Episode 143: “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful

A History of Folk Music in 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 143:

Summer in the City

by The Loving Spoonful.

Let's talk about the harmonica for a while.

The harmonica is an instrument that has not shown up a huge amount in the podcast, but which was used in a fair bit of the music we've covered.

We've heard it, for example, on records by Bo Diddley.

Now, when I was a little boy,

at the age of five,

I had some in my pocket

to keep a lot of folks alive.

Now I'm a man,

May 21.

You know, baby,

we can have a lot of fun

and by Bob Dylan.

The answer, my friend,

is blowing in the wind.

The answer is blowing in the wind.

Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist

for

and the Rolling Stones ain't had no peace in the fall, y'all

since my little red rooster's been gone.

In most folk and blues contexts, the harmonicas used are what is known as a diatonic harmonica, and these are what most people think of when they think of harmonicas at all.

Diatonic harmonicas have the notes of a single key in them, and if you want to play a note in another key, you have to do interesting tricks with the shape of your mouth to bend the note.

There's another type of harmonica, though, the chromatic harmonica.

We've heard that a time or two as well, like on Love Me Do by the Beatles.

Love, love me do.

You know I love you.

I'll always be true.

So please

love me do.

Chromatic harmonicas have 16 holes, rather than the diatonic harmonica's ten, and they also have a slide which you can press to raise the note by a semitone, meaning you can play far more notes than on a diatonic harmonica.

But they're also physically harder to play, requiring a different kind of breathing to pull off playing one successfully.

They're so different that John Lannon would distinguish between the two instruments.

He'd describe a chromatic harmonica as a harmonica, but a diatonic harmonica he would call a harp, like blues musicians often did.

But now John has his work cut out on the next one, as he takes the guitar on and off his neck and pulls the harmonica in and out of his face.

It's a harp.

What a harp?

The harp.

I'm playing a harp in this one.

Playing a harp?

Harmonica are playing Love Me Do.

Harp in this one.

Little.

But it goes on.

Do you want to do these announcements?

Go ahead.

You go ahead.

That's all right.

Tell them what the next song.

Oh, we'd like to carry on with Chuck Berry's.

I've got to find my baby.

I don't know where she's been.

Pardon.

Hello.

Love Love these goon shows.

While the chromatic harmonica isn't a particularly popular instrument in rock music, it is one that has had some success in other fields.

There have been some jazz and light orchestral musicians who have become famous playing the instrument, like the jazz musician Mike Skeldray, who played in those goon shows the Beatles loved so much.

And in the middle of the 20th century, there were a few musicians who succeeded in making the harmonica into an instrument that was was actually respected in serious classical music.

By far the most famous of these was Larry Adler, who became almost synonymous with the instrument in the popular consciousness, and who reworked many famous pieces of music for the instrument.

But while Adler was the most famous classical harmonicist of his generation, he was not generally considered the best by other musicians.

That was, rather, a man named John Sebastian.

Sebastian, who chose to take his middle name as a surname, partly to anglicise his name, but also it seems, at least in part as tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, which, incidentally, now makes it really, really difficult to search for copies of his masterwork John Sebastian Plays Bach, as internet searchers uniformly think you're searching just for the composer, started out like almost all harmonica players as an amateur playing popular music.

But he quickly got very, very good, and by his teens he was already teaching other children, including at a summer camp run by Albert Hoxey, a musician and entrepreneur who was basically single-handedly responsible for the boom in harmonica sales in the 1920s and 30s, by starting up youth harmonica orchestras, dozens or even hundreds of kids, all playing harmonica together, in a semi-militaristic youth organization, something like the Scouts, but with harmonicas instead of woggles and knots.

Hoxey's group and the various organizations copying it led to there being over 150 harmonica orchestras in Chicago alone, and in LA in the 20s and 30s, a total of more than 100,000 children passed through harmonica orchestras inspired by Hoxie.

Hoxie's youth orchestras were largely responsible for the popularity of the harmonica as a cheap instrument for young people, and thus for its later popularity in the folk and blues worlds.

That was only boosted in the Second World War by the American Federation of Musicians' recording ban, which we talked about in the early episodes of the podcast.

Harmonicas had never been thought of as a serious instrument, and so most professional harmonica players were not members of the AFM, but were considered variety performers, and were part of the American Guild of Variety Artists, along with singers, ukulele players, and musical saw players.

Of course, the war did also create a problem, because the best harmonicas were made in Germany by the Hohner Company, but soon a lot of American companies started making cheap harmonicas to fill the gap in the market.

There's a reason the cliché of the GINA War film Playing a Harmonica in the Trenches exists, and it's largely because of Hoxey.

And Hoxie was based in Philadelphia, where John Sebastian lived as a kid, and he mentored the young player, who soon became a semi-professional performer.

Sebastian's father was a rich banker, and discouraged him from becoming a full-time musician.

The plan was that after university, Sebastian would become a diplomat, but as part of his preparation for that role, he was sent to spend a couple of years studying at the universities of Rome and Florence, learning about Italian culture.

On the way back, though, he started talking to two other passengers, who turned out to be the legendary Broadway songwriting team Rogers and Hart, the writers of such classic songs as Blue Moon and My Funny Valentine.

