In 1975, John Sebastian, former member of the beloved 60s pop group the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful, was asked to write and record the theme song for a brand-new ABC television show with the working title Kotter. As any songwriter would, Sebastian first tried working that title into his song, but somehow the rhymes he came up with for \u201cKotter\u201d\u2014otter, water, daughter, slaughter\u2014didn\u2019t really lend themselves to a show about a middle-aged schoolteacher returning to his scrappy Brooklyn neighborhood to teach remedial students at his own former high school. So Sebastian took a more thoughtful approach to the task at hand and came up with a song about finding your true calling in a life you thought you\u2019d left behind. That song, \u201cWelcome Back,\u201d not only went on to become a #1 pop single on this day in 1976, but it also led the show\u2019s producers to change its title to Welcome Back, Kotter.<\/p>\n
What Sebastian\u2019s sweet, wistful and playfully nostalgic tune did not do, however, was influence the tone and content of the show. To listen to \u201cWelcome Back,\u201d you\u2019d think that Welcome Back, Kotter was a seriocomic slice-of-life program in the mold of, say, The Courtship of Eddie\u2019s Father\u2014another 70s TV show with a theme song by a great 60s songwriter (Harry Nilsson). Instead, Welcome Back, Kotter was little more than a flimsy platform for catchphrase-spouting caricatures, albeit an insanely successful one. Arnold Horshack\u2019s \u201cOooh, oooh, oooh,\u201d Freddie \u201cBoom Boom\u201d Washington\u2019s \u201cHi therrre,\u201d Vinnie Barbarino\u2019s \u201cWhat? What?\u201d and Gabe Kotter\u2019s \u201cUp your nose with a rubber hose\u201d were the pop-cultural coin-of-the-realm in 1975-76, and though they bore little relation in tone or spirit to the song that topped the charts on this day in 1976, the disconnect did nothing to hinder the popularity of all things Kotter-related. Indeed, if you weren\u2019t wearing an Uncle Sam or King Kong T-shirt in the summer of America\u2019s bicentennial year, you were probably wearing one with a picture of \u201cthe Sweathogs\u201d and a colorful phrase like \u201cOff my case, toilet face\u201d on it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome Back\u201d was the first and only television theme song that John Sebastian ever wrote, but it was far from the only television theme song of the mid-1970s to become a legitimate pop hit. Only weeks earlier in 1976, the instrumental \u201cTheme From S.W.A.T.\u201d had topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the excellent Mike Post-written theme The Rockford Files had made the top 10 the previous summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1975, John Sebastian, former member of the beloved 60s pop group the Lovin\u2019 Spoonful, was asked to write and record the theme song for a brand-new ABC television show with the working title Kotter. As any songwriter would, Sebastian first tried working that title into his song, but somehow the rhymes he came up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}