Zal Yanovsky
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Zalman Yanovsky (December 19 1944 – December 13 2002) was a founder with John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful rock band in 1964. He played lead guitar and sang. According to Sebastian "He could play like Elmore James, he could play like Floyd Cramer, he could play like Chuck Berry. He could play like all these people, yet he still had his own overpowering personality. Out of this we could, I thought, craft something with real flexibility."
One of the early rock and roll performers to wear a cowboy hat, and frilled "Davy Crockett" style clothing, Zal helped set the trend followed by such 1960s performers as Sonny Bono, Johnny Rivers and David Crosby.
Mostly self taught, he began his musical career playing folk music coffee houses in Toronto. He lived on a Kibbutz in Israel for a short time and was supposedly asked to leave after having driven a tractor through a building. He returned to Canada and teamed with fellow Canadian Denny Doherty in the Halifax Three. The two joined Cass Elliot in the Mugwumps, a group made famous by Doherty's & Cass's later group The Mamas & the Papas, in the song Creeque Alley. It was at this time he met John Sebastian and they formed the Lovin' Spoonful with Steve Boone and Joe Butler.
In 1967, he left the U.S. and returned to his native Canada, due to a marijuana-related charge. In exchange for not being deported, Yanovsky gave the name of his dealer, and as a consequence was ostracised by the music community and asked to leave the United States by the Federal authorities. In Canada, he recorded a solo album Alive and Well in Argentina (and Loving Every Minute of It). The album has hard rock and heavy metal influences, and features unusual sounds such as recordings of instruments being played in reverse.
After leaving the music business, he ran a restaurant in Kingston, Ontario named Chez Piggy, and wrote a cookbook that was collected by fans.
His father was the political cartoonist Avrom Yanovsky.
He died of congestive heart failure in December 2002.
