Unearthed :: San Jose’s Weird Herald Tragedy Told
When a band or artist’s long-lost material of melodic mystery goes unreleased for an unprecedented amount of time due to an endless list of situations and circumstances, does this ultimately mean the music was also completely unheard? It tends to entertain that old saying, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Without indulging too much into the obvious, there was no internet or social media in the 1960s. Still, there was community, spiritual strategy, and a critically acclaimed core of creative creatures all clawing at the same sensational sky, searching for answers to their unlimited questions about life, death, and all of the above during California’s pinnacle period of psychedelic exploration. So who was Weird Herald, and how does their story begin, end, and simultaneously stand out in the already radically rich history of harmonious tales told? Balancing the blistering feedback of a drug-obsessed oblivion with the sincere search for something meaningful, friends Billy Dean Andrus and Paul Ziegler, whose cosmic careers first began in the San Jose/Santa Cruz coffee house scene just a few years prior, launched their progressive Los Gatos-based project, Weird Herald, with fellow members Bill Holl, Jim Bowman, before eventually locking in the group’s legendary lineup with Cecil Bollinger, and Pat McIntire in the mid 1960s.
Releasing a highly valuable single on the onyx label that featured tracks "Saratoga James,” a song about a man that graduated from Saratoga High School, California, in 1965, who unfortunately fell into drugs and became sick from its cerebral curse before being committed to Agnew State Hospital, where he eventually underwent electroshock therapy, and “Just Yesterday,” were ultimately a part of a full-length album. The group faced a typical tale of management/producer headaches, and according to legend, the master tapes were destroyed. They have since collapsed into the poetic presence of space and time, waiting for the archival archeologists to extract them from a condemned closet or gravitational graveyard that is visited very seldomly. Occupying the same oscillating circles with legends such as Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna), whom Ziegler eventually joined in the early 1970s, while teaching guitar lessons at Fat City Guitars, and the late Skip Spence (Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape), with whom Andrus was best friends and schoolmates with during their formative years, the band was already inspired and esoterically established by these essential entries way before they ever started. Setting the spiritual stepping stones that ultimately led them to the promised land of sonic brotherhood and atmospheric activeness, Weird Herald carefully conjured the cosmic climate of the decade’s most iconic and influential interior with the ghostly gravity found within the feverish fibers of their unique sound and alchemical approach to the multi-genre vehicle from which they traveled with.
Exploring the electrifying elements of country, folk, and all-out rock, Weird Herald’s atmospheric ascetic expressed the likes of the Byrd Brothers, Country Joe & The Fish, Gene Clark’s subliminal 1974 masterpiece “No Other,” and several other iconic installments of the era without relying too heavily on the contemporaries to carry them to greatness. With tracks such as the album’s ominous opener “Where I’m Bound (Intro),” “David Of Bijou" (potentially the first song dedicated to Skip Spence), “Frodo’s Foot (Take 1 - bonus track),” and the album’s anthem title-track, “Just Yesterday” is a melodic miracle that has officially been thawed out of its half a century dormancy, while safely resting in the hands of the Andrus family in it’s original reel-to-reel state. Released for the first time by the fine folks over at Guerssen Records, the late Billy Dean Andrus, who sadly passed shortly after the recordings were made, and the rest of the band’s melodic memory may now rest knowing their sonic spirit was faithfully freed from the personal purgatory it once called home.
