The Lovin' Spoonful's drug bust

The front page of an underground newspaper, implicating Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone as informants (Berkeley Barb, February 17, 1967)

In May 1966, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone of the American folk-rock band the Lovin' Spoonful were arrested in San Francisco, California, for possessing one ounce (28 g) of marijuana. The Spoonful were at the height of their success, and Yanovsky, a Canadian, worried that a conviction would lead to his deportation and a breakup of the band. To avoid this eventuality, he and Boone cooperated with law enforcement, revealing their drug source to an undercover agent at a party a week after their initial arrest.

The Lovin' Spoonful were the first pop music act of the 1960s to be busted for possessing illegal drugs. Boone and Yanovsky's drug source, Bill Loughborough, was arrested in September 1966. He initiated a campaign to boycott the band, the effectiveness of which is disputed by later commentators. By early 1967, Yanovsky and Boone's cooperation was reported by the West Coast's burgeoning underground rock press, souring the Spoonful's reputation within the counterculture and generating tensions within the band. Yanovsky's bandmates fired him in May 1967, and the band subsequently saw diminished commercial success. In January 1968, Loughborough was sentenced to three months in county jail followed by three years of probation. The Spoonful dissolved that June.

Background

California and marijuana

Main article: Cannabis in California

In 1913, California became the first U.S. state to prohibit marijuana. Hemp, a class of the drug, was used in the 19th century for medicinal purposes, but in the early 20th century, marijuana's image became increasingly linked with crime and a negative view of Mexican immigrants. In the 1950s, as recreational use of the drug became more common, California's state government raised the minimum prison term for possessing it to a minimum of 1–10 years. Sale of the drug was punished more harshly, with a minimum prison term of 5–15 years, including a mandatory three years before parole eligibility.

Arrests over marijuana in California rose from 140 per year in 1935 to 5,155 in 1960. The 1960s counterculture accelerated the drug's use among California's youth; arrests peaked in 1974 at 103,097, most of them felonies.

The Lovin' Spoonful

The Lovin' Spoonful in a 1965 promotional photograph; clockwise from top left: Steve Boone, Joe Butler, Zal Yanovsky and John Sebastian

In 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the most successful pop music groups in the U.S. The band issued their debut single, "Do You Believe in Magic", in July 1965, and it quickly propelled them to nationwide fame. Between October 1965 and June 1966, the band's first four singles reached the Top Ten of Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart, two of which reached number two. In March 1966, the band recorded what became their biggest hit, "Summer in the City", which topped the U.S. charts in August.

The Lovin' Spoonful formed in late 1964 in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood. Three of the group's members – John Sebastian, Steve Boone and Joe Butler – were from the New York area, but the fourth – Zal Yanovsky – was originally from Toronto, Canada. The band were among the earliest popularizers folk rock, a genre which blended folk and rock music. Folk rock emerged from the American folk music revival, which centered on Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. By 1966, the American pop-music scene shifted towards cities on the U.S.'s West Coast, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Other early folk-rock acts, like the Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas, located themselves on the West Coast, but the Lovin' Spoonful remained based in New York City.

The Spoonful's image and sound was influential in the emerging San Francisco scene, particularly in the city's Haight-Ashbury district, a center of the 1960s counterculture. The band visited the city several times in the second half of 1965; they played for two weeks in July and August 1965 at Mother's Nightclub, which then advertised itself as the "world's first psychedelic nightclub", and they appeared for a week in October at the hungry i, one of the most prominent clubs in America's folk-music scene. On October 24, they headlined a dance party at the Longshoreman's Union Hall in the city's Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood. Organized by the concert-production collective Family Dog Productions, the event combined rock music with light shows and psychedelic drugs, and it was among the earliest events of its kind in San Francisco; Erik Jacobsen, the Spoonful's producer, reflected, "That whole idea of going and listening to music and getting high started there".

Bust and cooperation

On May 20, 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful arrived in San Francisco for another tour of the West Coast. That day, Boone and Yanovsky attended a party in the city's Pacific Heights neighborhood at the home of Bill Loughborough. Loughborough managed the Committee, a San Francisco-based improv comedy group, and he met Boone and Yanovsky through a mutual acquaintance, Larry Hankin. Loughborough sold the pair a lid – contemporary West Coast slang for roughly one ounce (28 g) of marijuana. Boone and Yanovsky left the party in their rental car and were pulled over by the police, who searched the vehicle and discovered one ounce of the drug.

