John “The Chief “Seiter: The Big Hatted Drummer

Recently while surfing through old music videos on YouTube, I came across a television appearance from the sixties by Spanky & Our Gang. The video is from some sixties TV show (“Hollywood Palace”I believe) Milton Berle introduces the band and Spanky and company begin lip syncing their latest hit “Make Every Minute Count” After the initial few seconds, the camera zooms in on the drummer who is wearing a giant cowboy hat with a feather attached to it. Actually, it’s not really a cowboy hat. It’s bigger and taller and was often worn by Native Americans in Westerns.  It’s the type of hat Tom Laughlin wore in the Billy Jack movies. Anyway, the audience laughs and then the camera pans out to show the entire band again. Like many who saw that on television many years ago, I wondered, ‘Who is that guy?’ After seeing him in several other Spanky videos and doing some research on the internet I found out it was John “The Chief” Seiter.

The John Seiter File

Seiter was born in St.Louis, Missouri. He  joined Spanky & Out Gang right after “Sunday Will Never Be The Same” became a hit. He played on three studio albums and a live album before the band split up. After that he played drums with The Turtles on their final album, “Wooden Head”.

Here is a clip of him performing with The Turtles on The Mike Douglas Show without his hat.

After The Turtles broke up he joined Rosebud a sort of super group with folk singer Judy Henske, former Lovin’ Spoonful member Jerry Yester, David Vaught and Henske’s future husband Chris Doerge who would become a very successful L.A session musician recording with Lee Hazelwood, Paul Williams and Linda Rondstadt and touting with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne and James Taylor.

Rosebud split up after only one album. Seiter became a session drummer most notably working on Tom Waits debut album, “Closing Time” which was produced by his old bandmate Jerry Yester. He also appeared on albums by Aztec Two-Step, Odetta and George Clinton.

In 1972, he played drums and percussion on a recording of “Peter And The Wolf”. It was narrated by Rob Reiner who was riding high at the time due to “All In The Family” and it was produced by, once again, Jerry Yester. Seiter and Yester’s old bandmate David Vaught played bass thus reuniting 3/5ths of Rosebud. The album is a weird comic seventies take on the Prokofiev classic and worth checking out for a few bucks if you can find it.

John Seiter’s brother Jim is also a musician.

— Written  by
  Casey Redmond
     January 23, 2020

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