The Lovin' Spoonful's drug bust
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.
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.
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.
[3] Hemp, a type of the drug, had been used in the previous century for medicinal purposes, but marijuana's image in early 20th-century America became increasingly linked with crime and a negative view of Mexican immigrants.
[2] In 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the most successful pop music groups in the U.S.[5][6][nb 1] The band, who formed in New York City's Greenwich Village neighborhood in late 1964, mostly consisted of New Yorkers,[9] but their lead guitarist Zal Yanovsky was originally from Toronto, Canada.
[13] By 1966, America's pop-music scene shifted towards West Coast cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles,[14] and other early folk-rock acts, such as the Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas, located themselves there.
[16] In attendance at the Longshoreman's show were members of the Grateful Dead,[31] a jug band who were inspired by the Spoonful's performance to similarly "go electric" in their style.
[32][33][nb 3] In early 1966, the Spoonful toured college campuses across the U.S.[36] They arrived in San Francisco on May 20,[37] where they were scheduled to play the following evening at the University of California, Berkeley.
[38] The day they arrived, Yanovsky and Steve Boone, the band's bassist, attended a party in the city's Pacific Heights neighborhood at the home of Bill Loughborough.
[39][nb 4] Loughborough managed the Committee, a San Francisco-based improv comedy group, and he met Boone and Yanovsky through a mutual acquaintance, Larry Hankin.
[68][69] Chester Anderson, a counter-cultural activist from Haight-Ashbury,[70] denounced the Spoonful in a broadside issued through the Communications Company (ComCo),[17] a publishing group he founded.
[40] 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.
[74][75][76] The musician Cyril Jordan recalled hearing that Bill Graham, a prominent concert promoter in the San Francisco area, was asked to blacklist the Spoonful.
[78] 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.
[82] In the same issue of the Free Press as Loughborough's ad, Jim Brodey, a New York-based counterculture writer,[83] 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.
[74] Among the letter writers was Johnson, a critic for The Los Angeles Times,[74] 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.
[93] 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.
[99][nb 13] 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.
[76] Richard Goldstein, a music critic who was among band's earliest champions,[108] wrote at the time of Yanovsky's departure that it marked the end of the group "as we knew them".
[109] 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".
[77] 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".
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".