Yanovsky and Boone were bailed out the morning after the bust and performed that night's scheduled show at UC Berkeley (Berkeley Barb ad pictured).

Boone and Yanovsky were arrested and spent the night in jail. Rich Chiaro, the band's road manager, bailed them out the following morning. Bob Cavallo, the band's manager, and Charles Koppelman, who had signed them to his entertainment company, flew to San Francisco to begin managing the situation. Sebastian and Butler were not immediately informed on the details of the bust; Sebastian was in Los Angeles at the time, and he later recalled only being told it had happened several days later. The band performed as scheduled on the evening of May 21 at the University of California, Berkeley's Greek Theatre, playing for an hour in-front of 5,500 concertgoers.

At a meeting with San Francisco police and the District Attorney, Yanovsky was threatened with deportation to Canada. Yanovsky feared that, if he was deported, he would never be allowed to reenter the U.S. Melvin Belli, an attorney whom Cavallo and Koppelman hired, expressed to Yanovsky and Boone that they were unlikely to win on the merits of their case and that their only way to avoid charges was to cooperate with authorities. The two initially balked at the idea, but they relented to avoid Yanovsky being deported, something they expected would lead to a breakup of the band.

Yanovsky and Boone cooperated with authorities to name their drug source, directing an undercover operative at a local party on May 25. In exchange, all charges were dropped, their arrest records were expunged, the two did not need to appear in court and there was no publicity related to their arrest.

Trial and sentencing

Police initially arrested Loughborough's girlfriend, Sandy Smith, but she was released without being charged. His arrest followed in September 1966, and preliminary hearings for his case began in early December. Around that time, knowledge of Yanovsky and Boone's involvement as informants became more widespread on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco. In an attempt to quash the story, the band's management offered to pay for Loughborough's defense attorney or to pay for his silence regarding the matter, options which he refused.

Loughborough was convicted on June 5, 1967, on two counts of the sale of marijuana. In January 1968, the Superior Court Judge Joseph Karesh sentenced him to three months in county jail followed by three years of probation. Loughborough's motion for a new trial included affidavits signed by Boone, Yanovsky, Cavallo, Hankin and Smith, who alleged that the prosecution's chief witness, a San Francisco police officer, perjured himself on the witness stand, but the judge denied the motion. Loughborough served his time in jail, and he reflected: "The sentence was much less than I expected ... I got off lightly if you consider the implications".

Counterculture reaction

Boycott and picketing attempts

By early 1967, the underground press circulated news of the bust and generally criticized Yanovsky and Boone for acting as informants. Excerpts of the court transcript were photocopied and hung in public places across San Francisco. Chester Anderson, a counter-cultural activist from Haight-Ashbury, denounced the Spoonful in a broadside issued through the Communications Company (ComCo), a publishing group he founded. He distributed his leaflet to numerous underground newspapers, including the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press and the East Village Other. Boone remembered the Berkeley Barb being the first to cover the bust; the newspaper placed the story on its front page in February 1967.

Loughborough led efforts to boycott the Lovin' Spoonful. In July 1967, he took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Free Press which related the story before urging readers to destroy their Spoonful records, skip their concerts and avoid having sex with members of the band. The musician Cyril Jordan recalled hearing that Bill Graham, a prominent concert promoter in the San Francisco area, was asked to blacklist the Spoonful. Some authors suggest the bust and its fallout was the reason for the band's absence from the Monterey International Pop Festival, a music festival held in June 1967 on California's Central Coast. The music festival signalled a major geographical shift in America's pop music scene, and the author Jon Savage suggests the band's treatment by the counterculture stemmed from the broader inter-city rivalries between the West and East Coast amid the pop scene's transition.

Attending [the Lovin' Spoonful's concert tonight], buying the records, or in any way passing the word around about the Spoonful's commercial activities, is supporting THE MAN. And making it possible for the same fucking thing to happen again, everywhere. ... The money taken in from this concert ... is going into the pockets of generals on Death's staff.

