Jorma Kaukonen loves words. But as he likes to quote – and usually followed by a hearty laugh – “At this point, I’m a guy that likes having written songs but hates actually writing them.” But written songs he has – many of them – and his fans eat them up. But words are a big part of his musical chemistry. Even when you look back at the albums he has recorded, either solo or with Hot Tuna, his choice of cover songs tend to lean towards painting a picture of an emotion or an action or simply consciousness as seen through his eyes. Kaukonen might be saluted as a guitar player but his words define him more than you may think.
Born in Washington DC, Kaukonen got to experience the world as only a state department personnel father could allow – by moving to places only us normal kids read about in our school geography books; places like the Philippines and Pakistan. He met and befriended Jack Casady in DC and they formed their first band together, the Triumphs. In Ohio, his friend Ian Buchanan turned him on to the great Reverend Gary Davis. In California, he hooked up with some folkie musicians who were forming what would become the Jefferson Airplane. And now, back in Ohio, Kaukonen devotes a good part of his time, when he’s not out playing gigs with Casady, to his Fur Peace Ranch, a music instruction camp dear to his heart.
At 84, Kaukonen still has the young soul of a musician; meaning he still loves making music after all these years. That has never gone away and undoubtedly never will. He still loves playing shows and meeting fans and talking music with them. In 2018, he published his very detailed memoir, Been So Long, sharing stories from his life on and off stage. He played at Woodstock, Altamont and the Monterey Pop Festival; appeared on the covers of Life and Rolling Stone magazines during the Airplane’s heyday; recorded the songs “White Rabbit,” “Somebody To Love” and “Volunteers” with them; was inducted as a band member into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1996; and has seen or played with such legends as Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Cream, Jaco Pastorius, Derek Trucks and Bob Dylan. Blessed, lucky or just in the right place at the right time, Kaukonen has had a front row seat to the magic of rock & roll.
But his rapport with longtime bandmate Jack Casady is something beyond just a lucky twist of fate. Their chemistry is electric, even when performing acoustic shows. Casady has nothing but praise for his friend and musical partner: “Jorma is such a great songwriter and lyricist and there is so much depth of field to the material that we do that you can really involve yourself in many ways within the song,” he told me during a 2020 interview for Glide. “We feed off the audience, of course, and also we feed off of being on the road in different environments night after night. We’re old school, we’re like folk musicians, we like to go across the country to where the people are.”
Coming together organically while members of the Airplane, Kaukonen and Casady’s Hot Tuna was a way to experiment with their instruments. Releasing their debut record in 1970 as a live album was genius, sparking what would become their trademark – live performances that sizzled with ingenuity, passion, respect for tunes that came before them and pure enjoyment of what they could create together. Just a few months ago, they put out Reno Road, songs Casady recorded of Kaukonen back in 1960. And the duo will be on tour through early February before Kaukonen heads out with John Hurlbut from March to June (keep an eye out for more tour dates via Kaukonen’s website https://jormakaukonen.com)
It’s a heady time to be Jorma Kaukonen and I got to speak at length with him about his music, his time in the Airplane, his admiration of the Reverend Davis and what hanging out at Woodstock was like. But first, he had to make sure the dogs were sleeping.
You’re making yourself sound like a normal everyday guy, Jorma
Well, when I’m home, there’s nobody normaler than me (laughs)
And where is home?
I’ve lived in southeast Ohio for thirty-five years. You know, it’s really funny because Vanessa [his wife] goes, “You ever think about leaving?” and I go, “No.” (laughs) My friends are here. I don’t need a map to get around town. It’s perfect.
So what is a normal day for you when you’re at home?
Well, let’s see. My wife’s got this little boutique in town called River Of Time so we got up, had some breakfast, she went to her shop, I walked the dogs and then I went to the supermarket to exchange a propane tank just in case we get a warm day for a BBQ (laughs).
Is there a day that ever goes by where you don’t noodle on your guitar?
