“I’ve got an audience that’s coming around again,” Greenbaum, now 77, says over the phone from his home in California.
“The song started with kids’ grandparents and then their parents and then they hear it in all these movies.
I was playing at the Troubadour and a producer of all the Lovin’ Spoonful hits [Erik Jacobsen] happened to be there that night.
In the meantime, I had come across a greeting card that said “Spirit in the Sky.”
One particular day, he did a song about a miner that was up in the hills, digging for gold.
I took some of the seriousness out of it, but I didn’t do it as a joke or against anyone.
No, I had fooled around with the music long before [Hooker’s version with Canned Heat], just playing it without words. »