John Sebastian - "Welcome Back"

Kind of a perfect power pop song?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK4_fDHv-SQ

A decade on from Sebastian's salad days in the Spoonful, somebody asks him to scare up a song for a tv show called Welcome Back (Kotter) and rockets to #1 on the hot 100 (and #93 on the country chart...?)

It's under three minutes, contains a harmonica solo, per a cursory Google there seems to be no record of him playing this live at the time of release, later revived by Ma$e and sometimes Mr. Bungle uses it as an opener

Have never seen an episode of Welcome Back Kotter, is it any good?

It may have been considered good at the time (the tone is similar to Taxi), but there is no TV show from the seventies that holds up well today. It's mostly notable for making a star of a young John Travolta.

there is no TV show from the seventies that holds up well today

shots fired

counterpoint: television peaked in the 70s and it's been a steady decline ever since

what a great song

Yeah, All in the Family could never hope to hold a candle to Bob Heart Abishola

lol

Absolutely love this song, especially what the electric piano does as the chords change through “yeah they tease him a lot cause they got him on the spot”

when "blaming it all on love" was compared to a tv theme song, this was the tv theme song i thought of

when viewed by todays standards most 70s tv doesn't hold up terribly well, i'd tend to agree. i grew up on syndicated reruns of '70s tv - M*A*S*H, Happy Days, stuff like that - and even the "prestige" norman lear shows probably wouldn't hold up fantastically well to a modern audience.

now. having said that, i will rep for the '70s "columbo" episodes. that shit is timeless. i'll also rep for "17 moments of spring" but since that's a soviet tv show the same cultural standards don't apply

also, shout-outs to thread for bringing back the spirit of 2003 ilx

xpost, i tried to get my teenagers to watch M*A*S*H. Started at season 3 to skip some of the most OTT misogyny from S1 and S2 (not that it is confined to just those seasons). They couldn't connect to it at all. Pretty depressing since i loved it growing up in the 70s. I have no doubt Welcome Back wouldn't fare any better. Love the title song though

As I recall, the show was just going to be called 'Kotter' when the song was commissioned. The producer liked it so much that 'Welcome Back' was added to the title.

is it any good?

Heck no.

the tone is similar to Taxi

The fuck it is!

I suppose it is, in the sense that it captures some of the gritty decay that was the popular conception of New York at the time.

My favorite TV theme. I wouldn't call Welcome Back Kotter a great show but it's goofy and lovable in its own way. The Sweat Hogs all had great personalities.

RE: 70s TV: The Rockford Files certainly holds up and also has an all-time banger of a theme as well.

Barney Miller had a fantastic theme and was a pretty good ensemble comedy.

If "doesn't hold up well to a modern audience" refers to the many unexamined bigotries present in it, then yes I agree but don't really think of that as a 70's thing, equally true of 50's, 60's, 80's, 90's tv, haven't revisited much 00's stuff lately but probably that too. I don't say that to handwave, totally legit to avoid on those grounds.

If the idea is that 70's tv was particularly shoddily made or aesthetically bankrupt in comparison to the tv that came before or straight after it tho, I find that a puzzling stance. The MTM stuff, lots of great crime procedurals, some really good sci fi. And of course if you include UK productions you basically get the high point era of crazy marxists doing stuff at the BBC.

xposts

TV shows (and TV comedies especially) just don't age as well as their theme songs.

Sure, if you want to compare the best show of the 70s to the worst show of today (Bob Heart Abishola?), you might find exceptions. But if you strip away any nostalgia value, most of that stuff is pretty unwatchable by 2023 standards.

There are definitely exceptions. Kolchak: The Night Stalker comes immediately to mind. M*A*S*H still holds up, imho. I agree with the comment upthread about rampant misogyny, which is otm (the film is much, much worse), but one of the remarkable things about that show is that it matured as its audience did.

The first few seasons of SNL are still funny, although they're funnier in my memory.

TV shows (and TV comedies especially) just don't age as well as their theme songs.

Sadly true having watched all of "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?" recently (second season anyway).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg__4iniYq8

this is a perfect theme song, Mr. Kot-tair

https://cdnmetv.metv.com/cXDFe-1443477850-blog-51.jpg

The real pleasure of those TV shows was the lunchbox.

Starlee Kine did a podcast about that lunchbox back in 2016

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/mystery-show/8wh956/case-6-kotter

RE: 70s TV: The Rockford Files certainly holds up and also has an all-time banger of a theme as well.

― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner)

fuckin' vintage mike post, you ever hear his version of "wouldn't it be nice" done in the style of the Rockford Files theme?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCOxtuTBO0o

fucking kills

a lot of shit doesn't age well, even if it was made by marxists. "ways of seeing", sure, that holds up great, but a lot of, say, pertwee-era doctor who was pretty marxist. mac hulke, for instance, put his marxist political ideals on screen in "frontier in space", but the story is shit and the politics are pretty lame - oh wow there's a WOMAN who's PRESIDENT oh my GOD. also the whole story is about negotiating a peace treaty which makes it almost as exciting as _the phantom menace_.

if we're talking about "unexamined bigotries", 95% of the time gender non-conformity was represented in media before, like, last week, it was in a pretty bigoted way. not even intentionally bigoted, it's just like _implicit_.

i may have mentioned this before, but i was re-watching the doctor who story "pyramids of mars" recently, which probably _does_ lean on some anti-arab stereotypes when it comes to the character of Namin. i'm not familiar enough with arab representation in media to talk about how it does or doesn't hold up on that front. that's one of the things about bigotry, it's easy to overlook or dismiss when it's not directed at you. anyway, what hit me on that watching was where sarah jane comes out wearing a gorgeous gown (funnily enough James Acheson wasn't doing costuming on that episode) and the doctor says it used to be one of Victoria's (meaning Victoria Waterfield) and Sarah Jane ripostes with "I certainly hope it wasn't Albert's!" like it's so baked into the culture of the time that i doubt anybody would considered that anyone _could_ consider it offensive. even today, i doubt a cis person would even notice it.

lots of media of that time has bigotry against other groups just as embedded in it, i have no doubt.

by the way speaking of mac hulke i _do_ think the spyder's web episodes i've seen hold up really well. (he was the script editor for the show.) by which i mean they're just as howlingly, absurdly offensive today as they were upon first broadcast. like the representation of transvestic fetishism in the bob holmes episode "nobody's strawberry fool" is so ridiculous that i absolutely find it far more delightful than i do offensive, though other people may have very different opinions. i mean, assuming there's another trans person in the world who's seen "nobody's strawberry fool"! i might very well be the only one.

when you're welcoming back kotter
and you're shitting rusty water

― there is no there there (elmo argonaut), Tuesday, July 21, 2009 10:44 AM bookmarkflaglink

The humor on Kotter is like 99% racist jokes? The characters are basically one dimensional ethnic stereotypes, and that's where the laughs are supposed to come from.

Taxi obviously makes immigrants a punchline, too, and that's def a legitimate reason to avoid it. I'm an immigrant who grew up in NYC myself, and while I love the show I can't deny that these kinds of depictions have been hurtful, to say the least. Latka is also "foreign" in the sense that he's lot less tethered to the format of a sitcom than the other characters, Andy Kaufman is doing his sketch/stand up thing, he really seems beamed in from a different kind of show and doesn't play along. The way the other actors interact with him is awkward and uncomfortable; he's allowed to fly off the wall (the Vic Ferrari character is the clearest example of this) and it's their burden to reconcile everything he does with the laws of their universe. That's a real stretch at times, because Taxi doesn't bend the fabric of its canned reality to accommodate him the way, say, Mork & Mindy does. He is separate. He's apart. There's never a moment you're not aware of the gulf between him and the others.

The thing is, Kaufman found himself in a position to demand a lot of leeway, and real immigrants don't often get to make those kinds of demands.

Kaufman also kinda seems like a sociopath.

And it's not the same New York. The New York of Taxi is a place that gets your hopes up, above all. It occasionally throws you a bone in the form of a magic moment that couldn't happen anyplace else, but it's a chronically unhappy place that nurtures false hope. The New York of Kotter is p much the wild west? It's like a high school, lawless. There's always someone looking to cut you down and it's going to be an uphill struggle just to survive.

^booming post!

The humor on Kotter is like 99% racist jokes?

Other 1% = “Up your nose with a rubber hose”

"a lot of shit doesn't age well, even if it was made by marxists"

I know what you mean. Every time I revisit my favorite East German shows from the 70s I am disappointed

next week on "If That's How You Want it, Soviet"...

The humor on Kotter is like 99% racist jokes?

Other 1% = “Up your nose with a rubber hose”

I guess it was just a regular old chocolate bar

Juan Epstein didn't kill himself.

RE: 70s TV: The Rockford Files certainly holds up and also has an all-time banger of a theme as well.

― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner)

fuckin' vintage mike post, you ever hear his version of "wouldn't it be nice" done in the style of the Rockford Files theme?

wow that's tremendous thank you

speaking of mike post has anyone else seen the documentary about HALYX? the sci-fi rock band/show that existed for one summer at Disneyland in 1981, produced by mike post?

he pops up quite a bit as a talking head, anyways it is incredible, far more interesting and well done than I ever would have guessed, figured I'd give it a few minutes one night and just sat enraptured for the whole thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rDLvg-Lfs

If this is going in a Mike Post direction, does anyone remember this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqNXuhIxOzE

Kate, have you seen Pendas Fen? Feels like you must've, but if not, think you'd enjoy.

I also have never actually seen Welcome Back, Kotter and had headcanoned myself a show about a dude who was the most promising guy in his small town returning to it having failed at his ambitions and resigning himself to teaching the local youths. Super surprised it's set in NYC!

It wasn't shown in the UK at the time but it turned up (in Scotland at least) years later, probably in the 80s. I laughed.

I've never seen Welcome Back Kotter but I love this record, and worry that actually watching an episode of WBK would spoil it for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO7-jN9mLso

Impossible to argue what's funny and what's not, but for me the 1972-1977 period was the zenith, the peak of all peaks for US sitcoms. The following shows from then can still make me laugh hard:
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, The Bob Newhart Show, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Barney Miller. M*A*S*H though never my favorite certainly had its moments.

I wouldn't expect Welcome Back, Kotter to register as particularly hilarious today. I enjoyed it at the time, when I was about eight. It was obviously aimed more at young viewers.

And "Welcome Back" is truly a great theme song, but ALL of the sitcoms I just mentioned had great themes as well

I’m pretty much with Josefa on this.

Although I never really liked WBK, even though of course I watched it regularly.

I also remember Gabe Kaplan kicking Robert Conrad’s butt in a relay race on one of those celebrity athletic competitions/mudslide shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSw2cFXx44g
^some pure uncut 70s tv time tunnel right here for your pleasure

very underrated as an athlete

Kotter was huge in my 4th grade classroom, we all gave ourselves Sweathog names. I was initially assigned Epstein because I was one of two who qualified for Horschack status and you can only have one Horschack. Years later I read a big thing about how intense Gabe Kaplan was about the show, like threatening to quit over script stuff, very "THIS SHOW HAS A VISION" kind of like Robert Reed in the late years of the Brady Bunch but I think Reed kind of had a point whereas with Kaplan it seems much iffier.

^excellent post!

very underrated as an athlete

Here’s a longer version, haven’t watched yet. Feel like I want to memorize everything Howard Cosell says.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqWU9huMMco

"he's a bonny lookin' wee-man." (said one member of the bay city rollers, upon my asking "what'd you think of haward cosell?," when they made an appearance at my local mall when i was in high school.)

they had just appeared on his show the previous night, i think.

Lol

"Farrah, baby, I'm not in charge of the rules committee! But, clearly, controversy has beset the Battle of the Network Stars."

This guy liveblogged rewatching it on YouTube: https://www.espn.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&id=3712343

So the Bay City Rollers were technically the very first band to appear on Saturday Night Live (Howard Cosell's Saturday Night Live)

Forgot about that! Elsewhere we've talked about how Coselll and ABC got the scoop and told America on Monday Night Football that John Lennon had died.

BoTNS has not one but two tiny threads of its own, but feel like this particular thread should be its real home.
https://www.vulture.com/2017/06/battle-of-the-network-stars-reboot-nostalgia.html

Which links to https://www.vulture.com/2014/04/dave-holmes-battle-of-the-network-stars-column.html

Is the theme song and title Welcome Back, Kotter the only case of a show coming from a group point-of-view? In this universe, we are all sweathogs.

The Network Battle of the T's and A's

Wonder if everyone on this thread knows that John Sebastian’s father (also John Sebastian) was a big deal classical harmonica player.

Kate, have you seen Pendas Fen? Feels like you must've, but if not, think you'd enjoy.

― Daniel_Rf

i'm aware of it, haven't seen it, but look OK i'm just in a rabbit hole mood this week because now i've found out about "Artemis 81" which i absolutely _must_ see now, and from there i somehow found my way to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95CCzrHsAQ4

these sorts of binges _do_ eventually pass, but boy howdy i'm going through a serious binge period lately

Wonder if everyone on this thread knows that John Sebastian’s father (also John Sebastian) was a big deal classical harmonica player.

