Legendary Rockers Hot Tuna Keep On Truckin'
http://www.hamptons.com/The-Arts/Top-Stories/9577/Legendary-Rockers-Hot-Tuna-Keep-On-Truckin-At.html
By Douglas Harrington
December 24, 2009
Westhampton Beach - Short of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie
Watts of The Rolling Stones, it can be argued that the longest,
continuous musical collaboration in Rock & Roll has been shared by
two of the original members of Jefferson Airplane, Jack Casady and
Jorma Kaukonen who simultaneously performed in their own band, Hot
Tuna, while members of the Airplane.
Jefferson Airplane has come and gone, but Hot Tuna is alive and well,
and performed at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on
December 6 to a sold-out crowd. Hamptons.com attended the show and
interviewed legendary R&R Hall of Fame bassist Casady a few days
prior to the performance.
Although Kaukonen had Casady by a few years, the two musicians met
and started playing music together in junior high school in
Washington, DC in the late 1950s. "I was in my last year of junior
high and Jorma was a senior, he was a friend of my older brother
Charles. We were both playing guitar and we struck up a friendship
and formed a little band back in those days called The Triumphs. We
did Buddy Holly songs and a lot of simple Rock-a-Billy stuff."
Their friendship continued while Kaukonen attended Antioch College in
Ohio. "While Jorma developed an interest in doing a lot of finger
picking blues at the time, I was working in DC doing R&B. We kept our
musical friendship up as we both had always had a love of the blues
and folk music and the regional music of the Appalachian Mountains."
Kaukonen transferred out of Antioch to Santa Clara University in the
San Francisco Bay area in 1962. "That is where he met Jerry Garcia
and Janis Joplin in I think 1964 or 1965. Out of that there are
combinations of people in that scene at the time and so he met Paul
Kantner and Marty Balin who were forming a folk-rock group as it
were. I joked that, 'What the blues purist is going into a folk-rock
band? We both laughed."
Jefferson Airplane had only been in its forming stage for a few
months and they were still in need of a bass player. Casady, unawares
to Kaukonen, had picked up the bass when he was 16 during his
friend's college absence from DC, "Jorma said, 'Listen, our manager
promises to pay us each $50 a week whether we work or not, do you
want to come out here?' I said, 'You're on!'" Casady dropped out of
college and headed west to join the band that would become Jefferson Airplane.
The Airplane was one of the pivotal bands of the 1967 summer of love
convergence on San Francisco's Haight-Asbury district by hippies and
flower children world and nationwide who wanted to tune-in, turn-on
and drop-out. Their "Surrealistic Pillow" album was considered by
many to be the psychedelic rock album to which all others should be
measured. Two seminal songs from the album, "White Rabbit" and
"Somebody To Love" were named to Rolling Stone Magazine's list of the
500 Greatest Songs.
A great live performance act, the Jefferson Airplane had the rare
distinction to have played the Monterey (1967), Woodstock and
Altamont festivals (both in 1969). The violence that plagued the
Altamont Festival is considered by many as the beginning of the end
of the Flower power generation and movement. On the local level,
readers may remember or have attended, as I did, the Jefferson
Airplane outdoor concert at Stony Brook University in 1970 that drew
almost 20,000 people. In 1972 the Airplane played their last live
performance at the Winterland Theatre in San Francisco. Casady and
Kaukonen left and devoted themselves exclusively to Hot Tuna, while
Kantner and Grace Slick formed the Jefferson Starship two years later.
According to Casady the notion that Hot Tuna was originally formed
because of the Airplane's touring hiatus due to vocalist Slick's 1970
vocal operation or 1971 near-fatal car accident is "not exactly
true." Although remaining members of Jefferson Airplane, Kaukonen and
Casady performed frequently outside the band prior to officially
forming Hot Tuna, "We played all the time. Jorma and I had a lot of
interest in the finger-style music of Reverend Gary Davis and Blind
Blake and a bunch of others, but also Jorma was starting to develop
songs on his own. We started doing a lot of playing outside the
confines of Jefferson Airplane that didn't seem to fit into where the
band was headed. It was on-going all along; even perhaps as early as
1968-1969 we started doing sets on stage before the Jefferson
Airplane started shows just as Jorma and Jack."
