POP MUSIC : Sebastian’s Sound of the ‘60s, Burning Spear Reggae on Tap

Throughout the 1960s, John Sebastian was a guitar-strumming, harp-playing changeling whose career, in retrospect, epitomizes the decade’s musical diversity.

Sebastian, who will be appearing Thursday night at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, first emerged in the early 1960s as a jug-band folkie. He regularly plied the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit with the Mugwumps--whose other members included Cass Elliott and Dennis Doherty, later with the Mamas and the Papas.

When the folk scene collapsed under the weight of the British Invasion, Sebastian put together his own band of American mop-tops, the Lovin’ Spoonful. Between 1965 and 1967, the group scored a string of cheery, decidedly Beatlesque pop hits, including “Do You Believe in Magic?,” “Daydream,” and “Summer in the City.”

Then, as the 1960s drew to a close, pop music all of a sudden became serious--and Sebastian, the teen-age heart-throb, became Sebastian, the tie-dyed hippie, best remembered for his show-stopping solo performance of the pensive “I Had a Dream” at Woodstock.

Since then, Sebastian, like so many other children of the 1960s, has had a hard time fitting in. He briefly resurfaced on the pop charts in 1976 with the number-one hit “Welcome Back,” from television’s “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

But for the most part, he’s been content on the nostalgia trail, keeping alive memories of his three vintage musical persona instead of trying to create a fourth.

Also in town this week is Burning Spear, performing Friday at the UC San Diego Gymnasium.

Burning Spear is the nom de plume of Winston Rodney, a Jamaican reggae tenor whose stark, brooding songs revolve around oppression--specifically, black Jamaicans’ not-so-distant slavery days--and mystical transcendence through the Rastafarian religion.

Rodney originally formed Burning Spear as a duo, with bass vocalist Rubert Willington, in the late 1960s. In 1969, they cut several singles for Jamaican record producer Clement (Sir Coxsone) Dodd, and achieved a moderate amount of success with their repertoire of traditional songs and chants dating from slave times.

A year later, Burning Spear became a trio, with the addition of second tenor Delroy Hines, and in 1974 scored their first international hit with “Marcus Garvey,” about the founder of Rastafarianism.

Since then, Burning Spear has continued to be one of the few reggae acts as popular in England and the United States as they are in their native Jamaica, even after the 1977 departure of Willington and Hines left Rodney as the “group’s” sole member.

Today, Rodney regularly tours the United States with his back-up band, while in Jamaica, he teaches cultural history at the Marcus Garvey Youth Club, which he founded.

Other San Diego concerts this week: hard rockers the Dan Reed Network tonight at the Bacchanal nightclub on Kearny Mesa, regional reggae favorites the Rebel Rockers, from Orange County, and the Cardiff Reefers, from San Diego, Thursday at San Diego State University’s Backdoor, Southern rock ‘n’ rollers Molly Hatchet, Friday at the Bacchanal, and the Desert Rose Band, featuring former Byrd Chris Hillman, Saturday at the Bacchanal.