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Hot Tuna25 YEARS & RUNNIN’

Live at Sweetwaterby Mark Humphrey

A quarter century ago, America was polarized (popular buzz word of the day) over the war in Vietnam, thelength of kids’ hair, and a new President, Richard Nixon. A generation gap (oft-heard term of the era) yawnedbetween a middle-aged silent majority (ditto previous parentheses) and its noisy young offspring, variouslylabeled hippies, yippies, deadbeats, pinkos, etc. This teen-to-twenty-something bubble in the American popu-lation fabric, today’s much-analyzed baby boomers, took to the streets in political confrontation, toured ‘innerspace’ via psychedelics, and utilized rock music as the motivational soundtrack of its experiences.

The rock band which most fiercely galvanized audiences with the era’s energies was the JeffersonAirplane. Explicit in its unabashed celebration of drugs (1967’s White Rabbit was probably the sole hymn topsychedelics to make the pop charts’ Top 10), revolution (We Can Be Together), and unconventional sex (Triad),the Jefferson Airplane delighted in confrontational messages and ‘guerilla theater’ tactics which kept it in thelate-1960s youth culture’s vanguard. They played both of 1969’s legendary rock festivals, Woodstock (goodhippies) and Altamont (bad hippies). But given the Airplane’s penchant for acid-and-revolution agitprop, wasn’tthere something off-kilter about guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady stepping out front with low-key coffee house incantations like the pre-World War I relic “Hesitation Blues”? Where was the clenched fist and‘trust-no-one-over-30’ rhetoric in that?

Airplane vocalist Marty Balin apparently saw no contradiction in the Kaukonen/Casady blues-duo oper-ating under the Airplane’s wing. In fact, he told Irwin Stambler (Guitar Years, 1970, Doubleday, New York), theyoffered a perfect parallel. “Basically,” Balin said of the Airplane, “we are doing social blues—our time and ourplace...Adults repress emotion, but kids are more innocent and the blues are more easily felt. It may soundcorny, but teenagers DO feel the blues.”

So the Airplane was a blues band for teens? Well, not exactly, but it wasn’t an unfriendly testing groundfor what evolved into a blues-based outfit which has now racked up more frequent flyer miles than the oft-grounded Airplane. Welcome to Hot Tuna’s second quarter century.

You can thank the absence of televisions in mid-1960s hotel rooms for the post-gig jamming betweenKaukonen and Casady that evolved into Hot Tuna. “We roomed together a lot,” Kaukonen told Jym Fahey (“Red

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Hot Tuna,” Relix, October ’93, vol. 20, No. 5). “I would teach Jack songs I’dbeen playing, and he would work out some really nifty parts on them.”Sounds of modified pre-War blues and ragtime wafted down the corridorsto Airplane guitarist/vocalist Paul Kantner, who invited the duo to struttheir funky stuff in the middle of Airplane performances. Sometimes MartyBalin would join them singing harmony on an old blues, and gradually theKaukonen/Casady blues duo became an established presence on theAirplane’s flight path.

“There was a period of time when we used to open up for theAirplane and play a couple of hours before the Airplane came on,” Casadytold Fahey. “It actually worked, and was fun and interesting for the audi-ence. Certainly, the shows weren’t in the format of typical pop acts at thetime.” The time in question was 1969, some years between blues revivals,and it’s a safe bet that many of the Airplane’s fans got their first taste offingerstyle ragtime blues from these vaunted standard-bearers ofpsychedelia.

If the Airplane’s virulent strain of pop propaganda has become, like the alliterative speeches of SpiroAgnew (“Nattering nabobs of negativism”), a sound inexorably bound to a specific historic moment, Hot Tunahas benefited from the timeless tap root of the blues. This video celebrates a quarter century of the Kaukonen/Casady team under the Hot Tuna banner (the debut album appeared in July 1970), though the duo took it firstfaltering steps towards Tuna-hood a decade earlier in Washington, D.C.