– Jim Brodey, Los Angeles Free Press, July 1967

In his autobiography, Boone recalled the Spoonful's West Coast shows being picketed by members of the counterculture, who he says carried signs accusing the band of being "finks" and traitors to the movement. In the same issue of the Free Press as Loughborough's ad, Jim Brodey, a New York-based counterculture writer, encouraged readers to picket the Spoonful's July 28 concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and he called for the opening act, Simon & Garfunkel, to pull out of the show. The concert was nearly sold out and no protest materialized.

Defenders

The biggest underground cancer in the rock scene this past year has been the Lovin' Spoonful situation. ... "Shove that hot lead up my ass and I'll name everybody," Lenny Bruce once said. That's reality. ... If what Zal and Steve did is a sin, then it is our sin, too. They are victims, just as the man who was fingered is a victim. Just as we are all victims. Do we REALLY want to be selling postcards of the hanging?

– Ralph J. Gleason, Rolling Stone, November 1967

Among the Spoonful's defenders were the California-based music critics Ralph J. Gleason, Bill Kerby and Pete Johnson. Kerby, who wrote for the Free Press, defended the band in the newspaper's August 4 issue, arguing that readers should instead save their vitriol for the "Establishment". In the following week's issue, the newspaper's letters section featured five letters, all of which disparaged the boycott and picketing efforts. Among the letter writers was Johnson, a critic for the The Los Angeles Times, who wrote in another piece that week that those angry at the Spoonful had "[violated] the integrity of their ethic" by engaging in "McCarthy-like tactics", rather than in the "philosophy of love, flowers and freedom 'to do your thing.'"

Gleason, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based rock magazine Rolling Stone, wrote a piece regarding the bust in the magazine's second issue, dated November 1967. In his piece, he argued that the reaction against the Spoonful was worse than Yanovsky and Boone's decision to cooperate. He concluded that the band's treatment was "the biggest underground cancer in the rock scene", and he encouraged readers to continue buying the band's records. Sebastian later said he thought Gleason's piece "set things right", but that it was published too late to have been influential.

Aftermath

Intra-band tensions, Yanovsky fired

The public revelations regarding Boone and Yanovsky's cooperation generated tensions within the band. Sebastian and Butler were generally ignorant of the bust's details until the underground press began reporting on it. The pair were enthusiastic about the emerging hippie scene, and Boone writes "it had to be hard to know they were being associated in the minds of the movement with finks".

Boone recalled the bust distracting him from his songwriting, leading to disillusionment from Sebastian, who was left to write nearly all of the band's music. In late 1966, while they continued to feel stress over their situation, Boone and Yanovsky collaborated for the first time on a composition. The pair hoped their resultant song, "The Dance of Pain and Pleasure", could serve as catharsis, but it was poorly received by their bandmates and Jacobsen, and it was never recorded or developed further.

Sebastian remembered that the counterculture's reaction to the bust "shattered" Yanovsky's feelings regarding "the band, [the music, the business], and the generation of love". In the months that followed, Yanovsky began drinking more heavily, and his behavior both on- and off-stage became increasingly erratic. He often disagreed with the band's creative direction, which was being increasingly dictated by Sebastian. Boone recalled that the relationship between the Sebastian and Yanovsky became stilted due to the latter's tendency towards rebelling rather than communicating his concerns directly. Yanovsky remembered tensions culminating after a flight back to New York, when he expressed to Sebastian that "his songwriting [had] really gone down the toilet", and that it was time for him to return to the "'risk element'" which characterized his earlier writing.

In May 1967, Sebastian convened a band meeting in which he issued an ultimatum that he would leave the group unless Yanovsky was fired. In a subsequent group meeting at Sebastian's apartment, the band informed Yanovsky that he had been fired, though he also agreed to continue performing the rest of the band's scheduled dates. He last performed with the Spoonful on June 24, 1967, at the Forest Hills Music Festival in New York.