Casady further explained, "Because we were all on RCA, we were able
to get a separate contract from RCA as Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady
for whatever band we wanted to put together. So we signed as that
separate group and later on we had to name that group and so we named
it Hot Tuna. We tried different people in the band, but in essence we
could do a show with just a guitar and a bass. That was the neat
thing about us and that is what we still do today."
As noted, by 1972 Jefferson Airplane had paled and Hot Tuna had more
than established itself. They packed concert halls and had fans
screaming, "Hot F---king Tuna" from the rafters. Kaukonen and Casady
had somehow bridged the gaps between folk, blues and rock, and along
the way had gathered an army of devoted fans. Kaukonen and Casady
were two blues purists that somehow found a way to fill stadiums with
R&R fans. Kaukonen had truly emerged as one of the greatest
guitarists of his generation.
I asked Casady about the 1974 Hot Tuna decision to go electric, "That
is just the natural direction of what you get involved in, I think
you try an approach or a genre and you submerge yourself into it.
Yes, we got into a vey loud, what we call the 'Metal Version' of Hot
Tuna, but the music was still based in the blues and finger-picking
genres of the time." Hot Tuna has over the years vacillated between
acoustic and electric moments and in the process churned out almost
two dozen albums and garnered life-long fans worldwide.
Unfortunately all good things come to end, as did the driving,
electric rock-blues of Hot Tuna. However, the relationship between
Casady and Kaukonen never ended. "Yeah, can you believe 51 years now?
I think because of our mutual respect for each other it is just
better than ever." All the solo albums aside, all the other
collaborations and all the individual projects, Hot Tuna lives on! I
asked Casady what I could expect at the all acoustic WHBPAC concert.
"You'll see Barry Mitterhof on mandolin, as well as tenor guitar,
banjo, ukulele; Jorma on guitar and vocals and Jack Casady on bass.
You will hear some new material and you will hear some classic
material, and as always, we will pick out a couple of new/old ones we
haven't played in a while."
Over the years Hot Tuna has played frequently in the East End at The
Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, but this is their first time
performing at WHBPAC and as expected the show was sold out. The
majority of the crowd was indeed filled out with mostly 50-somethings
from my generation who gathered in the lobby and on the street before
the show chatting about past Hot Tuna concerts and memorable moments.
There were plenty of Hot Tuna tee shirts, worn and tattered from
years gone by and new ones for sale in the WHBPAC lobby, along with
CDs, hats and, yes, the band members' signature herbal teas.
Once settled in their seats, the crowd erupted as Casady, Kaukonen
and Mitterhof took their places in three chairs on center stage. They
opened up with "Nobody Knows You When You Are Down and Out" and the
audience went wild. As to be expected this acoustic show did not have
the driving, high energy of the electric Hot Tuna of by-gone days,
but the clean, crisp acoustic nature of the performance lent itself
to really hearing the artistic mastery of these superb musicians and
the beautiful lyrics of Kaukonen. It was clear that both the band and
the audience were having a musical love affair in Westhampton Beach,
as Kaukonen himself noted in his post-concert online diary, "Wow...
another sold out show and this one at a new venue. We love this
place. The venue is pristine and sounds great... the food was
great... a grand evening for us."
If I can take the liberty of comparing the performance to wine,
rather than the effervescence of bubbly young champagne, this was
perfectly aged Cabernet that had grown richer, deeper, and more
nuanced over the years. With the encore of "Hesitation Blues," Hot
Tuna performed 21 numbers during the two sets and yes indeed, there
was the occasional, familiar shout out from the audience of "Hot F虺ing Tuna."
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