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“My name is John Sebastian and I am a guitar player from Greenwich Village.”
John Sebastian’s career as a pop musician began exactly 50 years ago in the heart of the Big Apple. At that time he founded his band The Lovin’ Spoonful. He writes hits like “Summer in the City” and “Daydream” for them. As a native New Yorker, he experienced first-hand how Bob Dylan became an icon in his Greenwich Village neighborhood and dared to mix folk and rock. “Bob Dylan was obviously hugely important to us – as a poet and as a music explorer. People don’t give him enough credit for what he had learned before he started writing those anthemic songs that became so important to us,” says Sebastian .
In Dylan’s wake, Sebastian becomes a legend himself. At the Woodstock Festival in 1969, he wowed 400,000 listeners with his delicate guitar sounds. New York, he says, offered the infrastructure: record companies, studios, producers. Dylan was so dominant that you had to differentiate yourself from him. And at that time, the Beatles, founded in Liverpool, were sloshing across the Atlantic from London. The city of New York has always been an inspiration for the musician. In his best-known hit, he processes his impressions of a city that is a melting pot of cultures like few others. “Of course, my brother’s grandiose chorus for Summer in the City was sort of a love song for New York in the summer. He gave me his part and I quickly completed it with the verses. The city was really inside of me in the sense that I was influenced by everything I heard around me. And that all happened in Greenwich Village,” says Sebastian.
London and New York – centers of charismatic musicians
“I am Billy Bragg, I am a singer songwriter and activist. And I come from London, from the Eastern industrial suburbs of London.”
Billy Bragg also has a close relationship with his hometown. Here he was kissed awake by punk at the end of the 1970s, hired himself out for a long time largely unnoticed on the stages in the neglected east of the city – until finally a tape by the songwriter ended up with the legendary London radio DJ John Peel. London is the place where something like this could happen, he explains. Together with New York – ahead of Los Angeles or Stockholm – the British capital is an innovative center. The most charismatic musicians often go here in search of success.
“Because London is the capital, everyone has to go there in the end. London is not like Birmingham or Liverpool. Everyone has to go to London. And that’s why the culture is much richer, but also much more competitive,” says Bragg. Even compared to New York, London plays a special role. Punk, the movement that also gets him to make music, wasn’t invented there. But without London, New York bands like the Ramones would have received little attention. London becomes the center of the movement. Here, among angry youth and art school students, punk becomes the dominant subculture. When Bragg hears The Clash perform, he joins the culture.
“My friends and I went out and were like, ‘Damn, this is it. We have to do something like this. So we gave away all our Eagles records, cut our hair and got leather jackets. All overnight. Our world was like the Upside down. And the next thing was ‘Rock against Racism’. 100,000 people are demonstrating against fascism on the streets of London. Yes, this is the city I’m proud of,” says Bragg.
Both cities have produced countless world stars
Folk rock, disco, hip hop and many other styles were invented in New York. In London, on the other hand, specifications from the USA are often refined and popularized. At least one pop masterpiece has been recorded in the Thames city every year since The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’. London and New York have produced countless world stars since the 1960s. That increases the pressure on young musicians to get better – because the audience’s expectations are high, as John Sebastian can tell of the New Yorkers: “It’s harder to assert yourself. That’s probably a good description of New York and all big ones Cities of the world. In other cities you might get by with mediocrity. But in the end you have to go to Berlin if you want to know it.”
When Sebastian has talked at length about his hometown, at the end of our conversation in his living room he picks up an autoharp, an instrument that is often used in rural folk music – as a hidden message that all urban musical styles ultimately trace back to rural origins. To this day, London and New York are the most exciting pop cities in the world for provincial pop musicians. Talents from all over the world are drawn here because they can prove themselves here – in the footsteps of Bob Dylan and John Sebastian, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
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