And unfairly, in my opinion. Article. Seems that way back in 1969, a couple of underage girls went to Yarrow’s hotel room to get autographs, and he answered the door naked, probably expecting some groupie sex. He was arrested and convicted of taking indecent liberties, and sentenced to three months in jail.
Fast forward 50 years, and he is now being cancelled out of appearances. Why do I think this is unfair? Because yes, it happened, and he was prosecuted for it; crime and punishment. And there has not been a whisper of improper behavior since. Issue over, it would seem.
He didn’t just answer the door naked. He made sexual advances. He groped her at a minimum. She was 14 and clearly underage.
"It was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers. I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it,” was how he described it at the time.
Hard to say what the reason was. Perhaps there were problems with Yarrow’s defense, or problems with the prosecutor’s case, or problems with the victims’ testimonies?
Probably because he was sincerely remorseful and devoted a lot of his time to charity and progressive causes. He did it. He admitted he did it without qualifications. He apologized.
Ummm, from what I was told in the 00’s, he did NOT get over it.
He did a nationwide book tour, signing his book “Puff, the Magic Dragon”. A major bookseller had so many issues with him propositioning and trying to grope female staff that eventually had to warn their branches to watch him. Our branch assigned a large male assistant manager to him, and had a meeting before he arrived where they cautioned women not to get “within grasping range.”
Coworkers kind of laughed at what they assumed was management being overly cautious. Turns out, management was correct.
I hate to show my age, but this wasn’t exactly a secret in the 70s and 80s. And yet, Peter, Paul, and Mary continued to be booked and have loyal fans right up until Mary Travers’ death finally ended the group. In fact, I think my local PBS station is still showing PPM concerts during pledge drives.
It was a very different time no doubt, but definitely odd though that of the no doubt thousands of times this happened with underage groupies back then, the only one ever caught and convicted was in the squarest of folk groups- who knew PP&M even had teen groupies? Maybe he should have gotten parental custody first like Uncle Ted.
I was speaking of well known 60s and 70s rock stars convicted for underage groupie sex- Glitter is a completely different disgusting subject, as I said Uncle Ted got parental guardianship first so not illegal, never heard of three or four, five never heard of but looks modern, Page never arrested or convicted IIRC, Cooke not underage, Berry completely different thing, so yeah for that era only Yarrow.
Then you surely remember that back in the pre-Internet age, a lot of stuff could be public knowledge in the sense of, it was publicly available information and people paying enough attention knew about it, but could be nowhere close to public knowledge in the sense of the general public being aware of it.
And it’s like the SD know-it-alls, “oh everybody knew X was gay!” Uh, no, everybody didn’t. How would we, if we never frequented the NYC bathhouse scene?
Right, I got the meaning that the remarkable part was about what with all the rock-n-roll decadence it’s the mild folkie getting busted and actually being criminally convicted contemporaneously, rather than just scandal-sheeted or being talked about in a memoir or sued later (though with few apparent major consequences for decades, more on this later).
Even now – in fact how many only learned of this now? The organizers of the recent event claimed to have had no knowledge of Yarrow’s case until somebody else called it to their attention. From the Wikipedia page it seems this is not the first time it happens, but it just never went much further than a cancellation here and there, if someone bothered to bring it up or point it out (apparently when someone objected to a political association).
It is interesting how the culture turns – I mean, Page/Nugent/etc/etc/etc one can imagine “OK, well yeah, teen groupie sex, among top three reasons to become a rockstar in the 70s, amiright?” And it had been sort of normalized as a “well, that’s how things were back then, we know better now” sort of thing for years, as long as no convictions were involved.