Jeannie Piersol is the Forgotten Rock Goddess of the Bay Area on The Nest
Thanks to High Moon Records, the San Francisco singer’s work finally sees the light of day on The Nest, which combines outtakes, live performances and demos of her solo work and the music she made with members of Jefferson Airplane and her bands, Yellow Brick Road and Hair.

Some of the greatest songs ever penned are B-sides: “I Am the Walrus,” “Silver Springs,” “My City Was Gone,” “Revolution,” “Pink Cadillac.” The list goes on, really, and I’d like to formally submit Jeannie Piersol’s “Your Sweet Inner Self” for future consideration. Piersol was a fixture in a San Francisco music scene that, retrospectively, is among the most mythologized in all of American history—thanks to the popularity of Haight-Ashbury and the proverb of folks like Ralph J. Gleason and Ken Kesey. Those California bohemians made some damn good tunes, too. I’m talking about the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane. Moby Grape! Sly & the Family Stone made noise, too. The Monterey Pop Festival was what everyone thinks Woodstock was. It was a cool time to fall under rock’s spell. The East Coast had Greenwich Village and the folk renaissance, but the West Coast had the Bay and Berkeley. But Piersol gets left out of those conversations.
Thanks to High Moon Records—a boutique reissue label founded by George Baer Wallace and JD Martignon that has been unearthing forgotten or lost relics of the 1960s and ‘70s for more than a decade now—Piersol’s work is finally seeing the light of day via an anthology called The Nest, which combines her solo work with the music she made with her bands, Yellow Brick Road and Hair. It’s a compilation that joins the likes of Gene Clark, Laurie Styvers, Love, Lotti Golden and Terry Dolan on High Moon’s shelves. The label’s specialty has become, it seems, a very specific pocket of West Coast bands in the margins of rock ‘n’ roll’s wartime revolution. Piersol belongs in that bastion.
Piersol may not have a Wikipedia page, but does have this great 7,500-word essay written by the compilation’s producer, Alec Palao, that puts her career into a modern-day perspective. And her biography makes for a fun deep dive. She was close with Grace and Darby Slick and, together, they started a band together called The Great! Society. Piersol’s voice was so powerful she shared lead vocal duties with Grace. Ask anyone who was alive and went to gigs in the Bay Area 60 years ago and they might tell you about the nights when Piersol’s singing filled the Fillmore, the Matrix and the Avalon Ballroom.
All those years ago, Piersol recorded a couple of tracks for Cadet Concept, a Chess Records subsidiary perhaps best known for releasing Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud in 1968, The Howlin’ Wolf Album a year later, and being the label home of Status Quo and Rotary Connection. Piersol’s A-side single was “The Nest,” a finger-picked, falsetto-sweet melody that explodes in horn magic yet anchors itself beneath the pillow of her voice. Hearing this song will make you wonder just how the hell fame eluded Piersol. She sings with the same gusto as someone like Dusty Springfield and is backed by a heavy, heavy, harmonious outfit. Actually, scratch that. She sings like she was the greatest performer on the planet, with a voice bright like that of a Heaven Sent perfume ad, and the guitar solo on “The Nest” is especially awing as it boils behind her. Oh, and I should mention that one of the backup singers on the track is a 22-year-old Minnie Riperton, who was singing lead in the Rotary Connection at the time.
But what’s more miraculous is that the single’s B-side, “Your Sweet Inner Self,” somehow, is better. Piersol and her band were cooking here, warping the baroque lightness of “The Nest” into a soulful, blazing rock ripper that aches to rupture right out of the stereo. It’s psychedelic, sure (Darby Slick is credited with playing a sarod on the song), but it’s also wonderfully energized. The Ter-Mar songs, which Piersol tracked in Chicago with Darby, Riperton, Phil Upchurch and Maurice White, exhibit a group of players woven into each other terrifically. I mean, to come out of those 1968 sessions with “The Nest,” “Gladys,” “Everyone Needs Love,” “Your Sweet Inner Self,” “Mr. Bright Eyes” and “With Your Love” seems improbable. And yet, it happened. And then Piersol took her band to Los Angeles and made “Joined in Space” and “Heading for the Sun” later that year.
The Nest illustrates how consequential 1968 was for Piersol, as it features “Gladys” and “With Your Love,” her first releases. “Gladys” is arguably the one song Piersol turned in that sounds exactly like the city she called home. It’s a birthright composition, one that aptly catalogs the influence and energy of whatever contemporary it was written in. You can hear the influence of Darby on “Gladys” (he’s credited with playing guitar on the track, after all), and she sings with that same mezzo-soprano that Grace turned into one of the greatest contraltos in the rock canon. “White Rabbit” anyone? It’s intense and evocative of an era many historians can easily put their finger and a label on. But while “Gladys” can easily slip into the shuffle of Haight-Ashbury’s soundtrack, “With Your Love” is a soul-inflected, funky siren with a top-note groove
But maybe the most fascinating parts of The Nest are the songs Piersol made with Yellow Brick Road and Hair. “Quivering” is far more lo-fi than the solo material, featuring a mess of snare drum and vocals from Piersol that sound like they’re coming from the next room over. It’s distinctively garage rock and rough-around-the-edges, locked into Yellow Brick Road’s live reputation at the time (it was recorded live at the Matrix in March 1967) more than their talents in a studio. “Light Sinking Down,” borne from stage banter, is equally fast and ragged. It was taped at that same Matrix show and unravels into this fun, jolting capture of musicians beating the hell out of their instruments. You can practically hear Victor Rivera’s guitar strings bending, as Piersol howls with a kind of seduction that could bring a 100-cap nightclub to its knees.
The Hair songs, “Shot Me Through” and a demo of “Gladys,” were pulled from sessions at Golden State Recorders in September 1967, and “Shot Me Through” has this movie-like quality, as if it could have been cinched into the set dressing of a B-movie. “Joined in Space” and “Mr. Bright Eyes” are especially cool, meshing Indian influences with doo-wop, variety-hour pop and symphonic, honey-warm textures. There are Mitch Ryder-evoking romps and in-studio curios of vintage, should’ve-been-iconic acid renderings. The Nest makes a good argument for just how good the West Coast’s rock circuit was 55, 56 years ago, be it the lost voices or the bands making a break for more mainstream-adjacent platforms.
And the fruits of the Bay Area’s storied, psychedelic history are splattered all over Piersol’s first anthology. Listening to The Nest, I don’t always hear the structures made more famous by her peers. There are no echoes of the Merry Pranksters or what flowery language dappled the streets in a sunny wash once upon a time. Instead, I hear a type of longevity painted in bold by a fusion of experimental rock music galvanized through its affection for soul ensembles. I hear the DNA of a singer who has lingered in every lionized note that broke past San Francisco’s city limits—a singer forgotten by name but felt in the template of a meritocracy she co-authored when the ink was still wet.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.