You know, there’s probably not a day that I ever don’t pick up a guitar and noodle and mess around a little bit. I actually was on a mission today for two reasons: One, at this point, I’m a guy that likes having written songs but hates actually writing them (laughs). But I’ve been talking to a couple of friends of mine and had some ideas and I was going to see if my muse spoke to me and at the same time warm up a little bit because I actually have a local gig coming up and then I’m going to be on the road. So I play the guitar almost every day but that’s not practicing. So I was actually going to just play a set while the dogs hopefully continue to sleep.
When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
That’s interesting, because I was so in love with the whole process of the guitar and learning the guitar in general that I don’t think I saw difficulties. When I started out playing the guitar, my mission was just to be able to accompany myself – and I started playing guitar in 1954 or 1955 – so I was thinking about like, you know, Johnny Cash songs and Ricky Nelson songs; songs that seemed easy enough for a complete novice to play and sing. I’m not talking about playing guitar like a guy like Steve Cropper or any of the great guitar players back then. I just wanted to accompany myself while I sing songs. And along the way, sort of in spite of myself, I learned how to play the guitar.
So I think in the very beginning, and I’m not saying it’s difficult, cause again I was so in love with the process, I think the most difficult thing was learning what to do with my right hand, cause we were doing a lot of stuff back then. We used simple chords cause we were just accompanying ourselves. But to be able to play a rhythmic accompaniment with the right hand, I think that was the toughest thing.
How long did it take to get it where you were happy with it?
From the moment that I discovered the guitar until pretty much when I was through actually going to school, that’s pretty much all that I did. In 1960, when I started to learn some of the Reverend Davis stuff and get turned on to some of the blues guys that I admired but I’d never seen them and I didn’t know anybody before that point who knew how to play that kind of stuff, everything was so new. My mentor, this guy named Ian Buchanan, and he’s long gone, but these guys never told us, “Make an A minor chord, make a C chord.” They just said, “This is how it goes.” And I’d look at them and then I’d scurry off into a corner and try to get what he was showing me and I’d come back and I’d show him and say, “How’s this?” And I’ll never forget, more often than not they’d go, “You suck. I told you it goes like this.” (laughs) So just playing relentlessly, and even when I’m sure I probably didn’t sound very good, I enjoyed playing in front of people, and I probably played in front of people when I shouldn’t have, but they were very tolerant. And after a while, I got it.
You’ve never really been a gadget guy, is that right?
You know, a lot of time has gone by since the first gadgets came out. With the Airplane, I had a Maestro Fuzz-Tone and a Wah-Wah pedal, and that was it. Now, my daughter plays music also and she’s got enough pedals, it looks like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (laughs). And that’s what everyone seems to do today. But at this moment, I’m not dismissive of them but I don’t really need anything. If I’m playing electric guitar, I’d want a drive pedal and a Wah-Wah pedal but that’s pretty much all I’d use. Every now and then I’d get some weird Eventide thing, like a thing called the Rose that you kind of have to have a degree in engineering to use them productively. But if I get a pedal like that I just like it to do random stuff (laughs).
On what album, in your entire catalog, did you experiment the most with the guitar?
I think that the Hot Tuna recordings in the seventies were absolutely, at least spiritually, influenced by Cream, one of the greatest live bands I’ve ever seen in my life. But I think that what happened with the Airplane, not just gadget speaking but musically speaking, was when we did After Bathing At Baxter’s, which was our third album. At that point, Surrealistic Pillow had been a big hit so the record company pretty much gave us carte blanche in the studio, and we just started messing around with stuff. I mean, we’d just been inspired by The Beatles Sgt Pepper, which obviously opened a lot of doors for guys like us that before that had just been quote-unquote doing songs. But just to be able to find something for me to be able to adapt to whatever songs the great writers in that band, whether it was Marty Balin, Grace Slick or Paul Kantner, came up with.
Recording an album has advanced so far since you first went into a recording studio. What do you like and what do you not like?