It all evolved from Kaukonen's search for blues recordings. “Jack Casady’solder brother, Chick, had a huge 78 record collection, and he had really turnedme on to the [blues] masters,” Kaukonen told Rick Ilowite (“High Flyin’ Blues:an Interview with Jorma Kaukonen,” Sing Out! Feb/March/April ’94, Vol. 38No. 4). Jorma discovered a fellow guitarist in Chick’s kid brother, though hewasn’t much impressed by what he heard: “I thought it was pretty awful, be-cause he was playing jazz - Johnny Smith and all that stuff,” Kaukonen recalledfor Scott Kutina (“Jorma Kaukonen: Jefferson Airplane to Hot Tuna,” GuitarPlayer June 1976). But the budding blues master and would-be jazz guitaristfound a common ground in early rock ‘n' roll.

“When we were in high school,” Kaukonen told Fahey, “we had a garageband called the Triumphs.” With the Triumph motorcycle insignia proudly em-blazoned on their bass drum head, the quartet stumbled through new BuddyHolly tunes, old Carter Family songs, and any “simple rock ‘n' roll tunes thatwe could get,” recalls Casady, who played lead guitar in the Triumphs (Kaukonenplayed rhythm and sang). “We were absolutely shameless,” says Casady. “Weplayed in a bunch of clubs when I was about 14 and he (Jorma) was 17...one

of them was called the Rendezvous. We went on before Link Wray.” Wray’s power chord proto-grunge 1958classic, Rumble, is legendary for an early fuzz sound reputedly caused by Wray stabbing a speaker cone with ascrew driver. Kaukonen, who amplified his acoustic Gibson J-45 with a microphone tucked under his beltbuckle and plugged into a Webcor tape recorder which served as an amp, may have taken a cue from Wray forhis later fuzz flights with the Airplane.

Washington, D.C. was a good place for both hearing and playing sundry American roots music forms inthe late 1950s, when a 16-year-old Kaukonen took up guitar. “When I started playing the guitar,” he told Ilowite,“I started out playing old-time music. The first song I learned was Jimmy Brown the Newsboy, and the secondwas Down in the Willow Garden. I’m from northern Virginia to begin with, so I grew up listening to eitherbluegrass or whatever passed for country at that time, or gospel and rhythm & blues...Bluegrass and old-timemusic have been lurking around my past at all times...Basically, I’m a frustrated Carter Family picker.”

But the blues was never far as an influence (“I wrote my high school senior paper on Big Bill Broonzy,”recalls Kaukonen), and D.C. offered ample opportunities for budding musicians to sample the best of every-thing, as Casady told Fahey: “On a Saturday afternoon, I’d go- to the Howard Theatre for $1.50 and see RayCharles...We’d go down to a club called the Shamrock and see Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Mike Seegerand his band (the New Lost City Ramblers) playing a lot of mountain music and folk music. And jazz. I’d seeCannonball Adderley and Yusef Lateef and Roland Kirk and probably my favorite bass influence at the time,Charles Mingus.”

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After high school, Kaukonen attended Ohio’sAntioch College and befriended a fellow guitarist, IanBuchanan, who opened a wide door for him to themusical universe of Rev. Gary Davis. “He (Buchanan)was the first person I’d met who really knew how toplay guitar,” Kaukonen told Ilowite. “He liked me andtook me under his wing...He taught me songs, and Ilearned them almost bar-by-bar. When I had trouble,I’d go to his room—I didn’t have a tape recorder—andhe’d show me how to do things note by note. For abouta semester I quit going to classes and literally playedguitar for about eight hours a day.”

Much of what Kaukonen was practicing withsuch single-mindedness on a Harmony Soverign (“areally impossible guitar”) was the music of Rev. GaryDavis, although he was exposed to other vintage blues- styles at the same time. “John Hammond Jr. was one ofmy hallmates at Antioch,” Kaukonen recalls. “He had just gotten the Robert Johnson tapes from his dad—therecords weren’t out yet—and I remember we were at a party and he was playing the tapes and everybody wasjust flabbergasted by what they heard. And I remember telling him, ‘This is way too complicated and too weird.’I really couldn’t relate to it. Of course he could and did. I proceeded in the Rev. Gary Davis direction.”

