Zal Yanovsky of the 60s group Lovin' Spoonful dies of heart attack at 57 at 0:07 on December 16, 2002, EST.
KINGSTON, Ont. (CP) - Zal Yanovsky went from singing for change in coffee houses to being a member of the '60s supergroup the Lovin' Spoonful - to relative anonymity in a few short years. Just days after his death, his wife Rose Richardson says her guitarist husband would want people to listen to the music they love and travel to the places they hold dear in their hearts. "Let's not miss a beat for him. That's a good one, it's musical," she said. Born in Toronto, Yanovsky went on to tour the world before leaving the band in 1967 and settling in Kingston, Ont., where he died suddenly on Friday of a suspected heart attack. He would have been 58 on Thursday. The band scored hits with Do You Believe in Magic, Daydream, Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind, Summer in the City, and You Didn't Have to be So Nice, and at one point was second only to the Beatles in record sales. In the mid-1960s, Time magazine called the Lovin' Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas the top two bands in America. In 2000, the Spoonful was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. But Yanovsky didn't seem overly impressed. "It's a big media event that's over in two seconds," he told the Kingston Whig-Standard in 1999. Denny Doherty, of the Mamas and the Papas, told the Whig on Sunday that sometimes he and Yanovsky couldn't believe they'd gone from small-time Canadians to big-time music stars in just a few short years. In the late 1950s, the two had been hanging out in Toronto singing their songs for change. By the early 1960s and Doherty and Yanovsky were hanging out in the basement of New York's Albert Hotel "mining for gold." Doherty said the place was a dump but it was a dump where dreams came true. "I remember Zalman came in one day and sang Do You Believe in Magic and I thought it was nice. I didn't see him again until the song was a hit," he said with a laugh from his home in Toronto. Doherty said there was no way he could have known that the Lovin' Spoonful's first single would hit No. 9 on the Hot 100. He just thought it was a catchy little song. "You can't tell if something is going to be a hit, but you can tell if something is a good song," he said. Do You Believe in Magic was just one of the hit tunes created in the hotel in the city's lower east side. "Here we were, in a hotel, in a basement with the ceiling caving in and what was coming out of there was gold. They were mining for gold down there," Doherty said. It was at Mama Cass Elliott's house that Yanovsky met John Sebastian - a man and musician who would become one of his bandmates and good friends. When Sebastian started the Lovin' Spoonful - a name borrowed from a song by Mississippi bluesman John Hurt - he also recruited drummer Joe Butler and bassist Steve Boone to round out the foursome. Yanovsky was also once named one of the top 100 guitarists of all time by Total Guitar magazine. "Yanovsky had an unorthodox style of playing, to say the least," said Doherty who was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame with Yanovsky in 1996. "There was not any book anywhere that he followed," Doherty. "And he is gone too soon." His career with the Spoonful was also cut short. The story goes that Yanovsky was forced to leave the band and the United States after a run-in with police in the spring of 1966 in Berkeley, Calif. In a rare interview, Yanovsky talked to writer Ken Cuthbertson three years ago for a Kingston Life Magazine article. Yanovsky said he was kicked out of the band. He said it was painful in 1967 and still painful 32 years later in 1999. "The band was like a marriage with four people in it," he told Cuthbertson. "As I look back, I opened the door and they kicked me out." Yanovsky will also be remembered for his impact on his community, said Kingston Mayor Isabel Turner. Yanovsky was "a part of the very fabric of our community" she said, and was largely responsible for revitalizing the city. "He took a very old building, went in and not only cleaned it all up, but brought it back to its former glory," Turner said of an 1880s stable that Yanovsky and Richardson turned into a restaurant, Chez Piggy. "He was one of the first to do that, and because of it, others looked at what he had done and followed suit, with the result being that quite a renovation has taken place in downtown Kingston." Richardson said her husband was just as much a businessman as he was the eclectic artist type. "People always saw his jokey outside but they didn't realize how incredibly reliable he was. He was someone you could always count on," she said. "I guess it's hard to believe that a person who was so much fun was also reliable. It's probably not a word people would use to describe him." A private family service will be held Monday in Kingston. Yanovsky is also survived by his daughter Zoe and son-in-law Garth, his grandson Max, sisters Dvoira and Kaethe and stepmother Anna. He is also survived by his first wife, actor Jackie Burroughs.
