The Lovin' Spoonful's drug bust



In May1966, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone of the American folk-rock band the Lovin' Spoonful were arrested in San Francisco, California, for possessing one ounce (28g) 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 popular music act of the 1960s to be busted for possessing illegal drugs. Boone and Yanovsky's drug source, Bill Loughborough, was arrested in September1966, and he initiated a campaign to boycott the band. By early1967, Yanovsky and Boone's cooperation was widely reported in 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 May1967, and the band subsequently saw diminished commercial success. In January1968, Loughborough was sentenced to three months in county jail followed by three years of probation, and the Spoonful dissolved that June.

California and marijuana
In 1913, California became the first U.S. state to prohibit marijuana. In the 19th century, hemp, a class of the drug, was typically used for medicinal purposes, but marijuana's image in the early 20th century was 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


In 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the most successful popular-music groups in the U.S. The band issued their debut single, "Do You Believe in Magic", in July1965, and it quickly propelled them to nationwide fame. Between October1965 and June1966, the band's first four singles reached the Top Ten of Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart, two of which reached number two. In March1966, 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 late1964 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 Lovin' Spoonful toured the West Coast several times in the second half of 1965. The band's earliest West Coast shows were at San Francisco's Mother's Nightclub, where they played for two weeks in July and August1965, and they appeared for a week in October at the hungry i nightclub, one of the most prominent clubs in America's folk-music scene. On October24, the band 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 marked one of the earliest events in the emerging San Francisco scene; Erik Jacobsen, the Lovin' Spoonful's producer, reflected, "That whole idea of going and listening to music and getting high started there".

Bust and cooperation
On May20, 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 SanFrancisco-based improv comedy group, and he met Boone and Yanovsky through a mutual acquaintance, Larry Hankin. Loughborough sold the pair 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 (28g) of marijuana.



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 LosAngeles 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 May21 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. The attorney Melvin Belli, 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 May25. 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.

Police initially arrested Loughborough's girlfriend, but she was released without being charged. His arrest followed in September1966, and preliminary hearings for his case began in earlyDecember. Around that time, knowledge of Yanovsky and Boone's involvement as informants became more widespread on the West Coast, particularly in SanFrancisco. 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 June5, 1967, on two counts of the sale of marijuana. In January1968, 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 and Hankin, 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.

Fallout
Boone and Yanovsky's arrests marked the first time members of a popular music act in the 1960s were busted for illegal drugs. Three weeks later, on June 10, 1966, Donovan became the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for possession of cannabis. Busts on the Rolling Stones, Buffalo Springfield, the Beatles and on Jimi Hendrix followed over the next three years. Boone suggests in retrospect that, owing to the novelty of the situation, the Lovin' Spoonful's management had no plan in place on how to handle the drug bust.

Counterculture reaction
By early1967, the underground press circulated news of the bust and generally criticized Yanovsky and Boone for acting as informants. Chester Anderson, a local journalist active in the counterculture, distributed leaflets regarding the situation to underground newspapers, including the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press and the East Village Other. The Berkeley Barb was the first to cover the bust, placing a story on its front page in February1967. Excerpts of the court transcript were photocopied and hung in public places across San Francisco.

Loughborough led efforts to boycott the band. In July1967, he took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Free Press which related the story, called for readers to destroy their Lovin' Spoonful records and avoid their concerts and urged female fans to not have sex with the band. In the same issue, Jim Brodey, a New York-based counterculture writer, encouraged a boycott.

The Lovin' Spoonful's shows on the West Coast were sometimes picketed by members of the counterculture. Protesters carried signs which accused the band of being "finks" and traitors to the movement, and they encouraged fans to boycott the band and burn their records. 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 June1967 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.

Among the Lovin' Spoonful's defenders was Ralph J. Gleason, a co-founder of the SanFrancisco-based rock magazine Rolling Stone. Gleason wrote a piece regarding the bust in the magazine's second issue, dated November1967, in which he argued that the reaction against the band 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.

Intra-band tensions
The public revelations regarding Boone and Yanovsky's cooperation generated tensions within the band. According to Boone, both 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 suggests that "it had to be hard to know they were being associated in the minds of the movement with finks".

In late1966, 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. 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 the months after the bust, 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 May1967, 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 Lovin' Spoonful on June 24, 1967, at the Forest Hills Music Festival in Queens, New York. In an interview four days later, Yanovsky agreed with the interviewer's assessment that the band had done little of note after their tour of England, held in April1966, a month before the bust.

The Lovin' Spoonful saw diminished commercial success in 1967, and they disbanded in June1968. After Yanovsky's departure, only one of the band's singles entered the American top 40. 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. 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". 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".