Valentine

You make

me smile

with my heart

Sebastian talked to his new friends and told them that he was feeling torn between being a musician and being in the foreign service like his father wanted.

They both told him that in their experience some people were just born to be artists, and that those people would never actually find happiness doing anything else.

He took their advice and decided he was going to become a full-time harmonica player.

He started out playing in nightclubs, initially playing jazz and swing, but only while he built up a repertoire of classical music.

He would rehearse with a pianist for three hours every day, and would spend the rest of his time finding classical works, especially Baroque ones, and adapting them for the harmonica.

As he later said, I discovered sonatas by Tillemann, Vevecini, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Haas, Marcello, Purcell, and many others, which were written to be played on violin, flute, oboe, musette, even bagpipes.

The composer seemed to be charging each instrument to create the embellishments and ornaments to suit its particular voice.

I set about choosing works from this treasure trove trove that would best speak through my instrument.

Soon his nightclub repertoire was made up entirely of these classical pieces, and he was making records like John Sebastian plays Bach.

And while Sebastian was largely a lover of Baroque music above all other forms, he realised that he would have to persuade new composers to write new pieces for the instrument, should he ever hope for it to have any kind of reputation as a concert instrument.

So he persuaded contemporary composers to write pieces like George Kleinsinger's Street Corner Concerto, which Sebastian premiered with the New York Philharmonic.

He became the first harmonica player to play an entirely classical repertoire, and regarded as the greatest player of his instrument in the world.

The oboe player J.S.

Harrison once wrote of seeing him perform, To accomplish with success a programme of Mr.

Sebastian's scope is nothing short of wizardry.

He has vast technical facility, a bulging range of colours, and his intentions are ever musical and sophisticated.

In his hands, the harmonica is no toy, no simple gadget for the dispensing of homespun tunes.

Each single number of the evening was whittled, rounded, polished, and poised.

Mr.

Sebastian's playing is uncanny.

Sebastian came from a rich background, and he managed to earn enough as a classical musician to live the lifestyle of a rich artistic bohemian.

During the 40s and 50s he lived in Greenwich Village with his family, apart from a four-year period living in Rome from 1951 to 1955, and Eleanor Roosevelt was a neighbour, while Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy, was the godmother of his eldest son.

But while Sebastian's playing was entirely classical, he was interested in a wider variety of music.

When he would tour Europe, he would often return having learned European folk songs, and while he was living in Greenwich Village, he would often be visited by people like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and other folk singers living in the area.

And that early influence rubbed off on Sebastian's son, John Benson Sebastian, although young John gave up trying to learn the harmonica the first time he tried, because he didn't want to be following too closely in his father's footsteps.

Sebastian Jr.

did, though, take up the guitar, inspired by the first wave rock and rollers he was listening to on Alan Freed's show, and he would later play the harmonica, though the diatonic harmonica rather than the chromatic.

In case you haven't already figured it out, John Benson Sebastian, rather than his father, is a principal focus of this episode, and so to avoid confusion, from this point on, when I refer to John Sebastian or Sebastian, without any qualifiers, I'm referring to the younger man.

When I refer to John Sebastian Sr., I'm talking about the father.

But it was John Sebastian Sr.'s connections, in particular to the Bohemian folk and blues scenes, which gave his more famous son his first connection to that world of his own, when Sebastian Sr.

appeared in a TV show in November 1960, put together by Robert Heridge, a TV writer and producer who was most famous for his drama series, but who had also put together documentaries on both classical music and jazz, including the classic performance documentary The Sound of Jazz.

Herridge's show featured both Sebastian Sr.

and the country blues player Lightning Hopkins.

You know, we're looking for my woman, she's out with another man.

Blue then the bottle, blue

Hopkins was one of many country blues players whose career was having a second wind after his discovery by the folk music scene.

He'd been recording for 14 years, putting out hundreds of records, but had barely performed outside Houston until 1959, when the Folkies had picked up on his work, and in October 1960 he had been invited to play Carnegie Hall, performing with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.

Young John Sebastian had come along with his dad to see the TV show be recorded and had an almost Damascene conversion.

He'd already heard Hopkins' recordings, but had never seen anything like his live performances.

He was at that time attending a private boarding school, Blair Academy, and his roommate at the school also had his own apartment where Sebastian would sometimes stay.

Soon Lightning Hopkins was staying there as well, as somewhere he could live rent-free while he was in New York.

Sebastian started following Hopkins around and learning everything he could, being allowed by the older man to carry his guitar and buy him gin, though the two never became close.

But eventually, Hopkins would occasionally allow Sebastian to play with him when he played at people's houses, which he did on occasion.

Sebastian became someone that Hopkins trusted enough that when he was performing on a bill with someone else whose accompanist wasn't able to make the gig, and Sebastian put himself forward, Hopkins agreed that Sebastian would be a suitable accompanist for the evening.

The singer he accompanied that evening was a performer named Valentine Pringle, who was a protégé of Harry Belafonte, and who had a similar kind of sound to Paul Robeson.

Sebastian soon became Pringle's regular accompanist and played on his first album, I Hear America Singing, which was also the first record on which the great trumpet player Hugh Masicala played.

Sadly, Paul Robeson-style vocals were so out of fashion by that point that that album has never, as far as I can tell, been issued in any any digital format and hasn't even been uploaded to YouTube.