From Ohio, Kaukonen proceeded directly to Davis’s hometown, NewYork City, thanks to Antioch’s work-study program (he was employed in a hos-pital). “I met the Reverend and followed him and his entourage around andjust tried to learn as much as I could by watching,” Kaukonen recalled forGordon Ely (“The Reverend Gary Davis Influence,” Guitar Extra!, Summer 1990).“He had massive hands. He could stretch like seven frets...When I first heardthe Reverend, that just blew everything else away, and that’s all I listened tofor three years. I would listen to his songs over and over again, not just tolearn things, but because I really liked them. It was like a teenaged girl listen-ing to her favorite song...I always loved the sheer power of his voice. I getgoose bumps to this day when I crank up those songs. I must say, too, and Ithink most of the people who knew him would agree, that considering he wasa blind man, the Reverend had remarkable perception about pinching goodlooking waitresses and never missing a drink when it went by on a tray. Skillsto be respected. The man was unbelievable.”

Davis’s influence on Kaukonen is audible on all of his fingerpicking inthis DVD, and was the direct source of Let Us Get Together (Davis recorded it several times) and, despite W.C.Handy’s 1915 copyright, Hesitation Blues (recorded in 1957 and available on Smithsonian/Folkways SF 40035,Rev. Gary Davis: Pure Religion and Bad Company). Kaukonen can also be heard picking accompaniment toJanis Joplin singing Hesitation Blues on the much-bootlegged ‘typewriter tapes’ of 1965, informal recordingsmade in Kaukonen’s apartment that were officially released on Sony’s 1993 Janis boxed set.

Casady was still in Washington, D.C. at this time, and found that switch-ing from guitar to bass considerably expanded his employment opportunities.“I played in a lot of R&B bands with a Wurlitzer piano like Ray Charles andthree saxes like Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Clowns,” Casady told Relix’s Fahey.“I did two weeks with Little Anthony Gourdine ...Things were a lot more inno-cent in those days in a certain way, but I still found myself in an all-black bandat the time. I guess I held my own. I also might be playing in a bluegrass bandthe next night. It was all good music and good players were playing it, and Iwas all ears.”

The peripatetic Kaukonen stayed in touch, but by the early1960s hadrelocated to the West Coast, where he attended the University of Santa Clara.Through a mutual friend he met Paul Kantner, with whom he played occa-sional coffeehouse gigs in the San Jose area. Kaukonen remembers Kantner asplaying Chad Mitchell Trio and Limelighters material, and there was little com-pelling reason for them to stay in touch after Kantner moved to San Francisco.That’s why Kaukonen, self-professed acoustic blues purist, was surprised when

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Kantner showed up to say: “‘Hey look, we’ve got thisband together. Why don’t you play guitar? “‘ Kaukonenwent to San Francisco to check it out (“It was nice togo to a big city after vegetating in San Jose”), and inSeptember 1965 called his old buddy from the Tri-umphs, who hadn’t seen him in over a year. “I toldhim, ‘I’ve been playing bass in a lot of R&B bands,”Casady recalls. “Jorma said, ‘It’d be great to have youcome out to California.’ So one thing led to another. Itworked out to be a great opportunity for me, and ob-viously changed my life.”

And how! From Little Anthony’s Tears on My Pil-low to the Jefferson Airplane’s SURREALISTIC PILLOWwas a stylistic stretch alright, but Casady wasn’t alone:“I didn’t know anything about playing like MikeBloomfield or any of those guys,” Kaukonen told Gui-tar Player. “It was completely foreign to me. So I had

to start figuring out stuff that would sound nifty, but which I could still do...in the beginning it was prettyaccidental. I mean, it’s not the kind of stuff that I would sit down and play on an electric guitar without a band.”

