The Lovin' Spoonful's drug bust

In 1913,^[2] California became the first US state to prohibit marijuana.^[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.^[3]

In the 1950s, as recreational use of marijuana became more common, California's state government raised the minimum prison term for possessing it to a minimum of 1–10 years. The new laws punished selling the drug more harshly with a minimum prison term of 5–15 years, including a mandatory three years before parole eligibility.^[2] Arrests over the drug in California rose from 140 per year in 1935 to 5,155 in 1960.^[2] The 1960s counterculture accelerated its use among California's youth;^[2][4] arrests peaked in 1974 at 103,097, most of them felonies.^[2]

In 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the most successful pop music groups in the US.^{[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.^[10] The band were among the earliest popularizers of folk rock – a popular genre blending folk and rock music^[11][12] which grew from the American folk music revival in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.^[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.^[15] Amid the transition, the Spoonful remained based in New York City,^[15] but their image and sound proved influential in the emerging San Francisco scene,^[16][17] particularly in the city's Haight-Ashbury district, a center of the 1960s counterculture.^[17]

The Spoonful visited San Francisco several times in the second half of 1965;^[18] they played for two weeks in July and August 1965 at Mother's Nightclub,^[19][20] which then advertised itself as the "world's first psychedelic nightclub",^[21] and they appeared for a week in October at the hungry i,^[22][23] one of the most prominent clubs in America's folk-music scene.^{[24][nb 2]} On October 24,^[27] they headlined a dance party at the Longshoreman's Union Hall in the city's Fisherman's Wharf neighborhood.^[20][28] Organized by the concert-production collective Family Dog Productions, the event combined rock music with light shows and psychedelic drugs,^[29] and it was among the earliest events of its kind in San Francisco;^[30][16] Erik Jacobsen, the Spoonful's producer, reflected, "That whole idea of going and listening to music and getting high started 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 US.^[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.^{[39][nb 5]} Loughborough sold the pair a "lid" – contemporary West Coast slang for roughly one ounce (28 g) of marijuana.^[47] 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 of the drug.^{[47][48][49][nb 6]}

Boone and Yanovsky were arrested and spent the night in jail. Rich Chiaro, the band's road manager, bailed them out the following morning.^[51] The band's manager Bob Cavallo and Charles Koppelman, who had signed them to his entertainment company, flew to San Francisco to begin managing the situation.^[52] The band's two other members – John Sebastian and Joe Butler – were not immediately informed on the details of the bust;^[53] Sebastian was in Los Angeles at the time, and he later recalled only being told it had happened several days later.^[54] The band performed as scheduled on the evening of May 21 at UC Berkeley's Greek Theatre,^[55] playing for an hour in-front of 5,500 concertgoers.^{[56][nb 7]}

At a meeting with San Francisco police and the District Attorney, Yanovsky was threatened with deportation to Canada.^[58] Yanovsky feared that, if he was deported, he would never be allowed to reenter the US.^[49] Melvin Belli, an attorney 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.^[59] 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.^[60]

Yanovsky and Boone cooperated with authorities to name their drug source,^[16] directing an undercover operative at a local party on May 25.^[61][62] 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.^[63]

Police initially arrested Loughborough's girlfriend,^[40] Sandy Smith, but she was released without being charged.^[39][64] Loughborough's arrest followed in September 1966,^[61] and preliminary hearings for his case began in early December.^[14][61] Around that time, knowledge of Yanovsky and Boone's involvement as informants became more widespread on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco.^[14] In an attempt to quash the story, the band's management offered to pay for Loughborough's defense attorney^[16] or to pay for his silence regarding the matter, options which he refused.^{[65][nb 8]}

Loughborough was convicted on June 5, 1967, on two counts of the sale of marijuana.^[41] In January 1968,^[42] the Superior Court Judge Joseph Karesh sentenced him to three months in county jail followed by three years of probation.^[43] Loughborough's motion for a new trial included affidavits signed by Boone, Yanovsky, Cavallo, Hankin and Smith, all of whom alleged that the prosecution's chief witness, a San Francisco police officer, perjured himself on the witness stand.^[43] The judge denied the motion,^[43] and Loughborough served his time in jail.^[16] Loughborough reflected at the time: "The sentence was much less than I expected ... I got off lightly if you consider the implications".^[43]

By early 1967, the underground press circulated news of the bust and generally criticized Yanovsky and Boone for acting as informants.^[16][67] Excerpts of the court transcript were photocopied and hung in public places across San Francisco.^[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.^[71] He distributed his leaflet to numerous underground newspapers, including the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press and the East Village Other.^[65] Boone remembered the Berkeley Barb being the first to cover the bust;^[72] the newspaper placed the story on its front page in February 1967.^[61] California radio stations, including those operated by the Pacifica Network, covered the story extensively.^{[73][nb 9]}

Loughborough led efforts to boycott the Lovin' Spoonful.^[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.^[77] Some authors suggest the bust and its fallout was the reason for the band's absence from the Monterey International Pop Festival,^[15][78][79] a music festival held in June 1967 on California's Central Coast.^[15] The festival signalled a major geographical shift in America's pop music scene,^[15] 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.^[14]