But this excerpt from a later recording by Pringle should give you some idea of the kind of thing he was doing.

After these experiences, Sebastian started regularly going to shows at Greenwich Village folk clubs, encouraged by his parents.

He had an advantage over his peers because he'd grown up in the area and had artistic parents, and so he was able to have a great deal of freedom that other people in their teens weren't.

In

he would always look out for any performances by the great country blues performer, Mississippi John Hurt.

Hurt had made a few recordings for OK Records in 1928, including an early version of Stagger Lee, titled Stack O Lee.

Police officer, how can it be?

You can rest everybody with cruel stagger leave.

That bad man, oh cruel staggery.

But those records had been unsuccessful, and he'd carried on working on a farm, and not performed, other than in his tiny hometown of Avalon, Mississippi, for decades.

But then, in 1952, a couple of his tracks had been included on the Harry Smith Anthology, and as a result, he'd come to the attention of the folk and blues scholar community.

They'd tried tracking him down, but been unable to, until in the early sixties one of them had discovered a track on one of Hurt's records, Avalon Blues, and in 1963, thirty-five years after he'd recorded six flop singles, Mississippi John Hurt became a minor star.

playing the Newport Folk Festival and appearing on the Tonight Show.

By this time, Sebastian was a fairly well-known figure in Greenwich Village, and he had become quite a virtuoso on the harmonica himself, and would walk around the city wearing a holster belt containing harmonicas in a variety of different keys.

Sebastian became a huge fan of Hurt, and would go and see him perform whenever Hurt was in New York.

He soon found himself first jamming backstage with Hurt and then performing with him on stage for the last two weeks of her residency.

He was particularly impressed with what he called Hurt's positive attitude in his music, something that Sebastian would emulate in his own songwriting.

Sebastian was soon invited to join a drug band, called the Even Dozen Drug Band.

Drug band music was a style of music that first became popular in the nineteen twenties, and had many of the same musical elements as the music later known as skiffle.

It was played on a mixture of standard musical instruments, usually portable folky ones like guitar and harmonica, and improvised home made instruments, like the spoons, the washboard, and comb and paper.

The reason they're called jug bands is because they would involve someone blowing into a jug to make a noise that sounded a bit like a horn, much like the coffee pot groups we talked about way back in episode 6.

The music was often hocum music, and incorporated elements of what we'd now call blues, vaudeville, and country music, though at the time those genres were nothing like as distinct as they're considered today.

The Even Dozen Jug Band actually ended up having 13 members, and it had a rather remarkable line-up.

The leader was Stefan Grossman, later regarded as one of the greatest finger-picking guitarists in America, and someone who will be coming up in other contexts in future episodes, I'm sure.

And they also featured David Grisman, a mandolin player who would later play with the Grateful Dead, among many others.

Steve Katz, who would go on to be a founder member of Blood, Sweat and Tears and produced records for Lou Reed, Maria DeMato, who under her married name Maria Muldor would go on to have a huge hit with Midnight at the Oasis, and Joshua Rifkin, who would later go on to become one of the most important scholars of Bach's music of the latter half of the 20th century, but who is best known for his recordings of Scott Joplin's piano rags, which more or less single-handedly revived Joplin's music from obscurity and created the ragtime revival of the 1970s.

Unfortunately, despite the many times involved, a band as big as that was uneconomical to keep together, and the Even Dozen Drug Band only played four shows together, though those four shows were, as Muldar later remembered, Carnegie Hall Twice, The Hootinani Television Show, and Some Church.

The group did, though, make an album for Electro Records, produced by Paul Rothschild.

Indeed, it was Rothschild who was the impetus for the group forming.

He wanted to produce a record of a drug band, and had told Grossman that if he got one together, he'd record it.

You go to your home, this is your dinner hot.

She never even put your supper into the pot.

She's on the road again.

Just as Sean.

She's on the road again.

Just as Shonjevon,

on that album, Sebastian wasn't actually credited as John Sebastian, because he was playing harmonica on the album, and his father was such a famous harmonica player, he thought it better if he was credited by his middle name, so he was John Benson for this one album.

The Even Dozen drug band split up after only a few months, with most of the band more interested in returning to university than becoming professional musicians.

But Sebastian remained in touch with Rothschild, as they both shared an interest in the drug culture.

and Rothschild started using him on sessions for other artists on Elektra, which was rapidly becoming one of the biggest labels for the nascent counterculture.

The first record the two worked together on after the Even Dozen Jug Band was sparked by a casual conversation.

Vince Martin and Fred Neal saw Sebastian walking down the street wearing his harmonica holster and were intrigued and asked him if he played.

Soon he and his friend Felix Papalardi were accompanying Martin and Neil on stage, and the two of them were recording as the duo's accompanists.

Tear down the walls.

Tear down the walls.

We've mentioned Neil before, but if you you don't remember him, he was one of the people around whom the whole Greenwich Village scene formed.

He was the MC and organiser of Bills for many of the folk shows of the time, but is now best known for writing the songs Everybody's Talkin', recorded famously by Harry Nilsson, and The Dolphins, recorded by Tim Buckley.

On the Martin and Neil album, Tear Down the Walls, as well as playing harmonica, Sebastian acted essentially as uncredited co-producer with Rothschild, but Martin and Neil soon stopped recording for Elektra.