― Tommy Gets His Consoles Out (James Redd and the Blecchs)

was it a musicians strike thing? (my understanding is that the AFM strike of '42-'44 didn't apply to harmonica players, as harmonicas weren't considered a musical instrument by AFM standards... i could be wrong on that though!)

anyway. it's nice but there's not actually a huge repertoire of harmonica music in the classical canon, as is apparent by looking at sebastian sr.'s recordings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4-f-YlILYg

Impossible to argue what's funny and what's not, but for me the 1972-1977 period was the zenith, the peak of all peaks for US sitcoms. The following shows from then can still make me laugh hard:
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, The Bob Newhart Show, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Barney Miller. M*A*S*H though never my favorite certainly had its moments.

I wouldn't expect Welcome Back, Kotter to register as particularly hilarious today. I enjoyed it at the time, when I was about eight. It was obviously aimed more at young viewers.

― Josefa

husker du's cover of the MTM theme is fucking all-time for sure

re: that defunctland doc - everything defunctland does is fucking gold as far as i can tell, amazing channel

battle of the network stars is certainly memorable '70s crap... there were also, before reality shows, these super fucked up variety shows... paul lynde and kiss is a famous one, and then there's mary tyler moore in "mary's incredible dream", which is, uh, not exactly on par with the mtm show

my fave 70s show is CELEBRITY BOWLING, this is peak fucking '70s here, folks. look at don adams in this fucking thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNxLWeSznrQ

i mean don adams in the '70s... _the partners_, which nobody remembers, _don adams' screen test_, which can't have possibly been any good. he also spend three years in a canadian sitcom set in a supermarket. it ran on USA in the states but i can't remember it ever being on. apparently the whole thing is streaming if that possibly interests you.

what else was in the '70s? bearcats!, a tv series based on the stutz bearcat, which you may remember from being mentioned in passing in the velvet underground "sweet jane". there's "flatbush", which is like "welcome back kotter" but with even worse ethnic stereotypes - sort of the "frank bruno's boxing" to welcome back kotter's "mike tyson's punch-out!". in the mid '70s there was "the xyy man", which was the exciting action-packed story of... a man with jacobs syndrome? boy, there's an idea for a tv show. as far as queer representation, there was the 1973 episode of "marcus welby, m.d." (and honestly i would _not_ have expected that show to be running in '73) where dr. welby tells the lead character that lots of men get "confused" by the realization that they're attracted to other men, that it's a phase and he'll totally get over it. not really surprising gay liberation movements were doing guerilla actions called "zaps" against the networks during this time.

and then you have quinn martin. quinn martin _everything_. just fucking ridiculous, the amount of quinn martin on the air

my point is that i love 70s television and a lot of it was extremely bad. even aside from the misogyny, racism, and all-around bigotry.

Hawaii Five-O was a ‘70s show (debuted in ‘68) that was quite progressive vis a vis racism, with Asian-American actors in the main cast and all over the place as guest actors. Unfortunately it was not progressive wrt misogyny. I think Rockford Files, Kojak, Police Story, and Ironside were all pretty good crime procedurals of the ‘70s. However I could see the argument that today’s equivalents are superior in some ways. Not with sitcoms though, that genre belongs to history. It’s a dead genre now, as is the whole art form of “theme songs.”

Plenty of good sitcoms still, even the ones that aren't dramas in comedic drag

one thing from the 70s I think they should bring back is theme songs that explain the concept of the show, like this Herb Edelman sitcom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBAId5zr25w

Is the theme song and title Welcome Back, Kotter the only case of a show coming from a group point-of-view?

Not sure if I'm parsing the question correctly, but The Monkees might be another one. Other theme songs, such as Good Times and Laverne & Shirley, come from a "we" perspective.

With this one, thinking how the song/title talk about the main character but from a group outside perspective (not to overthink this). It would be like “hey hey you’re the Monkees.”

Other 1% = “Up your nose with a rubber hose”

ok, this made me laugh.

I'm broadly with the folks saying the 70's were a golden age for these kinds of shows. Not all of them equally, of course. I was introduced via Nick at Nite in the 90's and Taxi is my favorite sitcom tbc. I love 'I Love Lucy' but it always makes me cringe

hate this song

one thing from the 70s I think they should bring back is theme songs that explain the concept of the show, like this Herb Edelman sitcom

― he thinks it's chinese money (soref)

god, if ever a theme song screamed "sherwood schwartz"

i mean, that really was pretty much a sherwood schwartz thing, wasn't it? did anybody else really _do_ that?

lol. Also starring Joyce Bulifant.

I just want to say thank you for Celebrity Bowling bc it's so beautiful and esp. for "He rolls the ball real nice....important in the game of bowling"

https://www.emmys.com/news/features/macho-malibu

You have to click through a few times to get to a digital copy of the magazine and the full story, but it's well worth it.

You have to click through a few times to get to a digital copy of the magazine and the full story, but it's well worth it.

Meh