THE LOVIN’ SPOONFUL BUSTED, MAY 1966

JOHN SEBASTIAN (Lovin’ Spoonful): “In the course of one evening, [Boone and Yanofsky] went from being members of the hottest group worth talking about, except maybe for The Beatles, to being threatened with that group’s demise. They’d been taken out of their car, the police sat them down, and in one hour ( angrily snaps fingers) they had to make a decision: would they co-operate with the police? You have to remember the framework of the period, people’s perception of the police was changing radically. In the Village before 1967 policemen were still people who looked after you. Frank Serpico [an incorruptible policeman immortalised on screen by Al Pacino] took friends of mine home and put ice on their balls so they would make it through a bad shot of heroin. But after 1967 this whole pig thing had started and you were dealing with a very different flavour of the police department. You know, in retrospect, I wish that it all hadn’t been kept from me… I would have said, ‘Take the bust. You know, let’s be pot smokers, not finks.’ There was a polarity beginning between people of our age and hair length and the police. Zally and Stephen had no idea how ugly it was to become. Look, we felt that we were ahead of our time. That’s why we didn’t embrace the hippy mentality; we had already been through that freedom thing at 15. So when we went out to California, and saw all of these people that were blissed out, I mean it was only more encouraging to us. The band could never have been what it should have been because of that event. It was a real tragedy. Essentially it prevented the Spoonful from going to California for crucial months and we couldn’t be part of some pretty wonderful music festivals that could have shown us to be highly

Spoonful frontman John Sebastian and Zal pal Larry Hankin reflect on the fall-out.