But in the meantime, Sebastian had met the most important musical collaborator he would ever have, and this is the start of something that will become a minor trend in the next few years: of important musical collaborations happening because of people being introduced by Cass Elliott.

Cass Elliott had been a singer in a folk group called The Big Three, not the same group as the Merseybeat group, with Tim Rose and the man who would be her first husband, Jim Hendricks, not the more famous guitarist of a similar name.

The big three had split up when Elliot and Hendrix had got married, and the two married members had been looking around for other musicians to perform with, when coincidentally, another group they knew also split up.

The Halifax Three were a Canadian group who had originally started out as the Colonials, with a line up of Denny Doherty, Pat Lecroix, and Richard Byrne.

Byrne didn't turn up for a gig, and a homeless guitar player, Zal Yanofsky, who would hang around the club the group were playing at, stepped in.

Doherty and Lacroix, much to Yanofsky's objections, insisted he bathe and have a haircut, but soon the newly renamed Halifax 3 were playing Carnegie Hall and recording for Epic Records.

When I first came to this land, I was not a wealthy man, so I got myself a farm and I did what I could.

So I got myself a farm, call that farm the muscle in my arm.

But the land was sweet and good, and I did what I could.

But then a plane they were in crash-landed, and the group took that as a sign that they should split up.

So they did, and Doherty and Janovsky continued as a duo, until they hooked up with Hendrix and Elliot and formed a new group, the Mugwumps, a name which may be familiar if you recognise one of the hits of a group that Doherty and Elliott were in later.

Muck bumps high, jumps low, sunk beat, bumps, don't you work as hard as you play?

Make a break off everything and shake up, guess it had to

But we're skipping ahead a bit there.

Cass Elliott was one of those few people in the music industry about whom it is impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say.

And she was friendly with basically everyone, and particularly good at matching people up with each other.

And on February 7th, 1964, she invited John Sebastian over to watch the Beatles' first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Like everyone in America, he was captivated by the performance.

I think you understand.

Well, I

say that some truth.

I wanna hold your hand.

I wanna hold your hand.

I wanna hold your hand.

But Yanovsky was also there, and the two played guitar together for a bit before retreating to opposite sides of the room.

And then Elliot spent several hours as a go-between, going to each man and telling him how much the other loved and admired his playing and wanted to play more with him.

Sebastian joined the mugbumps for a while, becoming one of the two main instrumentalists with Yanovsky, as the group pivoted from performing folk music to performing Beatles-inspired rock.

But the group's management team, Bob Cavallo and Roy Silver, who weren't particularly musical people and whose main client was the comedian Bill Cosby, got annoyed at Sebastian because he and Janovsky were getting on too well musically.

They were trading blues licks on stage rather than sticking to the rather pedestrian arrangements that the group was meant to be performing, and so Silva fired Sebastian from the group.

When the Mugbumps recorded their one album, Sebastian had to sit in the control room while his former bandmates recorded with session musicians, who he thought were nowhere near up to his standard.

By the time that album was released, the mugwumps had already split up.

Sebastian had continued working as a session musician for Elektra, including playing on the album The Blues Project, which featured white Greenwich Village folk musicians like Eric von Schmidt, Dave Van Bunk, and Spider John Kerner playing their versions of old blues records, including this track by Jeff Muldor, which features Sebastian on harmonica and Bob Landy on piano, a fairly blatant pseudonym.

I got a bad lucky, I'll give me trouble every day.

I'm going,

Sebastian also played rhythm, guitar, and harmonica on the demos that became a big part of Tim Hardin's first album, and his fourth, when the record company released the remaining demos.

Sebastian doesn't appear to be on the orchestrated ballads that made Hardin's name, songs like Reason to Believe and Misty Roses.

But he is on much of the more blues-oriented material, which, while it's not anything like as powerful as Hardin's greatest songs, made up a large part of his repertoire.

I know what love's about.

Give my baby leave.

Eric Jacobson, the producer of Hardin's Records, was impressed enough by Sebastian that he got Sebastian to record lead vocals, for a studio group consisting of Sebastian, Felix Papillardi, Jerry Yester, and Henry Dilt of the modern folk quartet, and a bass singer whose name nobody could later remember.

The group, under the name Pooh and the Heffalumps, recorded two Beach Boys knockoffs, Lady Godiver and Rooty Toot, the latter written by Sebastian, though he would later be embarrassed by it and claim it was by his cousin.

I've missed my light.

Yeah, Rudy Duden, Rudy Dude, she's my baby.

Rudy Dude,

yeah, Rudy Dude, Rudy Dude, I don't mean labor.

Rudy Dude,

After that, Jacobson became convinced that Sebastian should form a group to exploit his potential as a lead singer and songwriter.

By this point, the Mugwumps had split up, and their management team had also split, with Silver taking Bill Cosby and Cavallo taking the Mugwumps, and so Sebastian was able to work with Janovsky, and the putative group could be managed by Cavallo.

But Sebastian and Janovsky needed a rhythm section, and Eric Jacobson knew a band that might know some people.

Jacobson was a fan of a Beatles sound-alike group called the Sellouts, who were playing Greenwich Village and who were co-managed by Herb Cohen, the manager of the modern folk quartet, who, as we heard a couple of episodes ago, would soon go on to be the manager of the Mothers of Invention.

