Jorma Kaukonen: Still Working the Roots
If Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna-style rock brought him fame, acoustic blues and country fingerpicking keep him going
By Barry Mazor
This summer will mark fifty years since Jefferson Airplane was formed and then swiftly signed to record by RCA Victor. A year earlier, their lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (pronounced “Yorma”) had home-recorded at his house in San Francisco, as he provided acoustic accompaniment to a nearly unknown Janis Joplin. They’d both worked the folk circuit, and she was trying out the hoary “Hesitation Blues,” with him backing her in Reverend Gary Davis fingerpicking style, and on Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and a few other seriously old oldies.
Jorma would turn to “Hesitation” himself, having determined exactly how long he had to wait, to introduce his long-lived side project roots rock band Hot Tuna in 1969, along with his lazy, endearing singing (not much heard with vocalist-heavy Jefferson Airplane) and what his blues and rag guitar work sounded like when played with his buddy, Airplane bass player Jack Casady. They’d been playing together since they were teenagers in the Fifties. This week, before turning 75 later this year, Kaukonen lets loose a new solo album, Ain’t in No Hurry, and Jack makes an appearance. So does a new take on “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” a Woody Guthrie-derived number, Yip Harbrug’s old pop “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” and four Jorma originals, in the acoustic roots-Americana mode.
He was once best known for extended wah wah pedal freak outs—if with more form, drive and clarity than found in your average psychedelic jam band noodle pudding. Audiences also took note of the haunting, acoustic “Embryonic Journey” instrumental on Surrealistic Pillow, the Airplane album that yielded their hits, “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” anomalous Top 40 results for an ambitious, fractious, sometimes literary band from San Francisco.
It’s not so unusual in 2015 to find someone who'd rocked out and had actual hits once upon a time turn to kinder, gentler sit-down acoustic music to extend a career for an older audience, all these decades later—but that’s not the story with Jorma Kaukonen. He’d never stopped working on the fingerpicked roots music, whether blues or more country based—and has never stopped filling halls for electric gigs either, to this day. He still appears regularly as a solo acoustic act, on Jorma and Jack duet tours, and Hot Tuna appearances, which at times have ranged from soft to loud to metal loud.
We talked recently about the multiple aspects of his music and how it’s added to his own musical longevity.
“I started out playing acoustic and most of my beginning things were ‘old timey,’ or whatever you want to call it, but then Buddy Holly and those guys came along and Jack and I had this little band together,” he recalled. “ I couldn’t hear my guitar, a [Gibson] J-45, so I got a Fender MusicMaster and Jack and I actually got gigs. I’ve never, ever sat down and practiced the electric guitar just to get my chops up, but when I’m playing a finger style song on an acoustic guitar its complete unto itself. I give myself concerts all the time; that’s what passes for practicing. When I got trapped in The Jefferson Airplane, I got totally seduced by the whole rock ‘n roll thing—and, as you know, we were incredibly fortunate and became successful quickly—stuff that normally doesn’t happen in our business. You gotta get lucky—and we got lucky.”
That said, there’s been no point in decades of music making when he showed any signs of being conflicted between his electric rock and acoustic roots music impulses—like some 1930s blues musician deciding whether “God’s music or the devil’s music” was to be the way for them. That analogy has a way of coming up, though.
“I was watching the Grammys the other night,” he told me, “and noticed that Beyoncé sang ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey song. And I’ve just recorded ‘The Terrible Operation,’ by the same guy [when he was Georgia Tom, with the rude and lewd Famous Hokum Boys], on the new record. And I said ‘Yeah; I get it.’ A great song is a great song, and it doesn’t matter what time it comes from—whether it’s a gospel song, something like ‘Brother Can Your Spare a Dime,’ or something I write today that’s of that ilk.”
