Issue #159 – Jeannie Piersol

Though little known, ’60s siren JEANNIE PIERSOL emerged from the community that spawned Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and other leading lights of The Bay Area’s future rock meritocracy. A close friend of Grace Slick and her brother-in-law Darby, she was a founding member of their pioneering band The Great Society before leaving to front her own groups The Yellow Brick Road and Hair. She’s perhaps best known as the hypnotic and eminently seductive voice behind sought after 1969 psychedelic soul single ‘The Nest’.

In this extract PAUL RITCHIE follows the nascent singer on to the stage 

It would be the best part of a year however before Jeannie got her first taste of stagecraft, as featured lead vocalist for The Yellow Brick Road. The group’s formation was instigated by Lawrence Salas, who had taken up the bass guitar. After a couple of months of rehearsals, The Yellow Brick Road opened for Grateful Dead at UC Davis at the end of October ’66. “At UC Davis, the band wasn’t so good. I was on the stage and at one point a student motioned to me, come over here. He said, ‘Your band really sucks but you’re very cute!’”

The group spent most of the ensuing month rehearsing. By January, they were confident enough to audition at The Fillmore. Musically, The Yellow Brick Road bore an undoubtable resemblance to the now defunct Great Society, especially with Jeannie’s similarly unfettered lead vocal. In addition to an R&B influence, Jeannie had started contributing original material. Among the songs that the singer herself contributed were ‘Light Sinking Down’, ‘I’m Going’, ‘Please Leave Me Alone’ and ‘Quivering.’ “I didn’t play any instrument, so yeah, I wrote those totally in the air. I wrote ‘Light Sinking Down’ because of my experience with LSD. I only ever took it once, with Ray, and it was the worst trip in the whole world!”

The principal venue The Yellow Brick Road played was of course The Matrix, where they appeared on several occasions in March and April ’67. Recordist and future Matrix owner Peter Abram captured one of these evenings. Their sets featured assorted blues standards, off-beat covers like Ann-Margaret’s ‘I Just Don’t Understand’, and a decent sprinkling of originals. The garage band rush of the previously mentioned ‘Light Sinking Down,’ and the unusual ‘Quivering’ are included on the new compilation.

Late spring ’67 saw a handful more shows, but the relative lack of work, and therefore visibility, amongst their more copy-worthy peers in the city’s growing rock ’n’ roll community perhaps weakened the group’s resolve. As it happened, there was someone ready to take charge. At the beginning of the year, Darby Slick had returned from India after a three-month sojourn in search of musical enlightenment. Emboldened by the success the Airplane was having with his song ‘Somebody To Love’, and now as equally in thrall to R&B as Jeannie and Salas were, Slick was looking looked for a new creative outlet, and he felt he had found it in The Yellow Brick Road. His focus and vision however centred on Jeannie, and so it transpired that the other members of the band would inevitably get jettisoned. Horn player Terry Clements joined the band on Darby’s recommendation, and slowly the original personnel began to erode. In their places, along with Clements and himself on guitar, Darby brought in an interesting multi-racial trio of players: Frank Jones on keyboards, Bing Nathan on bass and drummer Dennis Whithum.

“Darby had gone to India, and when he came back, he decided to take over The Yellow Brick Road and rename us Hair. Darby found the musicians, and so it became his band then. It was kind of fun. I used to duet with Frank, he was very nice, a gentleman. The musicians wore suits, because Darby wanted a soul-type band, but every day he would change his mind about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. I felt like, it wasn’t me singing, it was whatever Darby wanted. Terry and Frank were good players and he had respect for them, me not so much because now I was his sister-in-law!”

To read the full article order Shindig! issue #159 here

Jeannie Piersol’s The Nest is out today on High Moon. Order here