The Lovin' Spoonful
The Lovin' Spoonful is a Canadian-American folk-rock band formed in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1964. The band were among the most popular groups in the United States for a short period in the mid-1960s and their music and image influenced many of the contemporary rock acts of their era. Beginning in July1965 with their debut single "Do You Believe in Magic", the band had seven consecutive singles reach the Top Ten of the US charts in the eighteen months that followed, including the number-two hits "Daydream" and "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" and the chart-topping "Summer in the City".
Led by their primary songwriter John Sebastian, the Spoonful took their earliest influences from jug band and blues music, reworking them into a popular music format. In 1965, the band helped pioneer the development of the musical genre of folk rock. By 1966, the group were "one of the most highly regarded American and they were the year's third-best-selling singles act in the US, after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. As psychedelia expanded in popularity in 1967, the Spoonful struggled to transition their approach and saw diminished sales before disbanding in 1968.
Before they founded the Spoonful, Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky were active in Greenwich Village's folk-music scene. Aiming to create an "electric jug band", they recruited the local rock musicians Steve Boone and Joe Butler. The four-piece lineup honed their sound at New York nightclubs before they began recording for Kama Sutra Records with the producer Erik Jacobsen. In May1966, at the height of the band's success, Yanovsky and Boone were arrested for marijuana possession in San Francisco. The pair revealed their drug source to authorities to avoid Yanovsky being deported to his native Canada, an action which generated tensions within the group. Due to disagreements over their artistic direction, the band fired Yanovsky in May1967, replacing him with Jerry Yester, and Yanovsky commenced a brief and commercially unsuccessful solo career. The original iteration of the Spoonful last publicly performed in June1968, after which time Sebastian departed the group and pursued a briefly successful solo career. The band dissolved later that year.
In 2000, the Spoonful were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an occasion that saw Sebastian, Yanovsky, Boone and Butler perform together for the last time. Yanovsky died of a heart attack two years later. Sebastian has remained active as a solo act, and Boone, Butler and Yester began touring under the name the Lovin' Spoonful in 1991.
History
1964–1965: Formation
Greenwich Village and folk music
The co-founders of the Lovin' Spoonful – John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky – met on February 9, 1964, at the apartment of Cass Elliot, a mutual friend and fellow musician. Elliot was holding a party that night to watch the English rock band the Beatles make their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Elliot, Sebastian and Yanovsky were all active in the folk-music scene in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City, and the three were greatly influenced by the Beatles' performance; Sebastian later reflected, "It affected heavily... my specific generation". Later that night, Elliot encouraged Sebastian and Yanovsky to play guitars, and Sebastian remembered discovering they had "a tremendous affinity" for one another.Sebastian, the son of the classical harmonica player John Sebastian Sr., grew up in a Village apartment which neighbored Washington Square Park. The younger Sebastian often went to the park to play music, and he also played in rock bands as a teenager at his prep school in New Jersey. He became a multi-instrumentalist, being proficient on guitar, harmonica, piano and the autoharp. Beginning in the early 1960s, he worked as a studio musician.
Yanovsky grew up in Downsview, a suburb of Toronto, Canada, and he was enmeshed as a guitar player in the city's folk-music scene, which centered on the Yorkville neighborhood. Denny Doherty, another musician active in Yorkville, invited Yanovsky to join his folk group, the Halifax Three, which later relocated to Greenwich Village. After the Halifax Three broke up in June1964, Elliot recruited Yanovsky and Doherty to join her own group, the Mugwumps. That same year, Sebastian briefly played with another New York folk group, the Even Dozen Jug Band, before he was also recruited into the Mugwumps to play harmonica.
Sebastian later remembered becoming enamoured with Yanovsky: " amused the hell out of me. He inhaled and exhaled people and conversation and jokes and theater. He was this kind of cultural weathervane – and people gathered around him." During live performances with the Mugwumps, rather than playing folk songs straight through, Yanovsky and Sebastian often improvised off of one another on guitar and harmonica, respectively. After the Mugwumps dissolved in late1964, Sebastian and Yanovsky began planning to form their own group, which they envisioned as an electric jug band. Sebastian recalled: "Yanovsky and I were both aware of the fact that this commercial folk music model was about to change again, that the four-man band that actually played their own instruments and wrote their own songs was the thing." Yanovsky contacted Bob Cavallo, the former manager of the Halifax Three and the Mugwumps, who agreed to manage Sebastian and Yanovsky's group even though they had not yet performed publicly, had no songs and did not yet have a band name.