In the beginning, the first Airplane album, Takes Off, was a 3-track machine, no noise reduction, no Dolby, none of that kind of stuff; and Surrealistic Pillow was done on a 4-track, no noise reduction. Baxter’s was a big breakthrough for us, 8-track. That’s funny because my daughter could have like a hundred tracks on her iPhone and record an album, you know (laughs). So in the beginning, because of the way things were, because you couldn’t do a lot of overdubbing because the quality of the tape degraded, was the band to be well enough rehearsed so you could get a good basic track, and then you pretty much had to capture, and if you were doing overdubs, you pretty much had to capture them quickly too, cause you just couldn’t do it over and over again.
I think that when the technology advanced so you could do stuff over and over and over and over again, it was exciting in a lot of ways but in a lot of other ways, for me, it took away some of the excitement of playing music live. Now listen, this is old musician guy stuff, so I’ll issue that disclaimer immediately (laughs), because a lot of times people are architecting Franken-solos and cutting things together, and I get it, I really do. But it’s been a while since I’ve had a budget to make an album that would allow me to do a lot of that kind of stuff and I don’t like recording myself, so I don’t have a studio at home. So for me, the excitement is to be able to go in and capture something exciting that you don’t need to build by cutting pieces apart.
Are you currently working on something to record?
It’s like writing a book. There are two kinds of people: people that talk about it and people who have actually done it. Same thing is true of recording. Right now, I’m one of these people that talks about it, because I just don’t have enough new material to go and do a whole project. But, I have been doing some writing of late and Jack and I have talked about when we get enough material to go and do a record that, yeah, we will do another one.
Tell us about Reno Road, cause I hear that has a very interesting story.
In the spring of 1960, my whole life was changed in the spring quarter at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. That’s when I met this guy, Ian Buchanan, and he was a real interesting guy. He’s been gone for a while but you can Google him. But to make a long story short, he was from New York and he knew guys personally. He was buddies with, a contemporary of, Dave Van Ronk and with Reverend Gary Davis. He just knew all these people and he was THE GUY back then. He could play and he was artistic and all this kind of stuff. He took it upon himself to teach me a bunch of songs and I learned nineteen songs. Then, I had this co-op job, cause Antioch was a work study program school and I worked at a spinal cord damage hospital in New York City on East 34th Street, the Rusk Institute Of Physical Medicine, and what I did was either work or play the guitar. My dad was in the foreign service and our family had been stationed in the Philippines for a while and they were still living there. I spent so much time playing the guitar in 1960 that even though Antioch College did not throw me out, they did not encourage me to return (laughs). So I figured I’d go live with Mom and Dad and put in a year of college in the Philippines.
Anyway, getting ready to go back to the Philippines, I stopped in DC, which is my hometown, and Jack lived there in Reno Road, hence the name of this record, and he asked me, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Well, let me show you.” I always had my guitar with me and he said, “Wait a minute,” and he had this old tape recorder, it was new back then, but he started recording and I recorded nineteen songs. Fast-forward from the dawn of time to now, a year or so ago, Jack discovered these tapes that he had made at the end of the summer of 1960. He had done all the stuff that he needed to do so tapes don’t crumble and fall apart, and digitized them. And that is where the source material for Reno Road came from.
When he finally had the tapes digitized and I got a chance to listen to them, I realized that at the time these recordings were made, I’d been playing fingerstyle guitar for maybe four and a half months. And all I could say is, I wasn’t bad (laughs). Of course, it was all I did. It’s so interesting and, again, a lifetime has elapsed since we made those tapes, but I still do a lot of the same songs. I try never to forget anything I’ve learned and some of the stuff was actually more complex then than it evolved into the last half a century. It’s really interesting.
Pete Sears told me one time when he joined up with Hot Tuna that he had to know everything because you knew everything.
Right and Pete Sears, he’s one of the heaviest cats that I know. He is the only piano player that I personally know that can channel the great Chicago player Otis Spann, who was totally awesome. And Pete is totally awesome.
You’ve done a lot of covers on your records, especially by the Reverend Davis. What was the toughest song you tried to learn to play on guitar?
