This was a collaboration between John Sebastian, The Lovin Spoonful’s bassist Steve Boone, and the frontman’s brother (and non-group member) Mark Sebastian. John and Zal Yanovsky were part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City; Yanovsky was from a bohemian folk group called The Mugwumps (two other members, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty, later formed half of the Mamas & the Papas). Steve Boone and drummer Joe Butler were veterans of the Long Island bar scene.

Mark was 15 years old when he wrote a poem that John used as the basis for the song – John especially liked the part that went, “But at night there’s a different world.” “That song that came from an idea my brother Mike had”. John Sebastian recalled in June 2014:

He had this great chorus, and the release was so big. I had to create some kind of tension at the front end to make it even bigger. That’s where that jagged piano part comes from.

This was recorded over two days: At the first session, they put down the instruments: guitar, bass, autoharp, drums, organ, electric piano and percussion. The second session was for vocals and sound effects. Boone came up with the middle eight, which John thought sounded like the Gershwin composition “An American in Paris,” where the orchestra implies the sound of traffic and city noises. This gave him the idea of incorporating car horns and other city ambiance into the track. The band was rather particular about the traffic sounds. Instead of just using what was available on the sound effects records in the studio, they found an old-school radio engineer – a guy who used to create the soundscapes for shows, so if a guy was riding a horse, you’d hear the hooves hitting the ground and the wind whistling by. This guy, whom John Sebastian referred to as a “hilarious old Jewish sound man,” came in with a huge library of street sounds, which the band went through for hours. They wanted the scene to build, so it starts softly (the horn at the beginning comes from a Volkswagen Beetle), and grows to a gridlock nightmare. To close the scene, they used a pneumatic hammer pounding away at the pavement.

The band had its roots in the folk music scene based in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan during the early 1960s. John B. Sebastian, the son of classical harmonicist John Sebastian, grew up in the Village in contact with music and musicians, including folk musicians who were involved with the American folk music revival of the 1950s through the early 1960s. The Lovin’ Spoonful was one of the most successful pop/rock groups to have jug band and folk roots, and nearly half the songs on their first album were modernized versions of blues standards. Their popularity revived interest in the form, and many subsequent jug bands cite them as an inspiration.

A jug band is a band employing a jug player and a mix of conventional and homemade instruments. These homemade instruments are ordinary objects adapted to or modified for making sound, like the washtub bass, washboard, spoons, bones, stovepipe, and comb and tissue paper (kazoo). In the early days of jug band music, homemade guitars and mandolins were sometimes made from the necks of discarded manufactured guitars fastened to large gourds that were flattened on one side, with a sound-hole cut into the flat side, before drying. Banjos were sometimes made from a discarded guitar neck and a metal pie plate.

The Lovin’ Spoonful worked with producer Erik Jacobsen to release their first single on July 20, 1965, “Do You Believe in Magic”, written by Sebastian.

“Do You Believe in Magic” reached #9 on the Hot 100, and the band followed it up with a series of hit singles and albums throughout 1965 and 1966, all produced by Jacobsen. The Lovin’ Spoonful became known for such folk-flavored pop hits as “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice”, which reached #10, and “Daydream”, which went to #2.

Here they are on Hullabaloo, a musical variety series in 1965 -1966. That’s Peter Noone (Herman) of Herman’s Hermits introducing them.

Paul McCartney has stated that “Good Day Sunshine” was “really very much a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Daydream,’ the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel.

That was our favorite record of theirs. ‘Good Day Sunshine’ was me trying to write something similar to ‘Daydream.’

The band’s name was inspired by some lines in a song of Mississippi John Hurt called the “Coffee Blues”. John Sebastian and others in the jug-folk scene of the time such as Geoff Muldaur credit Fritz Richmond for suggesting the name.

The song is a tribute to Maxwell House Coffee, in which Hurt describes he only needs one spoonful to make him feel all right, what he describes as “my lovin’ spoonful” in the song.

At the peak of the band’s success, the producers of the television series that later became The Monkees initially planned to build their series around the Lovin’ Spoonful, but dropped the band from the project due to conflicts over song publishing rights.

Although the original members only produced their hits for two years (from 1965 to 1967), they made their mark. Different members would come and go for years afterward, and in some form still touring using the name, but never regained their initial popularity. John Sebastian would go on to a fairly successful solo career, appearing at Woodstock in 1969.

The original four members of the Lovin’ Spoonful were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 6, 2000.

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