They were the Pixar of their day, their first seven singles hit the "Billboard" Top Ten back when that meant something.
But Steve Boone believes, despite being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Lovin' Spoonful don't get any respect.
Musicians... The audience adores them, the businessmen deplore them, but without their tunes the engine grinds to a halt.
But the truth is, if a musician were not, he'd have a hard time getting a job at a 7/11, because he wouldn't be able to show up on time. The band breaks up and drummer Joe Butler ends up driving a cab, not decades later, but almost immediately.
It was a different era. Sure, there were records, but live bands ruled. We had to get out of the house to get oiled up, blow off steam and meet the opposite sex, and this happened at clubs with bands. Which is where Steve Boone started out, before the Beatles, playing bass with the Kingsmen. Oh, not the Portland band with the "Louie Louie" hit, just another Hamptons act that covered the R&B hits of the day. Boone would have you believe if it hadn't been for a car accident, he'd have had a career in the military. If he hadn't gone into NYC to retrieve his motorcycle, he'd have ended up an engineer, even though he never attended a day of college
Yup, that's a musician, a delusional dreamer. Yup, if they weren't on stage, they'd be a doctor. Right.
You've got to read this book because of the endless run of bad judgment employed by Mr. Boone. Sure, he made it, truly, but that only lasted a handful of years, not a whole hell of a lot longer than the run of PSY, and then he was broke and running dope and...
So he meets John Sebastian and Zal Yanofsky and they give it six months to make it with their manager Bob Cavallo, then they're gonna break up and do something different. Yup, the Lovin' Spoonful was a lark, in an endless string, Sebastian and Yanofsky were looking for traction, and if their new combination of jug band music and rock and roll didn't work, they'd come up with something else.
Yup, the same Bob Cavallo who only recently stepped down as majordomo of Disney's Hollywood Records. The names keep popping up. Like Charley Koppelman before he was Charles. Boone's got no idea where the money went, but he's convinced without Koppelman and his partner Don Rubin the band would have never made it. The duo got the band signed to seemingly the only label they knew, Kama Sutra, which was distributed by MGM, which left the act so many steps from the money they never got any. But Charles and Don had relationships. Their label could get them on the radio. And the band had an immediate hit with "Do You Believe In Magic."
And Boone is a treasure trove of what ifs. What if they'd followed up "Summer In The City" with another rocker, what if they'd broken just a couple of years later and made a definitive album statement, what if he'd taken Nat Weiss up on his offer to produce James Taylor...
Then what? He wouldn't have been busted multiple times, gotten married to four different women and would be in the pantheon with the Beatles?
There's even an unironic inclusion of a letter from Sebastian complaining that Boone and drummer Joe Butler were gonna go back out on the road in the nineties as the Spoonful without him and Yanofsky. Sure, it was a band, but without Sebastian there'd be no success.
Then again, John B. Sebastian was never as successful without them. But was this because his solo album was caught up in a war between MGM and Warner and was delayed a year, never mind ultimately released by both?
Yup, bands have a weird alchemy, kick a seemingly insignificant member out and you kill the spark. Once Yanofsky was history, so was the Spoonful's run. And once Erik Jacobsen was thrown over as the producer, the hits dried up. Proving once again success in music is all about relationships and accidents.
Today everybody's so savvy, believing by being knowledgeable they can will success. But it'd be better to burn Don Passman's book and ply the streets, conversing with every player you bump into. But back then players were plentiful and music ruled the world.
But one thing hasn't changed, despite recording being dominated by international corporations, music is a haven of hustlers, and if you've got none on your team, your band's a nonstarter.
So the band breaks up. And in addition to having no cash, his Ferrari impounded and disappearing after hanging with a bad element, the IRS putting a lien on his royalties, Boone goes to the islands and buys a sailboat.
Which he doesn't bother to have checked out. So it leaks. And eventually sinks when sailed to South America with his eventual co-owners, a pair of drug dealers.
And then he follows a bisexual singer to Baltimore where he takes over a recording studio unaware of its unpaid bills and gets evicted from his space and puts it on a barge which soon sinks, along with Lowell George's demos.
We've been inundated with fairy tales, we're made to believe things work out. But time and again Boone gets himself into situations with bad endings. Proving once again if you take risks, if you flaunt the law, your time is gonna come.
He gets hooked on heroin. Helps undercover cops a second time and ends up marrying a bandmate's three decades younger daughter. Huh?
And you wonder why rock stars do irrational things and lose all their money...it's in their DNA! You finished college and believe the world owes you success in a pair of years, where those who do break through have no roadmap, they're just lifers plucking the strings, getting high and laid and rarely thinking about tomorrow.
I wasn't gonna read this book. But Boone still means something in my mind, he was there at the epicenter, the creation of iconic songs that do get their due contrary to his belief, but I agree should be exalted a bit more. Furthermore, their hits are some of the few that I all like. Yup, come on, most bands, even your favorites, succeed with a few clunkers, but not the Spoonful. Even their minor tracks are classics. I love "Six O'Clock," and "Darling Be Home Song" is a stone cold smash, just shy of "Yesterday."
So I'm thumbing through, skipping the growing up part, going straight to the heart of the matter, and when Boone starts talking about turning down Phil Spector and Elektra in favor of shysters, I'm hooked. Because I was there, on the other end of the enterprise, with these songs coming out of the speaker.
They're working so much they don't know which end is up. Limit testers die. And only Joe Butler gets laid on a regular basis. Yup, you can be in a band but you've still got to have game.
And when it's over to watch Boone bumble through life is both horrifying and riveting. Because this is how it is for so many people. This isn't college graduates with careers with a few bumps in their lives, Boone's life is almost completely bumps.
And then I had to go back and read from the beginning, I couldn't put this book down until I finished it.
And Tommy James's book was better, but too often rock bios are sanitized, or so poorly written as to be unreadable. And I was marveling at how well this book was written until I realized Boone had a co-writer.
So...
If you don't know the Spoonful, don't bother. But if you do, do like me. Start with the band searching for a label. And damn if you won't be unable to put the damn thing down. Because this is the life we thought we wanted. But reading the book you realize you don't. And that there are no miracles. Everybody needs to eat. And when the royalties dry up it doesn't matter how successful you've been, you've either got to borrow money or bend the law or both, which is what Boone did.
People send me these books all the time and I skim them and toss them. But not "Hotter Than A Match Head, Life On The Run With The Lovin' Spoonful," because of those songs.
Do you believe in magic?
I certainly do.
But not as much as John Sebastian, Zal Yanofsky, Joe Butler and Steve Boone. They sacrificed everything to their vision with no safety net. They made it, however briefly. The tracks live on, but tracks don't make a life, the ride doesn't go on forever, at some point everybody's forced to leave the amusement park and enter the real world, and that can be awfully hard.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Then read this book first. If it doesn't scare you away from a life playing music, go for it. But please, STAY OUT OF JAIL!
http://www.steveboone.nethttp://www.amazon.com/Hotter-Than-Match-Head-Spoonful/dp/1770411933/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1408861368&sr=8-1--
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