918 Lovin’ Spoonful “Summer in the City” 1966

“They followed with one hit after another until 1967, when Boone and Yanovsky were arrested in California for possession of marijuana. They angered a good number of their fans, many of whom were part of the hippie counterculture, by turning in their drug supplier to get out of doing jail time themselves. Many hippies called for a boycott of Lovin’ Spoonful’s records, and although it is impossible to say how much this affected their sales, the band did fall apart soon after. Yanovsky quit the band in 1967. ‘I should have left a year before then,’ he told the Ottawa Citizen years later, ‘but I was making pretty good money and so I sort of stuck it out. But the band was musically in a rut, and I think if you listen to the last album, you would agree. It was like a marriage, but instead of kids we stuck it out for the money’” (Michael Belfiore, Contemporary Musicians, 2002). 

Lovin’ Spoonful “Summer in the City”