Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Steve Boone of the Lovin' Spoonful Reveals the Hieronimus Connection
In his newly released memoir, Hotter than a Match Head: Life on the Run with the Lovin' Spoonful, Steve Boone tells some truly hot tales. Old friends Drs. Bob and Zohara Hieronimus are mentioned several times, and we'll reveal all on Sunday night July 27, 2014 from 8-10 PM when Steve is our guest on 21st Century Radio.
In the mid-1970s, Steve opened a recording studio in Baltimore called The Blue Seas. They recorded and produced several well-known artists here including Little Feat and Robert Palmer. Here is a photo of Bob Hieronimus and his son, Plato Hieronimus, hanging out at this legendary studio that was on a floating barge in the Inner Harbor.
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Bob Hieronimus and his son, Plato Hieronimus at the Blue Seas Studio. |
Bob Hieronimus designed this logo for Steve Boone's Blue Seas studio. |
In 1982, the Reverend Bob Hieronimus (a minister with the Universal Life Church) officiated at the wedding between Steve and his second wife. Steve Boone remembers it on page 267 of Hotter than a Match Head: "On October 30, 1982, we were married by my good friend Dr. Bob Hieronimus, whose wedding to Zoh I had failed to show up for two years earlier. Our wedding was attended by the largest gathering of two Irish Catholic families I had ever seen. Held outdoors at JoNell's family home in Laurel, it had all the trappings of an upper-middle-class wedding. An outsider never would have guessed the lives we had recently left behind."
In December 1983, Bob arranged for the first-ever reunion concert of the Lovin' Spoonful in front of his "Apocalypse" mural at Johns Hopkins University. Here you can see three of the original Lovin' Spoonful playing together for the first time in 15 years: Steve Boone, John Sebastian and Joe Butler.
Here is Steve Boone and Bob Hieronimus at Steve's home in Florida in 2000 when Bob visited flush with his success on getting the Yellow Submarine the renewed respect it was getting thanks to his persistence with Apple Corps. See Steve holding a copy of the influential music magazine Mojo, which acknowledged that without his help Apple may have never re-released this beloved cult classic. Bob's guidebook Inside the Yellow Submarine would not come out until 2002, but for the 30th anniversary of the film, he and Zohara hosted a Yellow Sub reunion party at the BBC (where Zoh did a live radio broadcast of "The Zoh Show") and invited Apple Corps to interview the co-creators of the film for their documentary footage that they included as extras on the DVD released in 1999. Mojo's article is also based in large part on Hieronimus's own interviews with the co-creators.
And this is Steve Boone's statuette from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It came to stay for a while in the Hieronimus household along with Steve's gold records, another story he partially tells in Hotter than a Match Head about a former friend who stole them and then disappeared. "I later got the gold records back from someone who contacted me through Zoh Hieronimus' Baltimore radio show, which I was doing a guest spot on - he'd bought them from a pawn shop right near Mark's house."
Listen to Steve Boone and his "Hotter than a Match Head" memories of "Life on the Run with the Lovin' Spoonful" on Sunday the 27th of July from 8-10 PM Eastern on 21st Century Radio. Come meet Steve in person at the Baltimore Book Festival in September where he will be a special guest on the City Lit Stage!
More about Steve Boone around the web:
www.LovinSpoonful.com/steve.html
www.youtube.com/user/LovinSpoonfulSite
A contemporary line-up of The Lovin' Spoonful.
