Good Time Music: The Legacy of The Lovin’ Spoonful

By Jason Barnard

By the mid-1960s, when British acts were colonising the American charts, one Greenwich Village four-piece fought back on their own terms. Sixty years on, a new seven-CD boxset confirms what the faithful always knew: The Lovin’ Spoonful were one of the great American bands.

It was February 1964, and in a New York apartment, history was being made twice simultaneously. On the television, The Beatles were introducing themselves to tens of millions of Americans via The Ed Sullivan Show. In the room, Cass Elliot was playing matchmaker between two young musicians whose chemistry, it turned out, would prove almost as combustible as that of Lennon and McCartney. John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky clicked instantly, and within eighteen months they would be charting consecutive US Top 10 singles at a rate that left even some of their British rivals blinking.

The group that eventually coalesced around Sebastian and Yanovsky was a genuinely unique proposition. Rooted in the Greenwich Village folk boom but electrified by rock and roll, jug band blues, country and Americana, The Lovin’ Spoonful occupied a space that nobody else had the range or the nerve to claim. Sebastian, born in New York in March 1944 into a household already saturated with music, had spent his formative years accompanying Fred Neil, Tim Hardin and Judy Collins around the Village clubs, playing harmonica in the Even Dozen Jug Band and absorbing the full spectrum of American music. His writing gift was prodigious: warm, melodic and emotionally lucid. Yanovsky, a Toronto-born Ukrainian-Canadian with a flamboyant stage presence and a dazzling guitar technique, had cut his teeth in the Halifax Three alongside a young Denny Doherty before the pair crossed paths with Sebastian via Elliot’s living room.

After a brief spell playing together in The Mugwumps alongside Elliot and Doherty in late 1964, Sebastian and Yanovsky went their own way. Recruiting bassist Steve Boone, born into a military family in North Carolina in September 1943, and drummer Joe Butler, a Long Islander who had been playing professionally since his early teens, the four rehearsed intensively before landing a residency at the Night Owl Café on MacDougal Street. They named themselves after a line in Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” and set about inventing what they would call “good time music”. The name was apt. The Lovin’ Spoonful dealt in joy.

After cutting four recordings for Elektra in early 1965, which were later issued on the 1966 compilation What’s Shakin’, they signed with Koppelman-Rubin, who placed them with the newly formed Kama Sutra Records. In June 1965, producer Erik Jacobsen, a former banjo player and neighbour of Sebastian’s, paid for studio time at Bell Sound in New York. The result was “Do You Believe In Magic”, a song Sebastian had conceived after watching a sixteen-year-old girl dancing to their set at the Night Owl in May 1965. Issued in July 1965, it peaked at Number 9 in the US Billboard Hot 100, and the machinery was in motion.

Their debut album, Do You Believe In Magic, followed in November 1965 and remains a remarkable document. A collision of Beatles-influenced pop and deep Americana, it captured the group’s range: Butler fronting a soulful reading of The Ronettes’ “You Baby”; Sebastian penning “Younger Girl”, a folk-pop gem that would become a hit for The Critters, and closing the record with the harmonica-driven “Night Owl Blues”.

The hits then came with remarkable velocity. “You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice”, a piece of flawless harmony pop begun by Steve Boone at the piano and finished between shows in San Francisco, peaked at Number 10 in November 1965 and reputedly influenced Brian Wilson. Written on a tour bus while Sebastian pined for his girlfriend Lorey Kaye, “Daydream” hit Number 2 in February 1966, kept off the summit only by The Righteous Brothers’ “(You’re My) Soul And Inspiration”. The album of the same name arrived in March 1966 and reached Number 10 on the Billboard listings. “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” made Number 2 in April 1966. Billboard’s end-of-year issue ranked the Spoonful the third best-performing singles act of 1966, a measure of just how dominant they were at their peak.

