Do you believe in magic?

In the spring of 1965, enough teenyboppers did to drive The Lovin’ Spoonful song of the same name to the Top 10 on the Billboard charts. 50+ years later, the tune’s distinctive, chiming autoharp and bouncing groove still sounds vibrant. “Do You Believe in Magic,” the title track to the quartet’s debut album, was also its first single, one of nine to make the Top 20 in a stunning two-year span (at a time when top groups were expected to release a new LP every few months).

John Sebastian, of course, wrote and sang “Magic,” as well as the bulk of the band’s other hits. In this 2015 interview with Best Classic Bands, he remembers his Spoonful days fondly, pointing out that, from the start, the plan was to be an American Beatles.

“The Spoonful got going at the height of Beatlemania, and it was a time when a lot of American bands were aping the English bands in order to work. It was our observation – me and [Spoonful guitarist] Zal Yanovsky and [producer] Erik Jacobsen – that the British stuff was heavily rooted in American music, and we could, perhaps, eliminate the middleman.”

[An unplanned performance at the Woodstock festival, in August 1969, catapulted Sebastian into a solo career as a tie-dyed festival mainstay, singing “Rainbows All Over Your Blues” to thousands throughout the birth of the new decade.]

Sebastian, born on March 17, 1944, was already a session musician playing on demos by Tim Hardin, Fred Neil and Bob Dylan among others by the time the Spoonful coalesced under Jacobsen’s direction – pulling Yanovsky from the Mugwumps (leaving Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty free for the Mamas and the Papas) and the Long Island-bred rhythm section of Steve Boone and Joe Butler from Greenwich Village rock band the Sellouts.

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