The Sellouts were ultra-professional by the standards of rock groups of the time.

They even had a tape echo machine that they used on stage to give them a unique sound, and they had cut a couple of tracks with Jacobson producing, though I've not been able to track down copies of them.

Their leader, Skip Boone, had started out playing guitar in a band called the Blue Suedes and had played in 1958 on a record by their lead singer, Arthur Osborne.

I saw her walking down the street.

I stood there, watched

Skip Boone's brother Steve, in his autobiography, says that that was produced by Chet Atkins for RCA, but it was actually released on Brunswick Records.

In the early 60s, Skip Boone joined a band called The Kingsmen, not the same one as the band that recorded Louie Louie, playing league guitar with his brother Steve on Rhythm, a singer called Sonny Bottari, a saxophone player named King Charles, bass player Clay Sonnier, and drummer Joe Butler.

Sometimes Butler would get up front and sing, and then another drummer, Jam Buckner, would sit in his place.

Soon Steve Boone would replace Bonnier as the bass player, but the Kingsmen had no success and split up.

From the ashes of the Kingsmen had formed the Sellouts, Skip Boone, Jerry Angus, Marshall O'Connell, and Joe Butler, who had switched from playing Peppermint Twist to playing I Want to Hold Your Hand in February 1964.

Meanwhile, Steve Boone went on a trip to Europe before starting at university in New York, where he hooked up again with Butler, and it was Butler who introduced him to Sebastian and Yanovsky.

Sebastian and Yanovsky had been going to see the sellouts at the behest of Jacobson, and they'd been asking if they knew anyone else who could play that kind of material.

Skip Boone had mentioned his little brother, and as soon as they met him, even before they first played together, they knew from his appearance that he would be the right bass player for them.

So now they had at least the basis for a band.

They hadn't played together, but Eric Jacobson was an experienced record producer and Cavallo an experienced manager.

They just needed to do some rehearsals and get a drummer, and a record contract was more or less guaranteed.

Boone suggested Jam Buckner, the backup drummer from the Kingsmen, and he joined them for rehearsals.

It was during these early rehearsals that Boone got to play on his first real record, other than someone released demos the Kingsmen had made.

John Sebastian got a call from that Bob Landy we mentioned earlier, asking if he'd play bass on a session.

Boone tagged along because he was a fan, and when Sebastian couldn't get the parts down for some songs, he suggested that Boone, as an actual bass player, take over.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no

But the new group needed a name, of course.

It was John Sebastian who came up with the name they eventually chose, the Lovin' Spoonful, though Boone was a bit hesitant about it at first, worrying that it might be a reference to heroin.

Boone was from a very conservative military background, and knew little of drug culture, and didn't at that time make much of a distinction between cannabis and heroin, though he'd started using the former.

But Sebastian was insistent.

The phrase actually referred to coffee.

The name came from coffee blues by Sebastian's old idol, Mississippi John Hurt, or at least Hurt always said it was about coffee, though in live performance he apparently made it clear that it was about Cunnilingus.

I understand that if I can get just a spoonful of Max's house, do me as much good as two or three cups of deserter coffee.

I've got to go to Memphis,

from there to Leland.

I want to see my babe by the loving spoon,

by the loving spoonful.

Well, I've guessed God to have

my loving.

I found her.

Good morning, baby.

Their first show at the Night Owl Club was recorded, and there was even an attempt to release it as a C D in the 1990s, but it was left unreleased, and as far as I can tell wasn't even leaked.

There have been several explanations for this, but perhaps the most accurate one is just the comment from the manager of the club, who came up to the group after their two sets and told them, Hey, I don't know how to break this to you, but you guys suck.

There were apparently three different problems.

They were under rehearsed, which could be fixed with rehearsal.

They were playing too loud and hurting the patrons' ears, which could be fixed by turning down the amps, and their drummer didn't look right, was six years older than the rest of the group, and was playing in an out-of-date fifties style that wasn't suitable for the music they were playing.

That was solved by sacking Buckner.

By this point, Joe Butler had left the sell-outs, and while Herb Cohen was interested in managing him as a singer, he was willing to join this new group, at least for the moment.

By now, the group were all more or less permanent residents at the Albert Hotel, which was more or less a DOS house, where underemployed musicians would stay, and which had its own rehearsal rooms.

As well as the Spoonful, Cass Elliott and Denny Doherty lived there, as did the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Joe Butler quickly fit into the group, and soon they were recording what became their first single, produced by Jacobson, an original of Sebastian's called Do You Believe in Magic, with Sebastian on auto harp and vocals, Janovsky on lead guitar and backing vocals, Boone on bass, Butler on drums, and Jerry Yester adding piano and backing vocals.

And it's magic, if the music is grooving, it makes you feel happy like an old-time movie.

I'll tell you about the magic and the free of soul.

But it's like trying to tell a stranger about a rock and roll.

Oh, if you believe in magic,

For a long time the group couldn't get a deal.

The record companies all liked the song, but said that unless the group were English they couldn't sell them at the moment.

Then Phil Spector walked into the Night Owl Cafe, where the new lineup of the group had become popular, and tried to sign them up.

But they turned him down.

They wanted Eric Jacobson to produce them.

They were a team.

Spectre's interest caused other labels to be interested, and the group very nearly signed to Elektra.