Wow, that’s a really good question. I think one of the toughest songs I learned back in the day, and sad to say I’ve let it go and I need to do some work to get it back, was Reverend Davis’ version of “Twelve Gates To The City.” We could geek out about this for a little bit but one of my friends, the great Roy Book Binder, says, “Your left hand is what you know but your right hand is who you are.” And I think that is really true because your right hand , if you’re right-handed, is the thing that actually physically draws the sound out of a guitar.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is because Reverend Davis was what we call a two-finger picker. He used his thumb and he used the first finger of his right hand to play the guitar. As a result, his rhythms tend to be very bouncy and you don’t notice a lot of like triplet fingers and stuff like that because he’s only got two fingers, even though he could do that. I’m a three-finger picker, a classical player, but I need two fingers to support on the face of the guitar. Because I use three fingers – my thumb and the first two fingers of my right hand – there is a lot of triple fingers in my music. Now, that is so comfortable for me to do and a lot of the stuff, and again I go to “Twelve Gates To The City,” has none of that whatsoever. So it was just sort of like an alien thing for me to learn back in the day. And if I get off my lazy butt and decide to relearn it again, it’ll still be alien again.
What was your initial attraction to Reverend Davis and his music?
Wow, I’m not sure it’s going to be easy to put into words. There was something about his music that just grabbed me viscerally almost immediately. A lot of his stuff is not very typical. Blues music as a genre uses a lot of repetitive vocabulary. Not everybody does it but many of the people do and a lot of the good stuff, whether it’s using repetitive vocabulary, doesn’t sound the same as everything else. But Reverend Davis was a very sophisticated guy, and this is not a conversation I would have ever had with him cause I didn’t know him in that way, but it would be curious to know how he, or IF he, intellectually approached the music thinking about passing chords or all this kind of stuff, as many modern musicians do. But in any case, his stuff was very sophisticated and there is something that was almost classical about his nature, you know. Not rhythmically speaking but chordly. He used all these great chords and passing chords and his licks were not, and again I don’t mean to be dismissive, but his licks were not typical blues licks and all that kind of stuff.
What about his lyrics? He was very gospel but very realistic. If you keep listening, it’s in there, which is like most blues music. Did that talk to you as well?
You know, as somebody who grew up in a Jewish/Lutheran family with nobody who was observant about anything, it’s interesting. I remember talking to David Bromberg one time, “Why is it that us Jewish guys when we were younger were so attracted to fundamentalist Christian music?” And we never came up with an answer but I think about it from time to time. I think it’s the honesty of the emotion over anything else and the fact that you could listen to the possibility of good and evil, you know, fall from redemption, without having it be obliterated by dogma. Does that make any sense at all?
Yeah, it does. I was listening more to the words of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” this morning and it could be written today. It’s spot on.
I agree. It’s truly timeless music, there is no question about that. And to be honest with you, who knows what kind of music is going to be timeless, but I agree. Reverend Davis’ art is absolutely timeless. Most of the recordings of him that we’ve heard have tended not to be secular music but tended to be gospel. But he also played blues too. I didn’t know him personally the way that some of my older friends did but apparently he would never play quote-unquote blues songs around Mother Davis (laughs). But we know that he played a lot of blues songs too. In fact, have you ever read his biography called Say No To The Devil? A guy at the University Of Chicago wrote a biography of Reverend Davis called Say No To The Devil and see if you can get that from your library. That is well worth the read.
What is a song that you have written that has changed in it’s meaning to you over the years?
Oh, that’s a good question, wow. I’m going to have to really wrack my brain here a little bit. That’s a toughie. You know, I’m not sure I have an answer for that but I’m a guitar player that occasionally writes songs and to quote my friend Chris Smither, “I hate writing songs but I love having written songs.” (laughs) I need something to just bump me in the ass to make me do something. So over the years at different times a lot of, well, almost all of my songs, were definitely springing from whatever is going on in my life at the time and a lot of that had to do with the tumultuous relationship I think that I had with my ex-wife, may she rest in peace.
