The Lovin' Spoonful's Steve Boone Believes in Magic on the East End, Where It All Began

When Steve Boone takes the stage with his band, The Lovin’ Spoonful, at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on July 2, you could say it will be more than just a gig for the musician and his legendary band.

It will, in fact, be a homecoming.

That’s because Boone, the Spoonful’s longtime — and original — bass player, is a local boy in the most authentic sense of the term.

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Boone’s family owned The Howell House Hotel in Westhampton Beach — it was demolished in the 1970s — and Boone’s nephew Emmett Boone is the husband of WHBPAC’s director, Julienne Penza-Boone. A 1961 graduate of Westhampton Beach High School, who was added to the school’s Wall of Fame in 2012, Boone even helped out at the Hampton Chronicle, a precursor to The Southampton Press Western Edition, when his mother managed the newspaper.

“I would help her deliver papers whenever her regular boy wouldn’t show up,” recalled Boone in a recent phone interview. “It was great. Having a mom in the newspaper business was a neat thing.”

But, in fact, Boone’s local connections go even further back and farther east — specifically, to East Hampton, where his family moved when he was 15 years old. Boone still recalls with nostalgia the minimal traffic, laid-back vibe and pristine natural environment that defined his youth and life on the East End in those days.

“I arrived there in 1958 from Florida. I was still a young person with not a lot of experience,” he said. “I look back at that time as almost magical. I thought everybody lived like that.”

In the late 1960s, Boone’s local ties and love for this place were key in luring bandmate John Sebastian to the East End, followed by other legendary musicians, including David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, who spent a few months here in the winter of 1968-69 as they worked on the songs that would go on their debut album as Crosby, Stills & Nash.

But that part of the story comes later.

When asked what brought Boone to the East End in the first place back in the late 1950s, Boone explains that his family had previously lived on Long Island but moved away in 1952, after his younger brother, Charlie, was scalded and badly injured in an accident involving boiling water.

“He needed skin grafting and was referred to Florida, where they thought the humidity would help him to heal,” said Boone. “My father was in the hotel business. In ’58, we had an opportunity to move back to Long Island to manage a hotel.”

That hotel was the Sea Spray Inn in East Hampton, which longtime residents will recall occupied a plum spot with killer views and sea breezes right on Main Beach. Though the inn burned down in 1978, the Sea Spray’s cottages still stand to this day and are owned by East Hampton Village, which rents them out seasonally.

“I also worked at the hotel and those cottages,” recalled Boone. “Part of my job was as a beach boy, cleaning up around the place. We lived nearby, just east of the windmill.”

Boone attended East Hampton High School in his sophomore and junior years. Then, when he was 16, fate intervened, altering the trajectory of his life forever.

“In 1960, I was in a horrendous accident on Long Lane in East Hampton,” said Boone, explaining that it was the last day of school junior year, and he had caught a ride home from the bowling alley with a couple of classmates. “The driver ran into an oak tree — he hit it at 100 mph.

“I couldn’t walk for six months and spent the whole summer recuperating. So I learned how to play the guitar. My mother bought me a Gibson acoustic. I took right to it,” he continued. “My brother, Skip, was six years older and he had a rock band in St. Augustine. Skip taught me guitar.

“I was 16 years old, and I thought I was on course to be in the Marine Corps, since I was born at Camp Lejeune. But the accident rendered me ineligible for the military,” he said. “Sometimes accidents have silver linings.”

Before long, Boone gravitated toward bass guitar and, as part of a group called the Kingsmen, he, brother Skip and drummer Joe Butler, among others, began playing gigs locally at venues from East Hampton to Riverhead, including at a place called the Cottage Inn in East Hampton.

“It was a great nightclub. The folks who owned it knew the big-time entertainers who would come out to play on Friday or Saturday. They’d say, ‘Play in my club and you’ll get a weekend in the Hamptons’” recalled Boone. “They’d get Ike and Tina Turner, Dinah Washington, all this fabulous R&B music — they wanted us, the Kingsmen, to play on the quieter nights. That’s how I learned how to play.”

“One night, we were playing in Water Mill, at the Out of This World Inn, we were doing ‘The Twist,’ the Chubby Checker song. I look out and see Henry Ford Jr. dancing to the music,” said Boone. “It was a different world in the ’60s in the Hamptons. To me, it might be my own personal impression, but I liked the lack of traffic, like it was closed for winter. I loved it at every single month of the year. I thought it was a nice place to grow up and be a teenager. I was so glad my parents moved me to such a creative environment.”

It was brother Skip who was instrumental, so to speak, in charting Boone’s musical future, when he introduced him to John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky, who would become his bandmates in The Lovin’ Spoonful.

“My brother played a lot in Greenwich Village, and John and Zally were fans of Skip and Joe Butler’s band, called The Sellouts,” recalled Boone. “They went backstage one day and said, ‘Do you have a bass player?’ Skip said, ‘My brother’s in Europe — he’s a bass player. When he comes back, he’ll come in.’”