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.^[80] In the same issue of the Free Press as Loughborough's ad, Jim Brodey, a New York-based counterculture writer,^[81] 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.^[78] The concert was nearly sold out and no protest materialized.^[82][83] Reviewing the show for Cash Box magazine, an anonymous review wrote that the Spoonful "never quite clicked with the crowd", whose "response was barely better than perfunctory", but the reviewer determined the concert was probably not representative of the Spoonful and was simply an "off-night" for the band.^{[84][nb 10]}

Among the Spoonful's defenders were the California-based music critics Ralph J. Gleason, Bill Kerby and Pete Johnson.^[73][83][87] Kerby, who wrote for the Free Press, defended the band in the newspaper's August 4 issue, arguing that readers should instead save their vitriol for the "Establishment".^[73] In the following week's issue, the newspaper's letters section featured five letters, all of which disparaged the boycott and picketing efforts.^[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.'"^[83]

Gleason, a co-founder of the San Francisco-based rock magazine Rolling Stone, wrote a piece regarding the bust in the magazine's second issue, dated November 1967.^[87][86] In his piece, he argued that the reaction against the Spoonful was worse than Yanovsky and Boone's decision to cooperate.^[88] He concluded that the band's treatment was "the biggest underground cancer in the rock scene",^[86][89] and he encouraged readers to continue buying the band's records.^[90] Sebastian later said he thought Gleason's piece "set things right", but that it was published too late to have been influential.^{[91][nb 11]}

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.^[67] In late 1966, while they continued to stress over their situation, Boone and Yanovsky collaborated for the first time on a composition.^[92] 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 Erik Jacobsen, and it was never recorded or developed further.^{[93][nb 12]}

The public revelations regarding Boone and Yanovsky's cooperation generated tensions within the band.^[95] 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 writes, "it had to be hard to know they were being associated in the minds of the movement with finks".^[95] Some in the hippie movement ceased to be friends with the band.^[96] Cass Elliot, a long-time friend of the band and the one who introduced Sebastian and Yanovsky to one another,^[97] recalled attendees at the Monterey Pop festival urging her to stop talking with Yanovsky.^[86] She dismissed the suggestion as "ridiculous", adding that he remained "one of [her] best friends".^[86] Jacobsen suggested the band losing other friendships "hurt them psychologically".^[96]

Sebastian remembered that the counterculture's reaction to the bust "shattered" Yanovsky's feelings regarding "the band, [the music, the business], and the generation of love".^[98] In the months that followed, Yanovsky began drinking more heavily, and his behavior both on- and off-stage became increasingly erratic.^[99][100] Often disagreeing with the band's creative direction, which was being increasingly dictated by Sebastian,^[16][101] Yanovsky began regularly threatening to quit the band.^[91] Boone recalled that the relationship between Sebastian and Yanovsky became stilted due to the latter's tendency towards rebelling rather than communicating his concerns directly.^{[102][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.^[105]

In May 1967, Sebastian convened a band meeting in which he issued an ultimatum that he would leave the group unless Yanovsky was fired.^[100] 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.^[106] He last performed with the Spoonful on June 24, 1967, at the Forest Hills Music Festival in New York.^{[107][108][nb 14]}

The Lovin' Spoonful saw diminished commercial success in 1967,^[16] and they disbanded in June 1968.^[110] After Yanovsky's departure, only one of the band's singles entered the American top 40.^[76] Richard Goldstein, a music critic who was among band's earliest champions,^[111] wrote at the time of Yanovsky's departure that it marked the end of the group "as we knew them".^[112] 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".^[112] 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".^[113]

Later authors sometimes identify the bust as the incident which shortened the Spoonful's career.^[114] Boone and the author Hank Bordowitz later said that the counterculture's boycott hurt the band's commercial performance;^[115][116] Bordowitz suggests that the band's loss of "counterculture credibility" effectively ended their commercial viability,^[116] an opinion shared by Cyril Jordan, who said the incident "was the first time you saw how much power the underground had", and it "was the end of [the Spoonful]".^[77]

The author Richie Unterberger contends 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".^[117] 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".^[16] In July 1967, Erik Jacobsen said to KRLA Beat, a Southern California music magazine, that the band's popularity had not been noticeably hurt. He added that though there were more hippies on the West Coast, the Spoonful's latest single, "Six O'Clock", had received more airplay there than on the East Coast.^{[96][nb 15]}

Numerous jazz musicians were arrested in the 1950s for possessing illegal drugs – typically marijuana or heroin^[119] – but Boone and Yanovsky's arrests marked the first time 1960s pop musicians were busted for doing so.^{[1][nb 16]} Three weeks later, on June 10, 1966,^[122] Donovan became the first British pop star to be arrested for possessing marijuana.^[123][124] In the years that followed, numerous pop musicians were arrested for possessing marijuana or LSD,^[125] more often in Britain than in the United States.^[124] Boone suggests in retrospect that, owing to the novelty of the situation, the Spoonful's management had no plan in place on how to handle a drug bust.^[121]

In the US, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield were among the bands whose members were sometimes arrested for possessing drugs.^[126] Multiple arrests forced Bruce Palmer, a Canadian member of Buffalo Springfield, to voluntarily depart to Canada in January 1967.^{[127][nb 17]} The Grateful Dead struck a defiant tone to the San Francisco press after two of their members were arrested in Haight-Ashbury in October 1967. 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".^[17]

• The Rolling Stones' Redlands bust (1967)
• Canadian drug charges and trial of Jimi Hendrix (1969)