So there is a song that I wrote, and it’s on the Jorma album, called “Wolves & Lambs.” It’s a tough song in a lot of ways but I remember reading an interview with Pete Townshend where somebody is talking about, “Look, you’re doing all these great songs with The Who and you’re playing them all the time. How do you maintain the honest intensity of your delivery as a singer, not just as the songwriter?” And his answer to this question was, as I recall, just to paraphrase, “It’s like being an actor, you need to put yourself in that frame of mind.” So I think with a lot of the songs today, and I can’t believe I am going to say this but I will, I’ve got such a well-adjusted, better than moderately happy life that for me to do a song that was written in an uncomfortable time, it IS like being an actor. Again, I’m not sure that answers your question; in fact I’m pretty sure it doesn’t answer your question, but it may be all I’ve got (laughs).
When you were in the Airplane, what was Paul like as a leader of this band?
First of all, what an interesting cast of characters, and I was one of them, but I’m not talking about myself right now. I met Paul the first year I was at Santa Clara, which would have been in like the fall of 1962. Paul was a local folkie at the time we met and even though he wasn’t a blues musician we all played like the same coffeehouses and stuff. But Paul always seemed to know what it is he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. For example, and we can’t poll Marty on this because sad to say he has passed away too, but Paul was really into the vocal harmonies in the band. He always, from the beginning, insisted that we have a female vocalist in the band, and for us it was either Signe or Grace later on. Even back before it was fashionable to write epic songs, Paul always wrote epic songs; that’s just who he was. I’m not sure he would have internalized this but I think that he had a firm idea of who he was as an artist and for a young artist I think that’s rare. He seemed to have confidence but people say, yeah you just look so confident and all this kind of stuff and I go, “Well, I might have looked confident but I was scared shitless a lot of the time back then.” (laughs) Even though we would never have had this conversation with each other, cause it would have cut a little too close to the bone, we might have all been there a little bit.
Did you always agree with the direction some of the songs went in?
I think that one of the real strengths of the Airplane as a group of disparate artists was the fact that I don’t remember there ever being a band meeting or discussion or any kind of histrionics accompanying any songs that anybody wrote. Whoever wrote a song, it got on the record. It is true that Paul, Marty and subsequently Grace wrote a lot of songs together and I wasn’t privy to that when it was happening but I just remember it was a very artistically friendly group for the most part. Now, I think when we got into the studio, whichever band member had like a favorite band going, like whether it was Otis Redding or Cream or whatever it was, would have their take on the actual recording process, being influenced by whoever they were into at the time. But as far as the actual writing of the songs and stuff, we just let it happen.
Of all the albums you have recorded in your career, which one top to bottom do you feel you were on point and locked in at your highest potential as a guitar player?
Okay, I’m going to go for a subcategory here but you’re going to get two answers to your question. So the first answer would be acoustic and I would have to say my work on Quah, the solo I did with Tom Hobson. I think as an acoustic player, I was definitely at the top of my game. You know, everything was so quintessentially pure at that time. I’ve learned a lot more stuff, obviously, since then and as a result I think that my current playing tends to be a lot more eclectic, which is good in some ways and in other ways it’s not as strong as the more simplistic stuff. So as an acoustic player, I’m going to say the work on Quah. Now as an electric player, for the Airplane, Bless Its Pointed Little Head, the live album, absolutely.
What was on fire for you on Quah?
This was really the first time that I got a chance, not counting Jack’s recording in 1960 of course (laughs), the first chance that I got a project of my own and this is one of the situations where I went in there, the songs that I’d written were all done and all they needed to do was be recorded. I was playing a lot, working a lot, so I was really sharp. And in the studio, because there are no vocal overdubbing in that stuff, that’s all live, I was just so perfectly prepared. And I can’t imagine being that prepared to do an album ever again. But we’ll see, we’re not done yet (laughs).
I want to ask you about those haunting opening notes between you and Jack in “White Rabbit.” That song already existed and it was slightly different from what the Airplane did with it. What do you remember about almost recreating that intro?
