The sweet sound of friendship: A conversation with Hot Tuna's Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady

You might expect two bona-fide rock stars from the band Jefferson Airplane, now both in their 80s, to be relaxing in retirement. But instead, lifelong friends Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady are as active as ever, performing in the band Hot Tuna with a full touring schedule and a strong involvement in music education.

As founding members of the Jefferson Airplane, one of the first psychedelic rock bands to achieve commercial success, the two experienced meteoric stardom that came with the release of the Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow , which featured the hit songs “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.”

Boarding the Airplane

Kaukonen is a virtuoso guitarist, first playing only acoustic guitar, but quickly transitioning to electric guitar with Jefferson Airplane. In 2010, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 54 on its list of 100 Greatest Guitarists , calling him “a gifted fingerpicker and bluesman who developed a raga-inflected style as the Airplane’s folk rock grew increasingly psychedelic.”

Drawn to the blues as a teenager in the 1950s, Kaukonen did his high school term paper on blues giant Big Bill Broonzy.

“The pop music that was accessible to us in those days was insipidly awful, lyrically speaking," Kaukonen said. "That fact that the blues talked about real life was immediately appealing.”

Casady described getting his first guitar at age 12, and within two years was gigging around the Washington D.C. area, which boasted dozens of nightclubs, places where young musicians like himself (underaged and with a fake ID) could hone their skills.

“One night you were playing Louis Prima stuff, the next night it would be Ray Charles, the next night you were playing (country artist) Mac Wiseman,” he recalled.

One of his contemporaries was guitarist Danny Gatton, who would go on to be recognized as one of the great guitarists of his day. In 1960, Gatton offered him a gig as a bass player but Casady said, “I’ve never played bass.”

He said Gatton came back with: “How hard can it be? It’s got 4 strings!” So, playing a borrowed electric bass, Casady took the gig and fell in love with the instrument.

“The timbre, the tonal area, and the power of what it could do in a band, to move so many elements of orchestration,” he said.

Casady described being influenced by the great jazz bassists of the late 1950s, like Charles Mingus , Ron Carter and Scott LaFaro — but also by the blues catalogs that were just being released around 1960 like Son House , John Hurt and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. He said he would take the bus to the Library of Congress and utilize their listening booths to experience music from around the world, saying “that was our Google back then.”

Casady was one of the first rock musicians to play electric bass as a lead instrument and soon developed a signature sound that landed him recording sessions with Crosby, Stills and Nash and Jimi Hendrix.

Jamming, touring, teaching

Hot Tuna came about due to, as Kaukonen described it, “God’s infinite wisdom and synchronicity."

"When Jack came out to join the Airplane, we would share cheap hotel rooms that didn’t have TVs, and I would always have my acoustic guitar with me," he remembered.

"We’d sit around and we just started playing. We each brought what we had to the table and we learned to read each other really well. We didn’t plan anything, it was just fun to do.”

According to Kaukonen, the art of playing together for 60 years comes down to “listening and mutual respect, not being afraid to take chances. It’s not like being a surgeon...if we make mistakes, nobody dies. We just try not to do that again!”

In 1969, Hot Tuna began doing opening sets for Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane released eight albums between 1966 and 1972, when they essentially split up into two groups, with Casady and Kaukonen moving on full-time to Hot Tuna, while singer Grace Slick and the other members regrouped as Jefferson Starship.

Since 1970, Hot Tuna has released seven live albums and seven studio albums. Casady and Kaukonen appear on all of them, with a variety of additional personnel.

Music education has also become an important part of their lives. Both have taught music since their teenage years, as a way to earn money outside of gigging. In 1989, Kaukonen took that to a much larger level, starting the Fur Peace Guitar Ranch near his home in southern Ohio, offering in-person and remote lessons and workshops for all levels of players.

“I just love those ‘aha moments’ when a student gets something and has a good time with it,” Kaukonen said. Casady is also an active teacher at the Ranch.

Hot Tuna today

A modern-day Hot Tuna show is different every night.

“The key to Hot Tuna—tonight—will be listening in the moment. Every night is special, it only happens once. The catalog after all this time is quite vast, and we try to turn over material that we haven’t played in a long time,” Casady said.

Kaukonen added: “That magic of playing with someone who understands you, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts...we’re looking forward to making that happen.”

When I asked them how they have maintained their friendship for 60+ years, Kaukonen joked: “We’ve never had a band meeting! I don’t think we’ve ever had an argument about anything.”

Casady remembered when they first met as teenagers: “It’s real simple, he was a cool guy and I just wanted to be his friend. And we’ve worked at being friends. It’s something that you have to nurture. There’s mutual respect and we’ve never infringed on each other’s territory.”

Both men have been inducted, along with other members of the Jefferson Airplane, into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.

Hot Tuna will be performing at the Lincoln Theater in Mt. Vernon on Thursday, September 19 and at The Rialto in Tacoma on Friday, September 20.