In 1964, Sebastian lived in an apartment on Prince Street in Little Italy, a Manhattan neighborhood south of Greenwich Village. That year, Erik Jacobsen, the former banjo player of the bluegrass band Knob Lick Upper 10,000, moved into the apartment next door, and the two soon bonded over their shared interests of smoking marijuana and listening to eclectic music. Like Sebastian, Jacobsen had been affected by the new sound of the Beatles; he later recalled that while touring in early1964, he listened to the group for the first time on a jukebox: "I decided, kind of then and there I think, that I was gonna quit the Knob Lick Upper 10,000, and go to New York City, and produced electric folk music." As part of his effort to switch focus towards production, Jacobsen recorded demos for musicians in the Village, including Sebastian's compositions "Warm Baby" and
Earliest lineup
From 1962 to 1964, Steve Boone played bass guitar in several Long Island rock bands with the drummer Joe Butler. They both played in the Kingsmen, a band led by Boone's brother, Skip, before Boone quit in mid-1964 to spend time visiting Europe. Skip and Butler changed the band's name to the Sellouts and moved to Greenwich Village, holding a residency at Trude Heller's club as one of the neighborhood's earliest rock groups.In December1964, at the insistence of Butler, Boone went to the Village Music Hall, a small music club on West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village. There, he met Sebastian and Yanovsky, and though he had no background in folk music, Boone soon bonded with the two over their shared musical influences, including Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Motown, the Beatles and other British Invasion acts. Sebastian played him his composition "Good Time Music" – the lyrics of which derided early 1960s rock and roll while extolling the Beatles and other new music – and the three musicians jammed different Chuck Berry and R&B numbers. Sebastian invited Boone to Jacobsen's apartment afterwards, where Boone met Jacobsen as well as Jerry Yester of the Modern Folk Quartet, a local folk music group. That week, Boone attended Sebastian's performance at a Greenwich Village club. Sebastian's show, made up of a quickly assembled group of Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Buzzy Linhart and Felix Pappalardi, greatly impressed Boone, who later remembered it as "one of the most significant nights in my musical life." He also recalled: "I was stunned. I had never heard such power in a folk group before." The performance motivated Boone to enter the Greenwich Village folk scene and join Sebastian and Yanovsky's group.
The band was still in need of a drummer, and Boone suggested Jan Buchner, a part-timer with the Kingsmen who came at the recommendation of both Skip and Butler. Buchner, who went by the stagename Jan Carl, was the manager of the Bull's Head Inn, a small inn located in Bridgehampton on Long Island, and which he offered as a rehearsal space during the inn's winter closure. The band rehearsed at the Bull's Head for several weeks in December1964 and January1965, and they also played at local bars in Bridgehampton at night.
In late1964 and early1965, to keep earning money before his new band had earned a contract, Sebastian continued performing as a studio musician on other artists' recordings. In this period, he played harmonica on progressive folk records for several acts, including Fred Neil, Jesse Colin Young and Judy Collins. In January1965, the musician Bob Dylan asked Sebastian to play bass guitar on his newest album, Bringing It All Back Home. The album's first day of sessions, January13, featured only Dylan on an acoustic guitar and, for a few tracks, Sebastian playing bass guitar, but none of the recordings were used on the final album. Dylan returned the next day to re-record much of the material, rearranging the songs attempted the day before so they instead featured an electric backing. Dylan invited Sebastian to return for a separate session held that evening, in which they recorded a remake of the song "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Boone – one of the few people Sebastian knew with a car and driver's license – offered to drive him to the session. Sebastian was not a trained bass player and, after struggling to play the part, he suggested that Boone play instead, but neither musician's contributions ended up on the final album.