{"id":6797,"date":"2025-01-03T13:14:38","date_gmt":"2025-01-03T13:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=6797"},"modified":"2025-01-03T15:17:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-03T15:17:51","slug":"shindig-issue-159-jeannie-piersol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/?p=6797","title":{"rendered":"Issue #159 \u2013 Jeannie Piersol"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though little known, \u201960s siren JEANNIE PIERSOL emerged from the community that spawned Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and other leading lights of The Bay Area\u2019s 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\u2019s perhaps best known as the hypnotic and eminently seductive voice behind sought after 1969 psychedelic soul single \u2018The Nest\u2019. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In this extract PAUL RITCHIE follows the nascent singer on to the stage\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201966. \u201cAt UC Davis, the band wasn\u2019t so good. I was on the stage and at one point a student motioned to me, come over here. He said, \u2018Your band really sucks but you\u2019re very cute!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u2018Light Sinking Down\u2019, \u2018I\u2019m Going\u2019, \u2018Please Leave Me Alone\u2019 and \u2018Quivering.\u2019 \u201cI didn\u2019t play any instrument, so yeah, I wrote those totally in the air. I wrote \u2018Light Sinking Down\u2019 because of my experience with LSD. I only ever took it once, with Ray, and it was the worst trip in the whole world!\u201d<\/p>\n

The principal venue The Yellow Brick Road played was of course The Matrix, where they appeared on several occasions in March and April \u201967. Recordist and future Matrix owner Peter Abram captured one of these evenings. Their sets featured assorted blues standards, off-beat covers like Ann-Margaret\u2019s \u2018I Just Don\u2019t Understand\u2019, and a decent sprinkling of originals. The garage band rush of the previously mentioned \u2018Light Sinking Down,\u2019 and the unusual \u2018Quivering\u2019 are included on the new compilation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Late spring \u201967 saw a handful more shows, but the relative lack of work, and therefore visibility, amongst their more copy-worthy peers in the city\u2019s growing rock \u2019n\u2019 roll community perhaps weakened the group\u2019s 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 \u2018Somebody To Love\u2019, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cDarby 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\u2019t 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!\u201d<\/p>\n

To read the full article order\u00a0<\/em>Shindig!\u00a0issue #159 here<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Jeannie Piersol’s <\/em>The Nest is out today on High Moon. Order here<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though little known, \u201960s siren JEANNIE PIERSOL emerged from the community that spawned Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and other leading lights of The Bay Area\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6801,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1009],"tags":[1169],"class_list":["post-6797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","tag-jeannie-piersol"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6797"}],"version-history":[{"count":-3,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shindig-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}