So Kaukonen’s signature acid-rock sound in the Airplane was a happy accident that worked perfectly inthat context. Critic Frank Kofka rhapsodized in his March 1968 review of the album AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER’Sin England’s Jazz and Pop: “If one is going to talk about the Airplane’s resourcefulness, moreover, one has to saysomething about the use to which lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen puts fuzztone and feedback...the most readilyidentifiable components of the ‘San Francisco sound.’ Inferior guitarists tend to use such effects as a crutch.Happily Jorma - who, if there is such an entity as the ‘San Francisco sound,’ must get a large part of the creditfor originating it - is never guilty of this sort of abuse. He employs feedback and fuzz to modify his sound, butonly where it has the feeling of belonging’...He is one of the few American guitarists who can be ranked as apeer of the Cream’s Eric Clapton.” The only vestige of Kaukonen’s psychedelic sonic booms with the Airplaneheard in this Tuna fest is the overdriven slide wail of his twin steel lap guitar.

The irony of Kaukonen’s involvement with the Airplane is that it eventually empowered him to performthe music he loved most before a wider audience than would otherwise have been accessible. After Hot Tuna’s1970 debut album (with Will Scarlet on harmonica), the band increasingly moved towards autonomy from theAirplane. It finally departed the mother ship in 1973. Casady reflected in Relix: “The events (of the time) over-took the music and the band (Jefferson Airplane), it seemed to me. The emphasis seemed to be a little more onthe political rallying aspect of the band and less on the musical aspect.” Figuring they preferred to play ratherthan preach, Kaukonen and Casady cut the Airplane um-bilical cord, though they individually and collectively havereturned to the Airplane/Starship orbit on occasion in theyears since.

Hot Tuna itself was iced in 1978, only to be warmedup in the 1980s. Kaukonen and Casady both have beeninvolved in sundry other separate band projects, but agreethat the chemistry between them has kept Hot Tuna ontheir musical stove, if not always the front burner, lo thesemany years. The group itself weathered numerous person-nel changes because, Kaukonen told Relix, “Jack and I re-ally worked well together and as long as we had each otherin some way to build on, then everything else fell into place.”

The current incarnation of Hot Tuna features long-time San Francisco area musician Michael Falzarano, whofirst played with Hot Tuna in 1983, and keyboard playerPete Sears, who has worked with the Starship and RodStewart. Casady expressed his pleasure with the currentlineup to Relix’s Fahey: “(Pete’s) touch on the piano andthe accordion really works with Michael Falzarano playingmandolin and Jorma playing steel and dobro. The combi-nation of sounds gelled really well. That’s how things hap-

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pen. It’s not like in the pop world where you kind of preconceive the kind of sound to go after and then try tofit into those parameters. We like to discover things and take advantage of the chance encounter.”

And that, says Kaukonen, is the Tuna way: “As we would do material,” he told Relix, “the songs them-selves dictated how we were going to do them and what we needed. You really can’t get much more organic inapproach than that. That’s the way we did things.”

So here’s the homegrown Tuna taking on Jesse Fuller’s San Francisco Bay Blues, Johnny Cash’s FolsomPrison Blues, Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm with Maria Muldaur and Bob Weir guesting and I Know You Rider, a folk-blues the Byrds waxed in the jingle-jangle mornin’ of 1966 which entered the West Coast folk-rock repertoirecourtesy of longtime Bay Area blues maven Barbara Dane. From the Airplane’s 1967 SURREALISTIC PILLOWcomes Kaukonen’s signature instrumental, Embryonic Journey, of which Kaukonen told Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht,“I wrote it in 1962. I was just picking around and fell into the pattern that the whole song is all about. It’s indown-D tuning (D A D G B E, low to high). I got the idea for the descending line at the end of each phrase froma Pete Seeger song, The Bells of Rhymney.” And thus it is that Kaukonen’s music springs from an unpretentiousand ongoing process of exploration, one that he told Ilowite is largely about going for the feel of his favoritemusic: “I would hear things that I wanted to learn,” Kaukonen recalls, “but I never felt obligated to learn how todo them exactly. I always went for the essence and the feeling. I incorporated it into my live repertoire, and, asa result, my style began to mutate early on.” To Jorma and Jack and Hot Tuna, congratulations on a milestoneand best wishes for another quarter century of hot ‘n' happy mutations.