Love: The Lovin' Spoonful

 

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The Lovin' Spoonful name has an "interesting" provenance - according to some sources. Not quite as the name might appear on the surface. That said, this appears open to interpretation, as yet a different source credits a Mississippi John Hurt song Coffee Blues in which the man is singing about a cup of coffee with just the right spoonsful of what makes it good. In the best tradition of good art, it's best lleft to you to decide which story you prefer to believe. The vocalist for the Lovin' Spoonful apparently intimated in most concerts that it was the first, drawing out the references to loving more than to the coffee he was drinking on stage.

Although the band had broken up by the time the original Woodstock festival rolled around, John Sebastian preformed solo. There are several different recollections as to just when he appeared, but none disputes the fact that he was unscheduled, having arrived as a spectator, but when the rain made an electric performance (probably by Santana) if-fy, he took the stage for an acoustic set.

Considering that - during their rather short mainstream career - they were contemporaries of the Beatles' hottest years, for them to have as many hits as they did is fairly impressive. Their contributions were recognized with a 2000 induction to the Rock Hall of Fame.

To jog your memory/introduce you, depending on your age:

Hot: Summer in the City

The Lovin' Spoonful: Summer in the City

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You can feel the 1960s heat rising off of The Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City." The band's first #1 single, the song started as a poem by John Sebastian's brother, Mark. All that remains from the original is the chorus (which sounds more like a typical Spoonful song than the rest of the song). John Sebastian toughened up the lyrics to reflect the sweltering tensions in American's urban areas. The mid-song sound effects further set the mood. "We hired an old sound man, obviously from the radio era," Sebastian says in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. "He had old acetates of traffic jams and car horns. We listened for hours to various traffic jams and car horns and selected the ones we wanted. We found a pneumatic hammer...to provide the payoff for that section and bring it all together."

Thanks to central air conditioning, and improvements in urban planning and social services, summers in the city often don't seem as menacing these days. Though, that hasn't been the case in this summer of 2012, with record heat around the world, power outages, fires, droughts and derechos (I never even heard that meteorological term before one descended upon us in the D.C. area last month). Forty-six years after "Summer in the City" was first recorded, the imagery of "people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head" seems quite contemporary.

Nine Lives: Nashville Cats

Lovin' Spoonful: Nashville Cats

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The Del McCoury Band: Nashville Cats (Lovin' Spoonful cover)

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I always heard a short lick of tongue-in-cheek in the original slinky, funky take on this mid-sixties tune from Lovin' Spoonful, though I don't think it was purposeful: it's a wry tune to begin with, but Darius wasn't wrong way back in 2008 when he described the song as an honest homage from lead songwriter John Sebastian to the band's country and bluegrass influences.

But in the hands of twangy honkytonk bluegrass icon Del McCoury, the word "cats" rings especially true, as a reflection of the compatriots he knows well from his long career in the Ole Opry and beyond, just over the border from his native North Carolina. And dig those bluegrass harmonies, from the man and his sons.