My Career in Five Songs
FEBRUARY 9, 1964, launched an untold number of rock bands in the U.S., one of them being the Lovin’ Spoonful. That night, folk guitarist John Sebastian dropped by the Greenwich Village apartment of his friend Cass Elliot to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Elliot, who would soon rise to fame in the Mamas & the Papas, was something of a North Star for local musicians, and she introduced Sebastian to another young guitarist, Zal Yanovsky.
“Cass liked pairing people up. It was just one of the talents that she had,” Sebastian recalls. “That night, I played guitar with Zally, and we clicked immediately. Cass took Zally aside and said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘John’s a really great fingerpicker.’ She asked me what I thought of Zally, and I said, ‘Man, he’s such an unusual player. He’s smearing Elmore James and Floyd Kramer and the Buckaroos all into the same box.’ It was obvious that we should do something together.”
A year after their first meeting, Sebastian and Yanovsky, along with bassist Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler, were on the charts with the Lovin’ Spoonful’s