The commercial apex came with “Summer In The City”, issued in July 1966 and the group’s only US Number 1, where it stayed for three weeks. It remains a startling record: all grinding tension and metropolitan noise, with engineer Roy Halee miking the snare drum in the metal stairwell of the studio building to achieve the required industrial clatter. The lyrics grew from a poem by John’s teenage brother Mark, written looking out from the family’s apartment. It was a departure from the breezy sunshine pop the group had made their name with, and it proved their range. The attendant album, Hums Of The Lovin’ Spoonful, released in November 1966, was their most ambitious work, sweeping from the country pop of “Nashville Cats” to the bluesy stomp of “Voodoo In My Basement” and the achingly tender “Darlin’ Companion”, later covered by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash on Johnny Cash At San Quentin in 1969. In between, the group had also contributed the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s debut film What’s Up, Tiger Lily?. The result was a collection of smart, spirited instrumentals and vocal tracks that demonstrated how adventurous the group could be when the commercial pressure was briefly lifted.

However this upward trend was not to last. In May 1966, Boone and Yanovsky were arrested for marijuana possession in San Francisco. Yanovsky, threatened with deportation to Canada, co-operated with police. After the case went to court in December 1966, he was publicly denounced by the counterculture, gigs were boycotted and the press laid into the group. The damage was irreparable, not merely commercially but personally: the tension within the band became acute, and Yanovsky grew increasingly difficult to reach. The You’re A Big Boy Now soundtrack, recorded in October 1966 for Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of David Benedictus’ satirical novel, saw Sebastian write the songs without the full band, causing further friction. “Darling Be Home Soon”, its lead single, became their first not to crack the Top 10, peaking at Number 15 in early 1967.

Yanovsky played his last show with the group on 24th June 1967 at the Forest Hills Music Festival in Queens. He was replaced, just six days later, by Jerry Yester, who had played piano on “Do You Believe In Magic”. Yester, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1943 and a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels and the Modern Folk Quartet, was a solid musician, but the spark that had made the group alchemical was extinguished. The final Spoonful album proper, Everything Playing, issued in December 1967, scraped the Billboard 200 albums.

Sebastian departed after a promotional tour, memorably describing his time in the group as “two glorious years and a tedious one”. Joe Butler then assembled a reconfigured line-up for the group’s final album Revelation: Revolution ’69, issued as the Lovin’ Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler in January 1969. Panned on release, it has since acquired a degree of cult status, though it is widely regarded as a postscript to the real story.

Yanovsky, meanwhile, had gone to Buddah Records and recorded a solo album of inspired lunacy: Alive And Well In Argentina, produced with Yester and released in April 1968. Beginning with the Canadian national anthem played over animal noises and proceeding through gothic psych pop, Dadaist sound collage and mangled country covers, it was commercially limited and artistically peerless. In time, Yanovsky retreated from music entirely, opening his celebrated restaurant and bakery Chez Piggy with his wife in Kingston, Ontario.

The group’s legacy was consolidated gradually. In 2000, all four original members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, reuniting on stage for a final performance of “Do You Believe In Magic”. Yanovsky died of a heart attack in 2002, aged just 57. Sebastian was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008 and remains active as a solo performer.

Their influence runs through Buffalo Springfield, The Kinks, and even The Beatles, whose “Good Day Sunshine”, recorded in June 1966, could comfortably have sat on any Spoonful album. They were, as Lois Wilson explains in the box set booklet, a band of genuine alchemy: Sebastian’s melodic genius and Yanovsky’s guitar heroism underpinned by Boone and Butler’s jazz-inflected rhythm section. In their prime, from mid-1965 to the end of 1966, they were one of the finest singles band in the world. That relatively few people cite them in the same breath as their contemporaries says everything about the fickleness of cultural memory and nothing about the music. Play The Lovin’ Spoonful today and the magic is intact.

What A Day For A Daydream: The Complete Recordings is out now on Strawberry Records / Cherry Red.