Jack is responsible for that intro, and again, this is really interesting too cause of course as you said, the Great Society did “White Rabbit” before us. Jack references that classical piece “Bolero” as being an inspiration to that. We would really need him to weigh in on this but whatever it was, it is such a quintessentially original intro, period; because the chord changes are so not rock & roll, if you know what I mean, that the little lead part that I came up with, and I could never come up with a lead part like that today because now I know too much stuff. But keep in mind, I’d only been playing quote-unquote lead guitar for a couple of years at that point so it was pretty much a blank page in a lot of ways. So what Jack and Spencer Dryden, the drummer, did with that intro set the scene for me to come up with the part that I came up with.
Now, every now and then over the years somebody goes, “Oh, you know, we’re sitting in, we’ve got a chick singer, she wants to do ‘White Rabbit,’ fine, count me in and how hard could it be.” And the answer is, harder than you think if you don’t know the song (laughs). You know, I’ve let a lot of stuff go so maybe ten-some years ago I got an opportunity to back a female singer at the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame and she wanted to do “White Rabbit” and at this moment I decided, you know, I’m going to quit fooling around and I’m going to relearn my part. You’re going to love this, I bought the tune from one of those places where you can buy a tune online. I bought that tune and I sat down at our little stage at the Fur Peace Ranch and I spent hours learning my original part, which I now know (laughs). So every now and then, we do something with a band, like Dark Star Orchestra or just folks. “Let’s do ‘White Rabbit,’ it’s a great jam song.” And I go, “It’s not a jam song for me. It’s a song-song and I’ve got parts. I’ll kick it off and play rhythm and you guys can jam until the cows come home but the only thing I’m going to do lead-wise is that intro.”
“Valley Of Tears,” on Jorma, is like a little schizophrenic song the way the guitar jumps kind of all over the place. It’s almost like two songs thrown together. Tell us about the creation and evolution of that song.
A producer named David Kahne produced that song and that album and he had been the producer of Pearl Harbor & The Explosions, the San Francisco band, etc, etc. I think the creative layering of sonic textures on that song, that’s David all the way. That’s a solo album where I played pretty much, actually I played all the parts. If it was a fretted instrument, I played it on that record. But what David came up with in terms of production of that song, I felt was brilliant. I’ve listened to some of the songs from that session recently and when we get through with this conversation I’m going to email him, cause he lives in New York now, and again tell him what a great job he did. He just really used the talent that I brought to the studio in ways that I never could have done by myself.
I would never want to produce myself ever, because it would be just boring to me. I like working with other people and to try to bring the best out for myself with what they have to offer also. In this case, it’s not just another musician, it’s the producer too. He says, “Well, try this,” and I remember trying it and going, “Wow, I never would have thought of that in a million years.” So yeah, I think that making music more often than not is a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
You were in college and then Airplane during the Vietnam War and the band was getting kind of vocal about it. How did you feel about what was happening in the world?
You know, both my father and his two brothers, all of them long gone of course, were WWII vets, and I think that coming out of high school, I hadn’t really developed any strong feelings yet about going into the service and I think had I not gotten into the Airplane, and it’s difficult to say as there’s always points to speculate, but it’s not unthinkable to me that had something more important than going into the service not come up for me, I might have gone in. But something more important did come up. And, living in San Francisco, and I don’t know what it was like in the rest of the country, but San Francisco was a really strange societal ecosystem back then. I don’t know what it’s like now cause I’ve been gone for years but it just seemed pointless to me and I know that this is not a noble reason not to serve but I just felt like I personally had better things to do. That being said, most of my buddies that I grew up with in DC went into the service and had I not played the guitar and moved to California, I might have too.