Conflict avoidance was not the easiest thing at the height of the Airplane years, the late 1960s and early 70s. It was an outfit that, for all of the peace-and-love hippie vibe of the time and scene, ran on conspicuous friction and competition for supremacy between its leaders, Grace Slick, Marty Balin and Paul Kantner. It was a band with a deceptive “love” hit that took off from the premise “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you—dies.” While they may have referred to Winnie the Pooh in a pair of song titles, they also anticipated X’s smart/angry “Johny Hit and Run Paulene” punk in the crash and smash of multiple cuts on their daring After Bathing at Baxter’s album, the highly non-commercial follow-up to those Top 40 hits. Through all of that, though, Kaukonen and Casady stood as a solid backbone on guitar and bass, seemingly uninvolved and undistracted by the band’s clashes.
“And I think that’s a really fair picture,” Jorma agreed. “We managed it by disengaging ourselves, as much as possible, from that friction. If you think about the people that were in that band, the only two who were really close to each other in musical roots, at all, really, were Jack and me. There was a lot of friction, and we argued about a lot of stuff, but, y’know something: we never argued about music. One of the things that drove me nuts was band meetings arguing about business—and politics, which I really was not that involved with, even in such a political time. So we just hunkered down and did the music. And as we started to grow up a little bit—and I use that term loosely—everybody moved off in their own direction, and that’s really how Jack and I wound up devoting all of our time to Hot Tuna.”
Hot Tuna would arguably become the longest lasting of Americana bands to date, and one that made far greater use, by his own design, of his roots music experience. And while Jorma admits he likely would never have founded that or any band on his own, but stayed a solo acoustic player, if he hadn’t had the Airplane group experience, he does, even as a “solo” performer, have long-time friends, including multi-genre mandolinist Barry Mitterhoff, multi-instrumentalist and former Bob Dylan lead guitarist Larry Campbell who regular tour with him, play on his records (Campbell produced the new one), and also teach at his Fur Peace Ranch guitar camp in Southeast Ohio.
“I’m very fortunate that circumstances haven’t forced me to play with people I don’t like,” he notes, “because playing music with people is a really intimate thing. I see no reason to inject friction into my life, at a point in life when you could really be smiling most of the time.”
The long-standing guitar camp, which largely caters to adult guys looking to get back into guitar in middle age, boasts such instructors as Dave Alvin, David Bromberg, Tommy Emmanuel, Bill Kirchen, Chris Hillman, and Jill Sobule, in addition to Jorma himself, but they do have younger players who show up for classes as well.
“I’ll tell you what: The bar for guitar playing—I’m more familiar with the acoustic, but I’m sure it’s true of the electric, too—that bar has been raised in the last half century, as it should be, unbelievably. All the things that my 17 year-old son can do in his sleep today, were mindbending to us back in the Sixties. So people will ask ‘How do you rate yourself as a guitar player?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, I’m an intermediate level guitar player with a lot of experience and who knows something about the music he loves.’
The new songs Kaukonen’s written for Ain’t in No Hurry reflect that music, in their melodies and sentiments, and the delicate, expressive picking that goes with them, and also the point in life he’s reached (“You never seem to age in my dreams,” he sings on one, to his wife Vanessa, co-owner of Fur Peace Ranch, no doubt) without maudlin nostalgia—so often a trap for singer-songwriters who’ve been around more than a little while. This is no “Geriatric Journey.” The background in that old time, direct roots music he loves seems to be what’s supported and sustained his musical creativity and buttressed his career’s longevity.
“I agree with that totally,” he says. “What drew me to blues and rootsy music when I was a kid, besides the fact that it sounds cool, was lyrics that talked about sex, about adult problems, about drugs, alcohol—truth about all those mysteries of life you were just waiting to explore. I never thought, ‘This stuff is really cool, and people are going to respect it, and some day it’s going to have a name—Americana.’ I just really loved the music. It’s real, you know, real on a really profound level. That’s not to say that pop music is not real; the Airplane was a pop band, though we would have bristled if somebody had called us that. And I mean no disrespect to a band like, say, Paul Revere and the Raiders; those guys could play better than us, back then, and knew more about bands! That’s important stuff, too—but some music’s just born the test of time better than others, on many levels—whether it’s Jimmie Rodgers’ or Blind Blake’s.
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Barry Mazor is the author of Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music and Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, and he is a regular contributor to
Wall Street Journal
