How the Lovin' Spoonful and the Blues Project Electrified New York City
Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
THE LOVIN' SPOONFUL were NYC's Beatles. Lillian Roxon, in her indispensable Rock Encyclopedia, called them "our own little moptops, born, bred and raised right here in the streets we walked each day, hanging around outside the coffee shops, playing in the basket houses." And making hit records: seven top 10s in a row, each one a miniature classic, each one a stylistic departure from the one that preceded it. They were in their own madcap funhouse. Even when they did the blues, they sounded at worst rueful, and most of all, they exuded cheeriness, the way guitarist Zal Yanovsky would bounce around the stage, how Sebastian cradled his autoharp.
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