I think I was part of an evolving geopolitical situation. The school that I was going to at the time is a very, very conservative Jesuit school but as a non-Catholic, I wasn’t really involved in a lot of the stuff that happened on campus. I just wanted to get through with it. And, to be honest with you, one of the reasons I stayed in school for as long as I was in school was I had a student deferment. That being said, as soon as I graduated, and I was married when I was a senior in college, as soon as I graduated, I got drafted almost immediately. I was disqualified and considered 4F but I remember that the sergeant at the recruiting center, cause I actually got drafted and went to the recruiting center when they 4F’d me, said, “You’ll never get another government job.” And I remember I said, “Promise?” (laughs)
But anyhow, just the emotional and political landscape at the time in San Francisco, for many of us it was unthinkable. And, we were so fortunate that we were part of something that was happening in terms of our musical career and relating to the society we lived in. San Francisco was absolutely, even though California was a very conservative state at that time, San Francisco was not. So I think the feeling of the antiwar movement in San Francisco was very, very strong. You know, San Francisco was, and I guess in many ways, was a small town. Back in those days when I moved to San Francisco, I moved to California in 1962, I don’t think there was a ten story building that existed in San Francisco. It was really a small town. So I think that our political reality might have been light years away from what it was in the rest of the country. But the antiwar movement gathered traction and I had many friends that would have been my age, were they still alive, that served in Vietnam that are not still alive because they served in Vietnam.
On a lighter note, who was the first real rock star you ever met?
Okay, so there’s a couple categories here so let’s go back to the dawn of time. Jack and I had this little band in DC in 1958 and 1959 called the Triumphs. In those days when artists had a hit and they’d go on tour, they would pick up a pick-up band wherever they went. We were with this agency that would hire us to back people. There was a singer called Jimmy Clanton who had a hit back in 1958/1959 called “Just A Dream” and we were hired to go to Bluefield, West Virginia, to back Jimmy Clanton for a couple of songs that he was going to sing at this National Guard Armory. Since he had a hit, I’d have to say he was a bonafide star. Now, moving ahead to California, I think that the first real rock star that I met was David Crosby and I met him before he was a rock star. But he was always a rock star (laughs). Crosby and his buddies became gigantic rock stars but even back when he was a solo folkie guy, he was a rock star. He acted like it, he demanded he be treated like it. I knew him for many years, may he rest in peace, and he was always like that.
What was the first song that you heard where the lyrics really meant something to you?
I got this one: “Endless Sleep.” We did this with our band and I don’t know why but “Endless Sleep” was a song by Jody Reynolds: “The night was black, rain fallin’ down; Looked for my baby, she’s nowhere around; Traced her footsteps down to the shore; Afraid she’s gone forever more.” For some reason, this song was so sad I loved it (laughs). I was like seventeen or eighteen. And of course it was a song that was doable for me and Jack so we did it.
Have you recorded it?
You know, that’s a good question. Hang on just a second … okay, so Hot Tuna has actually recorded this song and it’s on the album Live At Sweetwater Two (laughs). You got to check out the original too though.
Besides your band, who did you hang out with at Woodstock?
Wow, that’s a good question. It’s hard to remember who was actually backstage when we were there but I guess one of the guys that I hung out with who wasn’t in my band was Mike Shrieve, the drummer in Santana. And you’re going to love this – Mike Shrieve’s drum thing on “Soul Sacrifice,” what an unbelievable song. I met Mike through my brother a couple of years before this and at one point we thought about adding him to the band, to the Airplane, and I remember Paul said, “He’ll never be any good. He’s too young.” So Paul was obviously wrong about this (laughs) because Mike was awesome.
But in any case, like I said, because we were friends from California, I remember hanging out with him. Other than that, it was just like wait and wait and wait and wait and getting wet and trying to keep dry, trying to find a port-a-potty. You know, thinking back at the Woodstock thing, the whole experience was so unromantic EXCEPT for playing for an audience of that size. I remember a couple of years ago my daughter was going to summer camp and we drove her and we stopped by the museum in Woodstock and she had two comments. One was she looked at these pictures of us and she said, “Do you guys go out dressed like that?” And I told her, “Sweetie, these are not stage clothes. We dressed like that all the time.” (laughs) And the other thing was the size of the crowd and I said, “You know, I’d obviously never played before a crowd that big in my life before. What an experience.”