But again, signing to Elekra would have meant being produced by Rothschild, and also Elektra were an album label who didn't at that time have any hit single acts, and the group knew they had hit single potential.

They did record a few tracks for Elektra to stick on a blues compilation, but they knew that Elektra wouldn't be their real home.

Eventually the group signed with Charlie Coppelman and Don Rubin, who had started out as songwriters themselves, working for Don Kirshner.

When Kirshner's organisation had been sold to Columbia, Koppelman and Rubin had gone along and ended up working for Columbia as executives.

They'd then worked for Maurice Levy at Roulette Records, before forming their own publishing and record company.

Rather than put out records themselves, they had a deal to license records to Karma Sutra Records, who in turn had a distribution deal with MGM Records.

Koppelman and Rubin were willing to take the group and their management producer as a package deal, and they released the group's demo of Do You Believe in Magic Unchanged as their first single.

Yeah,

believe in the magic of the younger soul.

Believe in the magic of a rock and wall.

Believe in the magic that can set you free.

Oh,

talking about magic.

Like I believe, believe

it.

Like I believe in magic.

The single reached the top ten, and the group was soon in the studio cutting their first album, also titled Do You Believe in Magic?

The album was a mix of songs that were part of the standard Greenwich Village folkie repertoire, songs like Mississippi John Hurt's Blues in the Bottle and Fred Neal's The Other Side of This Life, and a couple more originals.

The group's second single was the first song that Steve Boone had co-written.

It was inspired by a date he'd gone on with the photographer Nouveau Twilde, who sadly for him didn't go on a second date, and who would later be the mother of Mike Nesmith's son Jason, but who he was very impressed by.

He thought of her when he came up with the line, You didn't have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway, and he and Sebastian finished up a song that became another top-ten hit for the group.

Shortly after that song was recorded, but before it was released, the group were called into Columbia TV with an intriguing proposition.

Burch Schneider and Bob Rafelson, two young TV producers, were looking at producing a TV show inspired by A Hard Day's Night, and were looking for a band to perform in it.

Would the Loving Spoonful be up for it?

They were interested at first, but Boone and Sebastian weren't sure they wanted to be actors, and also it would involve the group changing its name.

They'd already made a name for themselves as the Loving Spoonful.

Did they really want to be the Monkees instead?

They passed on the idea.

Instead, they went on a tour of the Deep South as the support actor The Supremes, a pairing that they didn't feel made much sense, but which did at least allow them to watch the Supremes and the Funk Brothers every night.

Sebastian was inspired by the straight four-on-the-floor beat of the Hollandosia Holland repertoire, and came up with his own variation on it, though as this was the loving spoonful, the end result didn't sound very Motown at all.

Dreaming about my bundle of joy.

And even if time ain't really on my side,

it's one of those days for taking a walk outside.

I'm blowing the day to take a walk.

It was only after the track was recorded that Janovsky pointed out to Sebastian that he'd unconsciously copied part of the melody of the old standard, Got a Date with an Angel.

Hello?

Is that St.

Peter?

What the double-dear one?

I got a date with an angel.

Alrighty.

Come on, gang, clap your wings.

Got a date with an angel.

Got a meeter at seven.

Got a date with an angel, and I'm on my way to heaven.

No one else could be sweeter.

Looks divine when I meet her.

Feel as proud as St.

Peter, and I'm on my way.

Daydream became the group's third top ten hit in a row, but it caused some problems for the group.

The first was Karma Sutra's advertising campaign for the record, which had the words Lovin' Spoonful Daydream with the initials emphasised.

While the group were drug users, they weren't particularly interested in being promoted for that rather than their music, and had strong words with the label.

The other problem came with the Beach Boys.

The group was supporting the Beach Boys on a tour in spring of 1966 when Daydream came out and became a hit, and they got on with all the the band members except Mike Love, who they definitely did not get on with.

Almost 50 years later in his autobiography, Steve Boone would have nothing bad to say about the Wilson brothers, but calls Love an obnoxious boorish braggart, a marginally taunted hack, and worse, so it's safe to say that Love wasn't his favourite person in the world.

Unfortunately, when Daydream hit the top ten, One of the promoters of the tour decided to build a Loving Spoonful above the Beach Boys, and this upset Love, who understandably thought that his group, who were much better known and had much more hits, should be the headliners.

If this had been any of the other Beach Boys, there would have been no problem, but because it was Love, who the Loving Spoonful despised, they decided that they were going to fight for top billing, and the managers had to get involved.

Eventually it was agreed that the two groups would alternate the top spot on the bill for the rest of the tour.

Daydream eventually reached number two on the charts and number one on Cashbox, and also became the group's first hit in the uk reaching number two here as well and leading to the group playing a short uk tour during that tour they had a similar argument over billing with mick jagger as they'd had with mike love

this time over who was headlining on an appearance on top of the pops and the group came to the same assessment of jagger as they had of love

the performance went okay though despite them being so stoned on hash given them by the wealthy socialite tara brown that Sebastian had to be woken up seconds before he started playing.

They also played the Marquee Club.

Boone notes in his autobiography that he wasn't impressed by the club when he went to see it the day before their date there, because some nobody named David Bowie was playing there.

But in the audience that day were George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Steve Wynwood, Spencer Davis, and Brian Jones, most of whom partied with the group afterwards.

