I was there for Mark guitars, a subsidiary of Gibson, because, as I said, my instrument was one they no longer produced.

MT: It was a dirty lemon burst Les Paul model.

JS: Yes, and as you may know, Gibson never called me until they were way into production on what was a Lovin’ Spoonful Les Paul.

MT: They called it the Spoonful Burst as I recall.

JS: That’s right. I did some case candy for them and they gave me a really wonderful Les Paul.

MT: It was great working with Les Paul. You mentioned Bruce Bolen the other day when we talked. He was a good friend of mine. Did you know he was a protégé of Les Paul and they did several recordings together.

JS: No, I’ll be darned.

MT: Regarding your guitar, there kind of a legend about it you could clear up for me.

JS: Ok. So I started playing this instrument and in the process I tried to accumulate a few Les Pauls. One of those that was in our cache I later theorized was either mine or Steve Boone’s (Lovin’ Spoonful bass player). At some point he sold the instrument to Rick Derringer of the McCoys (“Hang on Sloopy”). Rick eventually took the instrument to Kalamazoo (Gibson factory) because it was gold and didn’t look too appealing and had them refinish it in red, which happened to be the color they were shooting that day. But after it was finished Rick decided he didn’t like it anymore. Eric Clapton ended up with it and then he gave it to Beatle George Harrison, who named it Lucy and used it on the White Album and later.

MT: You worked with producer Eric Jacobsen for years and most people don’t understand the importance of a producer to the success of a band’s music.

JS: Good point. And particularly, people don’t realize the amount of participation that Eric Jacobsen had in our process. We were four really interesting instrumentalists. Steven (Boone) and Joe (Butler, drummer) provided a great rhythm section. Zalman was thee stage guy to have, but there was still this element that came from when Eric Jacobsen and I had conversations about rock and roll and about how sad it was that when anybody had a hit they had to make their next single sound like the last one. I said what if country and western and r&b had a little bit more of a connection in one band. These conversations went on about a year and a half and at that point I met Zalman and began to see how that kind of an idea can be fleshed out. Recording was also becoming more sophisticated. We tried a new concept of overdubbing and started on four track recorders, ending up working on 16-track.

MT: The band broke up after a couple of years, then you appeared at Woodstock as an unannounced performer, right?

JS: Yes, and by then I had had a year or so learning to do concerts by myself. I went to Woodstock, not as a performer, but as an audient. I was backstage visiting all my pals – music had a smaller footprint back then. You knew everyone regardless of what genre you were in. At  one point they needed someone to hold the audience with an acoustic guitar set. I turned around and realized they were looking at me. Timmy Hardin lent me a guitar and I went out and played. The real set went longer than it goes in the movie.

MT: You also wrote music for films and Broadway.

JS: I had a wonderful first experience with Woody Allen, who needed some kooky kind of music. The Spoonful had a lot of fun making that album which was actually for a Japanese spy movie that Woody Allen had simply taken the sound track off and made it funny. Sometime later my office gets a call from some unknown guy, Francis Coppola, who made a teenage comedy that didn’t go anywhere, but we had a lot of fun doing it (You’re a Big Boy Now 1966).

MT: You our Woody Allen fans, I believe that movie was What’s up Tiger Lily.

JS: That’s right.

MT: You’re probably best known as a solo artist with the theme for a TV show.

JS: Yes, and it came at a point I was so far out of style. I was looking for work and a TV producer called me and said I got this story, a real Brooklyn kind of a thing but I figure if I’m going to hire anybody to write a theme song it’s got to be guys from New York. We’ve got Dion Dimucci writing one could you write one too? I got together with the producer and he gave me a rough demo and a few scripts to read. I made a demo and 48 hours later I came back to him. They were so excited about the song (“Welcome Back”) that they changed the name of the show from Kotter to Welcome Back Kotter.

MT: unfortunately, we have to go now, but my engineer and I are both from the music business and really enjoyed talking to you.

JS: I’ve got to tell you this is one of my more favorite interviews of the last few months. It’s fun to talk to somebody who’s as enthusiastic about these things from the ancient past.

MT: On a final note, you were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame in 2008 and we’ll look forward to seeing you on March 14^th at the Emerson Center.