Boone did just that.

“It was three guitar players, no drummers,” he recalled of his “audition” with Sebastian and Yanovsky. “We met at a coffee house, and had a small amp and found out immediately that we liked the same artists and same musical period of time. We all came from the folk scene and were fascinated by the Beatles’ success. With that primitive setup of one amp and three guitars, we really cemented.”

The year was 1964, and Joe Butler was soon invited to join as the group’s drummer, and The Lovin’ Spoonful was born.

The band’s first album was released in November 1965 and resulted in two top 10 hits, “Do You Believe in Magic,” which was also the name of the album, and “Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?” The following year, the Spoonful hit No. 1 with the blockbuster tune “Summer in the City.”

The band put out five albums in just three years, and Boone enticed many of his musical friends to come to the East End. They found homes in quiet neighborhoods where they could jam in the offseason, thanks to Boone’s mother.

“Besides the newspaper, she also worked at Bellringer and had a part-time weekend job selling real estate. After The Lovin’ Spoonful’s first year of success, me, the manager, Joe, we all wanted to live on the East End.”

John Sebastian ended up buying a property in North Haven that was recently preserved as the 4.1-acre Lovelady Park. Many of the Spoonful’s rocking friends followed, including Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the music they used to make at Sebastian’s garage-turned-rehearsal room is legendary. Also spending time out here in the late 1960s was Judy Collins, Stills’s girlfriend at the time, and members of the Mamas and the Papas.

“We’d pop over to John’s house, or John would come to my house. The Mamas and Papas were like our sisters and brothers,” said Boone. “They were close to John and Zally before, during the folk era. David Crosby and those folks, we knew. They were our competitors, but they were all our friends. It was a creative atmosphere — I look back at how creative it was for me.”

Though highly successful, as groups go, The Lovin’ Spoonful was fairly short-lived. The band stopped touring in 1968 and, after the release of its final album, “Revelation: Revolution ’69,” the members went their separate ways.

For his part, Boone decided to live out a dream and headed to St. Thomas, where he bought a sailboat that he lived on for four years. “I needed a break from the hustle and bustle, so it gave me the ideal opportunity,” he said.

Eventually, Boone decided to get back into the music business, and he moved to Baltimore, where he hooked up with some musicians he had met in the Caribbean and started producing music. Blue Seas Recording Studios operated out of a former houseboat. Docked in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, it had a recording board that had been built by whiz kid George Massenburg, whom Boone calls “the forefather of digital recording.”

“It was ’76, the bicentennial celebration, and I was in the middle of it all,” he said. “It was a magical time, so wild and unexpected.”

Also unexpected was the demise of the recording studio, which suffered an accident on Christmas Eve in 1977 and sunk to the water line.

“We salvaged equipment and I stayed in Baltimore for another year, then I moved back to Florida for the warm weather. I’ve always been an East Coast guy, and have lived all up and down I-95,” he said. “I talked about taking the band on the road with Joe Butler, and by 1990, we had the band together and were going on tour.”

When The Lovin’ Spoonful come to WHBPAC next week, Boone will be playing with three new band members, all of whom are based in Los Angeles and have worked and recorded with many other artists.

“Band leader and guitarist Jeff Alan Ross has a terrific resume that includes putting on some incredible audio/video staging,” he said. “He is also an outstanding vocalist who has worked with Peter Asher and Peter Noone.

“Bill Cinque is a multi-instrument player who also sings very well and can play the bass guitar if I faint,” he added. “Bill has toured with Neil Diamond, among many others. The third player is Rob Bonfiglio, an excellent graduate of Berkeley School of Music and fine guitarist and singer. He has played with The Beach Boys, among many others, and has a broad range of experience.

“I believe this lineup will do as well as could be with capturing the Spoonful magic, and I am looking forward to playing with them in concert.”

Though John Sebastian has not rejoined The Lovin’ Spoonful, he and Boone remain in contact. “I wish John would play, but he won’t,” Boone said. “We’ve kicked around about new songs, but he doesn’t want go on the road. It’s not the performing, it’s the traveling. When I go to Woodstock and hang with John, he doesn’t want to go on tour. But I’m hoping he walks out on stage one day.”

For now, Boone, who turns 80 in September and recently left the I-95 corridor in a move from Florida to Las Vegas, is happy to still be making music. He’s looking forward to taking the stage at WHBPAC when he will, once again, be performing the tunes he loves in his old hometown.

“I get up there at least twice a year and stay with my brother, Charlie,” said Boone. “I grew up with music in family — my mom and dad played piano, and we were all around the piano at holidays. It was a neat growing-up period. I have good thoughts and memories of growing up there — except for the accident.

“But I’ve never been disappointed by the way things turned out,” he said. “I’ll always have a soft spot for the East End.”

The Lovin’ Spoonful performs on Sunday, July 2, at 8 p.m. at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, 76 Main Street, Westhampton Beach. Tickets are $61 to $86 at whbpac.org or 631-288-1500.