Jerry Yester

Production Supervisor and Producer

Room 109 Interview - February 2000

Jerry Yester produced both the Goodbye and Hello and the Happy Sad albums for Tim Buckley. Jerry is also an accomplished arranger, guitarist and singer. He has either produced or arranged albums for The New Christy Minstrels, The Association, Tim Buckley, The Turtles, Tom Waits, Judy Henske (his first wife of twenty years and the mother of his first daughter), and The Lovin’ Spoonful, just to name a handful of many.

He was also a member of The Inn Group, The Christy Minstrels, The Easy Riders, The Modern Folk Quartet, and of course he’s a member of, and still tours with, The Lovin’ Spoonful. He certainly knows what it’s like to be on both sides of the control booth in the studio, and he’s performed on many a stage throughout his lengthy career.

I know you’ll enjoy learning of Jerry’s roots and his many experiences, as well as the production aspects that went into the making of Tim’s two most successful albums.

Jack Brolly

Q: Would you please tell us all about yourself and the events that eventually led to your collaborating with Tim Buckley?

A: I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but the family left Birmingham when I was six months old and moved to Burbank, California. When I was 17 and just out of high school, my parents moved up to Joshua Tree, California and my brother Jim and I stayed in Burbank living in a small house that our parents rented for us before they left.

Between then and the time that my brother went into the army, we started singing together. I actually started playing guitar when I was 15, and I was playing music in a rock and roll band called Tom Driscoll and the Tomcats, doing junior high dances, and women’s clubs.

Jerry Yester today

In my senior year at Notre Dame High School in 1960, I sang a Kingston Trio song with a couple of friends at the Spring Musical. The Kingston Trio was real popular at the time. In 1961, a guy who was a year behind me at Notre Dame called and asked if I could get back together with those guys to sing for a dance at Corvallis, a girls high school in Van Nuys, that coming Saturday night.

I said I hadn’t seen those guys since graduation, but my brother and I could do it. Jim and I had been singing Kingston Trio songs around the house for a while, and I was sure we could pull it off. He said okay and when my brother got home that day, I said: ‘Guess what. We're playing at Corvallis high Saturday night’ .

My brother couldn't believe what he was hearing because it was such short notice and he became extremely nervous. I said ‘Don't worry, it'll be all right‘. So, between Monday and Friday night he learned to play the guitar well enough to meet the challenge.We come from a real musical family and Jim played boogie-woogie piano and he had heard me play guitar, so he only needed to learn three chords. It wasn't tough. He had a natural ability for it. We did six songs that night and then Jim kind of got bitten by the bug.

The next thing I knew, Jim went to the Garret Coffee House in West Hollywood and asked the owner Terea Lea, if we could play there. She said ‘Okay, but if you're not any good I'm gonna yank you off.”

She liked us a lot and afterwards she told us to go down to the Unicorn and talk to Mutt Cohen (Martin Cohen - attorney brother of Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley manager Herb Cohen). She said that he could probably help us out. So, we went down there and auditioned and he became our manager and we started working there on a regular basis.

I didn't know that Mutt was a manager. I knew he was a lawyer, and I thought of Herbie as the only manager in the family.

I think this was before Mutt passed the Bar. He was managing the club and he was managing acts. Herbie hadn't really started yet, because he was off as a mercenary soldier at that time. He was fighting for Che Guevara or one of his friends. Anyway, Herbie came back eventually, but not until Jim had left for the army.

My brother and I sang together for about a year before the army and when he left, I started doing a solo and eventually ended up forming a trio with John Forsha and Karol Dugan calling ourselves the Inn Group. We got a lot of work and then we became part of the original New Christy Minstrels, which was actually a collection of groups. Randy Sparks went around to these different little duos, trios, and quartets and put them all together into this big group.

We did an audition for Columbia and got a contract to do the first album. It was recorded in two three-hour sessions and it was a beautiful album. It was absolutely wonderful. Since the Christy’s were not supposed to go out and perform, the Inn Group went out on its first road trip.

We were working in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Salt Lake City when Randy called and said that the Christy’s were doing the Andy Williams show and we had to get back there. We said, ’Wait a minute, we've got contracts for these gigs, and you said the Christy Minstrels weren’t going to perform live.” Then Randy said, ‘Well we are now‘. So, we said he’d have to replace us, and he did. Of course, the Inn Group broke up about six months after that.

Next, I did an album with a group called the Easy Riders. They had a hit with All Day, All Night, Marianne. I replaced Larry Ramos in that group and he left the Easy Riders for a slot in the New Christy Minstrels. The Easy Riders made the album, but never performed live.

From there I went on working as a solo when in June of ’62 I met Judy Henske. I had already fallen in love with her from just looking at an album cover of Dave Guard's Whiskey Hill Singers when the Inn Group was in Oklahoma. John Forsha bought the album and he showed it to me and I said, ‘I'm gonna marry that girl‘. And John said, ‘Yeah, right‘. It was a couple of years after, when I did marry her. We went to Palm Springs that first night we met and stayed together for the next nine years.

I then joined the Modern Folk Quartet who had come over from Hawaii. Audiences were really starting to love their music, and everybody was sure that they were going to take the country by storm, when one of the guys in the group went nuts. He just flipped out and hacked his landlady's mantlepiece in half with a samurai sword. So, Herbie kicked him out of the group.

This guy was a good-sized Hawaiian beach boy and he came back to the Unicorn one night by himself to take care of Herbie. When he was taking off his leather jacket, Herbie grabbed the jacket around his shoulders, proceeded to beat the shit out of the guy and kicked him out into the street. He was committed and escaped from Camarillo Mental Hospital about six times, and after the last time, he went back to Hawaii to live on the beach. I took his place in the MFQ.

A very short time after that we made an appearance in the movie called Palm Springs Weekend. It plays all the time on AMC. We did an album for Warner Brothers and then kind of started off on the road. We moved to NYC where we played Greenwich Village clubs and college concerts, and also made another album.

We lived in the Village and we were in New York when the British Invasion happened. When we were taking our second album cover picture, three kids walked by and asked us if we were the Beatles. We said, ‘Who?’ And then Henry Diltz said, ‘Wait a minute, I read about those guys in Newsweek. They're from England, They've got long hair and getting really popular‘.

We started hearing more and more about them, and in February of ’64, we were doing concerts with Judy on the East Coast, and driving in the snow when we stopped and rented a motel room just to watch the Ed Sullivan show because the Beatles were on. And they changed our lives. We stopped getting haircuts and the MFQ slowly started playing rock and roll.

It was like a tadpole losing its legs and losing its tail. Over the course of the next year and a half, we turned into a rock band. During that time, I also met John Sebastian, Zal Yanovsky, and all these other folkies who were getting into rock and roll. That was at the time that the Spoonful started and I played piano on their first single, Do You Believe In Magic. Erik Jacobsen, their producer, also asked me to help them out with some of the vocals because of my experience with MFQ.

The Association, the group that my brother Jim was a part of, was also influenced by MFQ and they asked me to produce their second album called Renaissance. I told them that I really appreciated them hiring me even though I thought they were crazy. They were coming off a number one record and I had never produced anything.

As their producer, I thought that they should do everything themselves...play their own instruments and sing all their own parts. Unlike the Monkees, who were very big at the time and kind of had the playing done for them. The record company wanted the Associations’ album to be like that, and I kind of persuaded them to let the boys play. That album produced two moderately successful singles entitled Pandora’s Golden Heebie-Jeebies, and No Fair At All.