The Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica. I played it every morning when I got up, and I think Erik did too. Spector’s records had a mysterious environment. Rather than trying to reproduce something real, he was creating imaginary atmospheres. We knew, though, that we were going to try to do something different. For us, Erik was a much better solution. Our allegiance was to him. Of course, Yanovsky, who had a wicked sense of humour, was always taking the mickey out of Erik. If Erik said something that Zally didn’t like, Zally went, “Boom-ba-boom, boom-ba-boom…” imitating the drums on ‘Be My Baby’ (laughs). But there were fringe benefits to Phil’s interest. A sudden visibility. The night after he came to see us, everybody from The Brill Building was in The Night Owl. Within a week, Kama Sutra Records was pursuing us.


SD: There was always a kind of goofy vibe on your TV appearances, whether you were in a ’20s speakeasy setting or dune buggies on the beach. How much input did the band have over these image-related decisions?


JS: I think that by the time people got that we were sort of a good time-y band, they put us in those settings. It worked, but we didn’t have any input. The one time we got involved was on The Ed Sullivan Show. They’d gotten the technology to make someone disappear and reappear on camera. They said, “We have this great idea. Zally will be playing along, and suddenly he’ll turn into a go-go girl.” It was just a lucky thing that I had the cutest Saint Bernard puppy with me. It was so young that I had to keep it with me. I said, “How about if Zally turned into this puppy instead? That’s more Lovin’ Spoonful.” And they went for it. When you watch that clip, my puppy does a beautiful take and looks right at the camera.


SD: Zally was always doing something subversive on camera. I’d imagine more than a few TV producers pulled their hair out over his on-screen antics, right?


JS: Sometimes if we got to one of these shows and they didn’t really know who we were, we would all change instruments as a joke. It was a secret wink to our fans. And that was very important at that moment. The “ins versus the outs”. When we started doing ‘You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice’ on TV shows I told Zally, “Don’t forget to sing on camera.” And he’d always forget because he was so involved in his guitar playing. His way of kind of rebuking me was to be caught mugging for the camera. Once the camera panned across and there were the three of us earnestly singing, and then Zally, who mouths visibly while pointing to his mouth, “I’m not singing” (laughs). Really, we were fish out of water. We were guys who grew up in an urban setting. We were from beatnik stock. So the idea that that music is all about 16- year-old girls and having them scream, I always felt it was pre-ordained by the Beatlemania thing. We didn’t feel like we fit that mold and looked for opportunities to show that.


SD: What was it like working with Woody 22


Allen on the soundtrack to What’s Up Tiger Lily?


JS: I knew Woody from seeing him perform at The Bitter End, where he was frequently an opening act. But on the movie, we had very little contact. He was not a hands-on guy. I also think he thought, “I don’t do the same things these guys do.” He was a guy with a clarinet. There were jokes in his movies about getting offered pot and being horrified. He was just that notch into the older generation that wasn’t embracing music, pot and free love.


SD: The following year you scored ‘You’re A Big Boy Now’ for Francis Ford Coppola, another music-loving director. How was that experience?


JS: I had a lot more contact with Francis, and it was wonderful. He would sit there and talk about the film. Then he’d run it again and talk about it some more. There were situations where he’d say, “OK, I got my good girl and I got my bad girl. But my bad girl, the actress is a little more appealing than the good girl. So I need assistance from you. Give her a theme and we can use it, not just when she’s on screen, but also when I show the guy walking by himself. And then the audience goes, ‘He’s thinking about the good girl.’” So Francis taught me a lot about theory of movie music. It was like school for me, really educational.


SD: Forty-five years on, when you think of Zally’s exit from the group because of the drug bust and threat of deportation, do you believe there might’ve been a different way to handle the situation?


JS: Absolutely. My God, within a month, Mick Jagger got busted for pot and it was a little hand-slapping, then back to business. None of these ideas on how to handle our situation came from the band. It was all from management and the record company. And these guys didn’t get the culture change. Even the dealer who we were trying to keep from getting busted fucked us up. He hired a lawyer who was trying to make pot legal in ’66 in San Francisco. So that defeated what was going to be a little thing where we paid somebody, Zally got a little hand slap, and back to business. It was so unfortunate. For God’s sake, Zalman wasn’t even a pot smoker. The ironies abound. I’mthe guy in the group who was smoking pot. Zally’s drug of choice was alcohol.


SD: Would the band have stayed together longer if that hadn’t happened?


JS: Well, there were other complications. Musicians were getting better and better. As drumming became more sophisticated, I think Joe Butler was losing confidence in his drumming. Not his singing, but his drumming. I don’t know how much further the group could’ve gone. It’s hard to say. The business was changing so rapidly. When we got into it, we were playing happily for 30 people and thinking, “This was a victory.” The whole scale of the business was just exploding.


SD: Steve Boone, Joe Butler and Jerry Yester are still touring as The Lovin’ Spoonful. You read so much about classic bands arguing over the rights to a name and a legacy. How have you handled it?


JS: I gave them my blessing. I can’t help thinking that they also made a number of mistakes in the way that they approached Zally in latter days. They would alternately call him to say, “Hey, let’s get the band back together,” and when that would fail, they would want to punish Zally for not participating. They started withholding royalties and things, and that was the only unpleasant part of the breakup. But with the Spoonful, you can’t pair us with other bands who had gruesome breakups with recriminations and hate. It just wasn’t that way. I didn’t want to continue with the band, because without Zally and Erik, the whole chemistry was not there. We were


“Once the camera panned across and there were the three of us earnestly singing, and then Zally, who mouths visibly while pointing to his mouth, ‘I’m not singing.’”


broken up by circumstance. After those circumstances set in, personalities sometimes turned ugly, but that was because we couldn’t get our minds around the fact that it was over.


SD: At Woodstock, it was you and an acoustic guitar facing that ocean of people. Was that completely overwhelming?


JS: While you’re at it, remember that I’m playing a borrowed guitar. And I didn’t even know I was going to play. I was there as an audience member. They pulled me up there to fill a little time while they cleaned water off the stage. Also, I’mslightly verklempt from what substances have been handed to me in the course of the three days (laughs). But that was another scene that I was just so glad to be part of. I never thought I gave my greatest performance. That just is sometimes the luck of the draw. It’s real good instruction for anyone playing music. You never know when your big moment is going to be, so just be damned ready for it (laughs).


SD: What’s a day in the life like for you now?


JS: I live in a Woodstock, where there are a lot of sessions happening. Odd calls keep coming in. Would you come and play autoharp or harmonica on this session? Sometimes it’s people that are just starting out. I remember one time it was this rather dishy Alaskan kid, and I ended up playing guitar on Jewel’s first two singles. In the winter, Happy Traum and I do instructional videos together…and I’ve also been writing with David Grisman. In the midst of it all, I’m endlessly walking my Australian Shepherd (laughs).


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