The Lovin' Spoonful made a big impression on Lennon in particular, who put Daydream and Do You Believe in Magic in his jukebox at home, and who soon took to wearing glasses in the same round, wiry style as the ones that Sebastian wore.

They also influenced Paul McCartney, who wasn't at that gig, but who soon wrote this, inspired by Daydream.

I need to laugh,

and when the sun

Unfortunately, this was more or less the high point of the group's career.

Shortly after that brief UK tour, Zalyanovsky and Steve Boone went to a party where they were given some cannabis, and they were almost immediately stopped by the police, subjected to an illegal search of their vehicle, and arrested.

They They would probably have been able to get away with this.

After all, it was an illegal search, even though of course the police didn't admit to that, were it not for the fact that Yanovsky was a Canadian citizen, and he could be deported and barred from ever re-entering the US just for being arrested.

This was the first major drug bust of a rock and roll group, and there was no precedent for the group, their managers, their label, or their lawyers to deal with this.

And so they agreed to something they would regret for the rest of their lives.

In return for being let off, Boone and Yanovsky agreed to take an undercover police officer to a party and introduce him to some of their friends as someone they knew in the record business, so he would be able to arrest one of the bigger dealers.

This was, of course, something they knew was a despicable thing to do, throwing friends under the bus to save themselves, but they were young men and under a lot of pressure, and they hoped that it wouldn't actually lead to any arrests.

And for almost a year there were no serious consequences, although both Boone and Yanovsky were shaken up by the event, and Yanovsky's behaviour, which had always been erratic, became much, much worse.

But for the moment, the group remained very successful.

After Daydream, an album track from their first album, Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind, had been released as a stopgap single, and that went to number two as well.

And right before the arrest, the group had been working on what would be an even bigger hit.

The initial idea for Summer in the City actually came from John Sebastian's 14-year-old brother Mark, who'd written a Bossanova song called It's a Different World.

The song was, by all accounts, the kind of thing that a 14-year-old boy writes, but part of it had potential, and John Sebastian took that part, giving his brother full credit, and turned it into the chorus of a new song.

in the city, in the summer, in the city.

To this, Sebastian added a new verse.

Inspired by a riff, the session player Artie Schwerk had been playing while the group recorded their songs for the Woody Allen film What's Up Tiger Lily, creating a tenser, darker verse to go with his younger brother's chorus.

Hot down, summer in the city, back on my neck, getting dirt and gritty.

Bend down, isn't it a fitted?

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city.

All around, people looking half stared walking on the sidewalk hotter than a match here.

But at night, it's a different world.

Go out and find a girl.

Come on, come on.

In the studio, Steve Boone came up with the instrumental arrangement, which started with drums, organ, electric piano, and guitar.

and then proceeded to bass, auto harp, guitar and percussion overdubs.

The drum sound on the record was particularly powerful thanks to the engineer Roy Halley, who worked on most of Simon and Garfunkel's records.

Halley put a mic at the top of a stairwell, a giant loudspeaker at the bottom, and used the stairwell as an echo chamber for the drum part.

He would later use a similar technique on Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer.

The track still needed another section though, and Boone suggested an instrumental part, which led to him getting an equal songwriting credit with the Sebastian brothers.

His instrumental piano break was inspired by Gershwin, and the group topped it off with overdubbed city noises.

The track went to number one, becoming the group's only number one record, and it was the last track on what is by far their best album, Hums of the Loving Spoonful.

That album produced two more top ten hits for the group: Nashville Cats, a tribute to Nashville session players, though John Sebastian seems to have thought that Sun Records was a Nashville rather than a Memphis label, and the rather lovely Rain on the Roof.

Caught up in a summer shower,

drying while it soaks the flowers.

Maybe we'll be caught for hours

Waiting out the sun

You and me were gabbin away

Dreaming conversation sitting in the day Honey, how long was I left But that song caused friction with the group because it was written about Sebastian's relationship with his wife who the other members of the band despised.

They also felt that the songs he was writing about their relationship were giving the group a wimpy image, and wanted to make more rockers like Summer in the City.

Some of them had been receiving homophobic abuse for making such soft-sounding music.

The group were also starting to resent Sebastian for other reasons.

In a recent contract renegotiation, a key member clause had been put into the group's record contract, which stated that Sebastian, as far as the label was concerned, was the only important member of the group.

While that didn't affect decision-making in the group, it did let the group know that if the other members did anything to upset Sebastian, he was able to take his ball away with him, and even just that potential affected the way the group thought about each other.

All these factors came into play with a song called Darling Be Home Soon, which was a soft ballad that Sebastian had written about his wife, and which was written for another film soundtrack, this time for a film by a new director named Francis Ford Coppola.

When the other band members came in to play on the soundtrack, including that track, they found that rather than being allowed to improvise and come up with their own parts as they had previously, they had to play pre-written parts to fit the orchestration.

Janovsky, in particular, was annoyed by the simple part he had to play, and when the group appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to promote the record, he mugged, danced erratically, and mimed along mocking the lyrics as Sebastian sang.

The song, one of Sebastian's very best, made a perfectly respectable number 15, but it was the group's first record not to make the top 10.

quarter of my life is almost past.

I think I've come to see myself at last.