Diminished commercial success

The Lovin' Spoonful saw diminished commercial success in 1967, and they disbanded in June 1968. After Yanovsky's departure, only one of the band's singles entered the American top 40. Richard Goldstein, a music critic who was among band's earliest champions, wrote at the time of Yanovsky's departure that it marked the end of the group "as we knew them". He added that though the band still possessed their "greatest asset" in Sebastian's songwriting, it was Yanovsky who "brought the Spoonful home in living color". The singer Judy Henske – who was married to Yanovsky's replacement in the band, Jerry Yester – offered a similar assessment, saying in retrospect that, "The Lovin' Spoonful without Zalman was nothing".

Later authors sometimes identify the bust as the incident which shortened the Spoonful's career. Boone and the author Hank Bordowitz later said that the counterculture's boycott hurt the band's commercial performance; Bordowitz suggests that the band's loss of "counterculture credibility" effectively ended their commercial viability, an opinion shared by Cyril Jordan, who said the incident "was the first time you saw how much power the underground had", and it "was the end of [the Lovin' Spoonful]". The author Richie Unterberger counters that the effects of the boycott have likely been overestimated, since "most of the people who bought Spoonful records were average teenage Americans, not hippies". He instead connects the band's commercial struggles to the expanding popularity of the genre psychedelia, to which folk-rock acts struggled to transition, further contending that their creative struggles likely stemmed from the bust and the resulting "spiralling personal difficulties".

Legacy

Numerous jazz musicians were arrested in the 1950s for possessing illegal drugs – typically marijuana or heroin – but Boone and Yanovsky's arrests marked the first time 1960s pop musicians were busted for doing so. Three weeks later, on June 10, 1966, Donovan became the first British pop star to be arrested for possessing marijuana. In the years that followed, numerous pop musicians were arrested for possessing marijuana or LSD, more often in Britain than in the United States. Boone suggests in retrospect that, owing to the novelty of the situation, the Spoonful's management had no plan in place on how to handle a drug bust.

In the U.S., the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield were among the bands whose members were sometimes arrested for possessing drugs. Multiple arrests forced Bruce Palmer, a Canadian member of Buffalo Springfield, to voluntarily depart to Canada in January 1967. The Grateful Dead struck a defiant tone in the press after two of their members were arrested in Haight-Ashbury in October 1967. The academic Nicholas G. Meriwether writes the reaction was instrumental in establishing the Dead's strong reputation within the counterculture, particularly after the Spoonful's situation had "served as a stark example of the pressure and peril of cooperating with the police".

See also

• The Rolling Stones' Redlands bust (1967)
• Canadian drug charges and trial of Jimi Hendrix (1969)

Sources

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Further reading

• Anon. (March 15 – April 1, 1967). "Lovin' Spoonful Cops Out". East Village Other. p. 16. JSTOR 28035811 – via JSTOR.
• Freemond, Jules (March 1–7, 1968). "Pop, Rock & Jelly". East Village Other. pp. 15, 18–19. JSTOR 28035838 – via JSTOR.
• Gorman, Stephen B. (July 28 – August 3, 1967). "The Potbust and the Law". Los Angeles Free Press. p. 3. JSTOR 28039674 – via JSTOR.
• Hayward, Claude; Anderson, Chester (n.d.). "To The Erstwhile Underground Press, Greeting" (Press release). San Francisco: Communications Company. Retrieved August 1, 2024.
• Katzman, Allan (December 1–15, 1967). "PP's Sermonette: The Things that Puzzle Us: In Everyday Experiences that We All Have". East Village Other. pp. 12–13. JSTOR 28035828 – via JSTOR.
• Malanowski, Jamie (October 1986). "Jailhouse Rock". MOJO. pp. 63–67, 89 – via Google Books.
• Sculatti, Gene; Seay, Davin (1985). San Francisco Nights: The Psychedelic Music Trip, 1965–1968. New York City: St. Martin's Press. p. 157. ISBN 978-0-312-69903-1.
• Stallard, Jeffrey (November 10, 1967). "Two marijuana cases hinge on Constitution". Los Angeles Free Press. p. 2. JSTOR 28039688 – via JSTOR.
• Ward, Charles Dexter (September 1–7, 1967). "The Spoonful Speaks". Berkeley Barb. p. 4. JSTOR 28033138 – via JSTOR.
• Yogi (March 17, 1967). "Yipes, Yogi! You, Too, Be Gentle". Berkeley Barb. p. 11. JSTOR 28033118 – via JSTOR.