You met Otis at Monterey?
Sure did. You know, that’s one of these tragic stories because I absolutely loved him. I mean, first of all, I love soul music but the power of his performance, his band was awesome.
I understand that you keep everything so what is the most unique piece of memorabilia you own?
It’s funny because I was just looking at it and it’s nothing to do with music (laughs). When my dad was stationed in the Philippines, the American diplomatic guys and the military guys had an R&R place in a little town called Baguio City and that was up north in the mountains, very high mountains, and the indigenous people that lived there were a headhunter tribe called the Ifugao. They were also not immune to the fact that they could sell souvenirs, so I have, and I actually just found it recently and it’s in my living room – I’m not sure if my wife is going to let it stay there (laughs) but it’s there right now – I have a spear from the Ifugao tribe of the northern Philippines in my living room next to the fireplace.
Tell us about the American Flag guitar. Do you still have that one?
I do not. That guitar, I got it like that and that was a 1957 Strat that whoever owned it before me painted it like an American flag. You know, things come and go in life and you can’t have everything but I wouldn’t mind having that one back. That was a good one. But I got that in probably 1974, maybe 1975, but when I was disassembling my life with my ex-wife, we were getting ready to split up and stuff, we hocked a lot of stuff. We used to call it, putting it in storage, although I never went to get it back. So anyway, to make a long story short, I hocked it on a pawn shop on 5th Street in San Francisco and strangely enough one of my friends who didn’t even know it was mine bought it and he’s still got it in LA. That’s a nice guitar.
Jack told me that he was forever chasing tone. What have you been forever chasing?
I would agree with him on that too. The tone, aside from maybe on some level chasing artistic purity with a sidetrack every now and then, tone has always been important to me. I’m not a really note-y player, it’s not my thing, but as a result, because I’m not, I get a lot of chances to really try and get the maximum tone out of my instrument, whether I’m playing electric or acoustic. For me, tone is everything.
When writing your book, what was something you realized about yourself that you hadn’t before?
I realized, and that’s a great question and I actually have an answer for it. I realized that I didn’t have to be self-conscious about anything.
You give a lot of details, you give a lot of stories.
I like details
You do, you like words, and you are still being wordy today, writing on a blog, etc. Why do you love writing?
I think it’s just a function of the way I grew up. I’m second generation American born in this country. My grandparents came over from their respective old countries. Both my mom and dad were the first people that ever went to college in their families; no, that’s not true, my maternal grandfather was a doctor with a PHD. But my father’s family, none of them went to school. And they were very proud of language and vocabulary and all this stuff so I believe just growing up around them as they were trying to find their way, I just liked the sound of words, you know, and I’m a reader also, and the books I read needed to have descriptions where I could see what was going on. I always liked those kinds of descriptions a lot.
We used to go to the library all the time. Now, of course, you just buy it on Amazon. Although I will say, I don’t like reading books on a kindle or stuff like that. I like to be able to dog ear the pages, I like to hold the book, AND I’m really loathe to clear the shelves and the shelves need to be cleared and books need to be passed on periodically but I keep them until we got books everywhere (laughs). Anyway, the first book that I read that really got me, with the descriptions and the dialogue and stuff, was Treasure Island.
What’s next for you?
I still enjoy touring, because playing the guitar and doing what we do, I still really love that. So in a lot of ways, I mean, I know at some point I’m probably going to do it less, but we’ve got a really busy year at the end of this year and the beginning of 2025 and I am really looking forward to it. I enjoy performing in front of people. I enjoy chasing the tone of my instrument. I’m so blessed that our audience allows me to tell my story over and over again, and people still want to hear it. I love all that stuff, I really do. So the fact that we can still book gigs and I can still do that and people still want to see me play, and you and I can have these conversations, I enjoy that also. I understand that at some point things change but so far I’m okay with the way they are.
Photographs by Scotty Hall and Andy J Gordon
One Response
Going to see Jorma and Jack in a few weeks really enjoyed the interview. He’s like an encyclopedia of knowledge. Thanks.