Everybody Fight About That Spoonful Dept.

Printer's slick, design by Peter Max©

The Lovin' Spoonful broke up because a bunch of reasons, any one of which would have been enough to rain on the parade of pop's most undervalued group. Busted and threatened, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone made a deal with the Feds - never a good look - to set up their friends for a narc, and internal musical differences contributed to a chaotic free fall.

Rolling Stone's "John J. Rock" gets the knives out early

John Sebastian was getting tired of being the guy who wrote all the tunes and decided the time was right for a solo career, and the other guys started bellying up against each other in the bar. The 'sixties were drawing to a close without the anticipated dawning of the age of Aquarius - the center cannot hold, man, and everything put together falls apart.

And this is where it gets complicated - a final album, clumsily yclept Revelation:Revolution '69 and credited to *cough* "The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler", limped out late '68 to a universal fooey on this. But it needn't have been this way.

The intended album, 68, smartly credited to the streamlined Spoonful, would have been a different kettle of meat.

Kama Sutra was desperate to wring any revenue out of the band as quickly as possible. Hit machine Bonner & Gordon supplied four songs,  new member Jerry Yester (whose production skills had rescued the previous album Everything Playing from oblivion) co-wrote, arranged, and played, getting in John Stewart and Red Rhodes alongside original band members Zal Yanovsky, Steve Boone, and Joe Butler. The icing on the cake was to be Peter Max©'s cover, intended to appear in a number of color variants like a limited fine art edition. Only one was proofed up [above - Ed.]. A hopeful ad appeared in Billboard [left - Ed.] to give the biz a boner.

What could possibly go wrong?

Loose cannon Yanovsky got canned and/or quit, taking his songs with him for his nose-dive solo album Alive And Well In Argentina. Producer Chip Douglas may have replaced Boone's bass with his own, and the album was already a cake left out in the rain. To fill the hole left by Yanovsky, Butler answered the question "War? What is it good for?" before anyone asked, with the music-free sound collage War Games. Because 1968 was almost last year already, the album was renamed after the album opener, 'Til I Run With You, inspiring a dopey new cover. The possibly power-crazed Butler reclaimed the Lovin' Spoonful brand, renamed the album after one of his two contributions to the album (*cough* co-written with hack tunesmith Bob Finizio Jr.), excised every other musician's credit and photograph, "featured" himself on the front and back cover, and wrote the sleevenotes. Peter Max© got the thankless gig of doing the layout for Alive And Well as recompense.

Questions?

Anyhoo, here's Spoonful's original 68, which if not the lost classic we'd like is a whole lot better than its misbegotten replacement. It's clear the band needed Sebastian more than he needed them (spoiler: not at all). Some swell songs, bitchin' playing - it's a mirror of the fractured times.

This post sponsored by The Frances A. Yates Aluminum Cookware Co., Balbec, WIS.