Jeannie Piersol Anthology: unearthing the forgotten psychedelic gem of the ‘Summer of Love’
With such a melting pot of artists, bohemians, agitators, and DIY chemists operating amid the West Coast’s heady counterculture across the turbulent 1960s, it’s bittersweet to think of the volume of bands and singers who nebulously collaborated and ‘dropped out’ together as major presences of the San Francisco psychedelic community yet whose names serve as mere footnotes when chronicling the rich creative scene that exploded halfway through the decade.
One such artist is Jeannie Piersol. Hailing from Marin County, also the locale of Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company, Piersol immersed herself in the Bay Area’s burgeoning acid rock, which was pulling garage into infinitely lysergic realms. She became close friends with Jefferson Airplane singer and hippy authority Grace Slick and lent her arresting vocals to their earlier band, The Great Society.
Piersol then fronted local bands Yellow Brick Road and Hair, with the help of Grace’s brother-in-law Darby Slick, earning a respectable local reputation playing the city’s key clubs and venues, including Lower Haight’s famous The Matrix hangout.
During this creatively fertile burst coursing through the city, Piersol managed to acquire some studio time to cut material as a solo artist as well as with her two bands. Issued on the subsidiary within a subsidiary Cadet Concept Records, preceded by Cadet Records and Chess Records, ‘Gladys’ was dropped in ’68 after its demo was rejected by Jefferson Airplane, a stirring psych-driver that pushes her vocals to powerful heights and features Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White behind the drum kit.
The following year saw the strolling ‘The Nest’, a lilting psych-pop fancy replete with a gloriously fuzzed out guitar solo and boasting soul singer Minnie Riperton on backing vocals.
The rest of her sessions never saw the light of day; Piersol’s creative work is a piece of Bay Area mythos over the lauded acclaim her contemporaries enjoy to this day. Compiling her two singles along with studio outtakes and live recordings, New York’s High Moon Records has issued The Nest, an anthology which has stepped up to the task of providing the lost ’60s gem with a definitive document of Piersol’s enchanting kaleidoscopic pop.
Vintage 16mm promo films have also been unearthed, including ‘Gladys’ accompanied by a far-out document of Ray Anderson’s famous liquid visuals from his Holy See light show, which bathed everybody from Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd at The Fillmore and other venues.
When assessing the Internet age’s impact on music, one of the absolute best things to happen is the new leases of life that forgotten gems and lost curios can enjoy, helped by dedicated excavation labels such as High Moon and easy access on any given digital store over gathering dust as an eye-watering priced rarity. Entering a new febrile climate where many curious folks are yearning for a deeper, higher purpose that is offered to them, Piersol’s body of work, as chronicled on The Nest, looks set to carry over the era’s rebellious spirit and take on a whole new dimension of relevancy and prescience.
