¶ “All of the heavies were light as a feather“ | “I Had a Dream” was sung at Woodstock by John Sebastian. It’s the second of five songs from a new project, Super Hits (!) of the Sixties! I’m aided and abetted here by my old pal Mark Pringle on guitar.

¶ On August 16th 1969, John Sebastian took to the stage at the Woodstock Festival with an acoustic guitar borrowed from his old friend, singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, to face the 500,000-strong crowd. Stage coordinator Chip Monck couldn’t risk wheeling amplifiers onto the stage because of the rain, so he prevailed upon a stoned Sebastian — there as a spectator, not a performer — to entertain the crowd.

¶ In his short set, he played some tracks off his new, 
as yet unreleased, album. One was “I Had a Dream”. In the studio, it was performed as a piece of Baroque pop with harps and a Bacharach arrangement — musically quite a departure for the Pop Chart darling, whose hits with the Lovin Spoonful included “Do You Believe in Magic,” “Summer in the City,” and Darlin’ Be Home Soon”.

¶ A year later, it was chosen as the opening song on the soundtrack of the movie Woodstock. It fit the occasion perfectly, its hippy utopian lyrics undercut by a tremulous melancholia that pointed to the dream’s impossibility… I’ve always liked John Sebastian’s music (and he’s the best interviewee, bar Henry Diltz, in any film made about Laurel Canyon), so I made a version, losing some of the tune, in my usual way, to make it even more depressing. I sent it to Mark [he had lent me a very expensive microphone and I’d recorded the vocal with it] and he volunteered to add some guitar. Which he did, one very enjoyable afternoon. His approach was to bring his current style of oblique flying condensation to drape over the tune.

¶ I always wondered if Bob Dylan had the Loving Spoonful’s “You’re a Big Boy Now” (written for Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same name) in mind when he returned to Columbia’s Studio A to record Blood on the Tracks in 1974…

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