And I see that the time spent confused

was the time that I spent without you.

And I feel

myself in blue.

So, darling, be home soon.

And then, to make matters worse, the news got out that someone had been arrested as a result of Boone and Yanofsky's efforts to get themselves out of trouble the year before.

This was greeted with horror by the counterculture, and soon mimeographed newsletters and articles in the underground papers were calling the group part of the establishment, and calling for a general boycott of the group.

If you bought their records, attended their concerts, or had sex with any of the band members, you were a traitor.

Yanovsky and Boone had both been in a bad way mentally since the bust, but Yanovsky was far worse, and was making trouble for the other members in all sorts of ways.

The group decided to fire Yanovsky, and brought in Jerry Yester to replace him, giving him a severance package that ironically meant that he ended up seeing more money from the group's records than the rest of them, as their records were later bought up by a variety of shell companies that passed through the hands of Maurice Levy, among others, and so from the late sixties through the early nineties the group never got any royalties.

For a while this seemed to benefit everyone.

Yanofsky had money and his friendship with the group members was repaired.

He released a solo single arranged by Jack Nitschie which just missed the top 100.

The radio's playing but

That song was written by the Bonham and Gordon songwriting team, who were also writing hits for the Turtles at this time, and who were signed to Coppelman and Rubin's company.

The extent to which Janofsky's friendship with his ex-bandmates was repaired by his firing was shown by the fact that Jerry Yester, his replacement in the group, co-produced his one solo album, Alive and Well in Argentina, an odd mix of comedy tracks, psychedelia, and tributes to the country music he loved.

His instrumental version of Floyd Kramer's Last Date is fairly listenable.

Kramer's piano playing was a big influence on Janovsky's guitar, but his version of George Jones's From Valent to Blue makes it very clear that Zalyanovsky was no George Jones.

Yanofsky then quit music and went into the restaurant business.

The Lovin' Spoonful, meanwhile, made one further album, but the damage had been done.

Everything Playing is actually a solid album, though not as good as the album before, and it produced three top 40 hits.

But the highest charting was 6 o'clock, which only made number 18, and the album itself made a pitiful 118 on the charts.

The song on the album that in retrospect had had the most impact was the rather lovely younger generation, which Sebastian later sang at Woodstock.

Why must every generation think that folks are square?

And no matter where their heads are, they know moms ain't there

'cause I swore when I was small that I'd remember when

I knew what's wrong with them that I was smaller than

But at Woodstock he performed that alone, because by then he'd quit the group.

Boone, Butler, and Yester decided to continue, with Butler singing lead, and recorded a single, Never Going Back, produced by Yester's old bandmate from the modern folk quartet, Chip Douglas, who had since become a successful producer for the Monkeys and the Turtles, and written by Jon Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who had written Daydream Believer for the Monkeys.

But the record only made number 78 on the charts.

So I'm never going back,

never going back,

never going back

all to Nashville anymore.

Oklahoma City, yes, I

know that she won't treat me through.

That was followed by an album by The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler, Revelation Revolution 69,

a solo album by Butler in All But Name.

Boone claims not to have played on it, and Butler is the only one featured on the cover, which shows a naked butler being chased by a naked woman with a lion in front of them covering the naughty bits.

The biggest hit other than Never Going Back from the album was Me About You, a Bonham and Gordon song which only made number 91.

John Sebastian went on to have a moderately successful solo career.

As well as his appearance at Woodstock, he released several solo albums, guested on harmonica on records by the Doors, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, and others, and had a solo number one hit in 1976 with Welcome Back, the theme song from the TV show Welcome Back Cotter.

Welcome back.

Your dreams were your ticket out.

Welcome back

to that same old place that you laughed about.

Well the names have all changed since you hung around,

but those dreams have remained and they've turned around.

You'd have thought they'd lead you.

Sebastian continues to perform, though he's had throat problems for several decades that mean he can't sing many of the songs he's best known for.

The original members of the Lovin' Spoonful reunited for two performances, an appearance in Paul Simon's film One Trick Pony in 1980, and a rather disastrous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

Zalyanovsky died of a heart attack in 2002.

The remaining band members remained friendly, and Boone, Butler and Yesta reunited as the Loving Spoonful in 1991, initially with Yester's brother Jim, who had played in the association, latterly with other members.

One of those other members in the 1990s was Yester's daughter Lena, who became Boone's fourth wife, and is, as far as I can discover, still married to him.

Yester, Boone, and Butler continued touring together as the Love and Spoonful until 2017, when Jerry Yester was arrested on 30 counts of child pornography possession and was immediately sacked from the group.

The other two carried on, and the three surviving original members reunited on stage for a performance at one of the Wild Honey Orchestra's benefit concerts in LA in 2020, though that was just a one-off performance, not a full-blown reunion.

It was also the last Love and Spoonful performance performance to date, as that was in February 2020.

But Steve Boone has performed with John Sebastian's most recent project, John Sebastian's Jug Band Village, a tribute to the Greenwich Village folk scene the group originally formed in, and the two played together most recently in December 2021.

The three surviving original members of the group all seem to be content with their legacy, doing work they enjoy, and basically friendly, which is more than can be said for most of their contemporaries, and which is perhaps appropriate for a band whose main songwriter had been inspired more than anything else to make music with a positive attitude.

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