Back in 1962, Jorma Kaukonen traveled from Ohio, where he was studying at Antioch College, to the University of Santa Clara in California. He was already an accomplished fingerstyle guitar player, having been tutored by a friend at Antioch — who in turn had studied with Reverend Gary Davis.
So he was in some ways the guy least likely to become one of psychedelic rock’s primary electric guitar heroes.
But that’s exactly what Kaukonen became three years later as a founding member of Jefferson Airplane. (He was also responsible for the band’s name.) Kaukonen did get to demonstrate his acoustic dexterity on “Embryonic Journey” from 1967’s iconic Surrealistic Pillow album, but he mostly spent eight studio albums — including the 1989 reunion album, Jefferson Airplane — helping to create a fresh guitar direction alongside bandmates Paul Kantner and bass guitar player Jack Casady, with whom Kaukonen started another band, Hot Tuna, in 1969. (Singer Grace Slick — who spoke with GP about Jimi Hendrix — joined after the group released its 1966 debut, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.)
“I guess on some levels they dragged me kicking and screaming into it,” Kaukonen tells us, via Zoom, about his migration to electric guitar. Again, it was a confluence of circumstance. I’d just recorded the Wabash Avenue stuff,” he explains, referring to recordings of acoustic club performances that were released for Record Store Day Black Friday this year.
“I was thinking about moving to Europe, maybe going to Denmark and being an expat musician or some nonsense. Who knows what I was really thinking back then. The Airplane ball got rolling, and the rest is history.”
After the Airplane first dissolved in 1973, Kaukonen continued on with Casady in Hot Tuna and also began a solo career with 1974’s Quah. These days, he’s back in Ohio — near Athens, in the southeast corner of the state — holding guitar classes and gatherings at Fur Peace Ranch, which he runs with his wife, Vanessa. With his 85th birthday looming on December 23, Kaukonen is playing some special, guest-filled concerts to commemorate it in December and has announced there will be no more extensive touring. But he’s not planning to retire.
The passion is still there. I think as a much younger player.”
— Jorma Kaukonen
“The passion is still there,” Kaukonen maintains. “I think in many respect the acumen is improved. Jack and I were talking about this. I think both of us have been in this game for a long time, and on some levels the playing has improved in a lot of ways. I’m probably not as fast as I used to be, but who is? I think as a much younger player. The passion and the excitement that I was able to do it at all sort of carried me through in a lot of ways.
“Today I’m more consciously aware of the story involved in what I’m doing when I’m playing. The audience has allowed me to tell and retell my story in different ways for many years, and I appreciate that.”
And in appreciate of that, we asked Kaukonen for the stories of some of the other key guitarists he encountered during the heyday of the San Francisco psychedelic scene.
Jerry Garcia
“Jerry’s one of the first people I met there, ‘cause he’s a really gregarious kind of guy. He was sort of the overlord of the Palo Alto scene, but he came down to play the Offstage [the San Jose venue crucial to bridging the gap between folk and psychedelic music in the 1960s].
“I think we were sharing a bill, both there playing a show — not together but the same night. We took a break, and we thought smoking pot in an alley on First Street in San Francisco seemed like a bad idea.
“So even though it was in the middle of a gig we drove out to Allen State Park. We were up on this rock, and it’s summer and the sun’s song down. It was a real beatific moment. We just got to know each other. And then we went back to the gig, and whoever was on played next.
“Jerry was an affable guy. He had played in bands for years, which I had never done, not counting a little band Jack and I had in highs school. So when I got into the Airplane I went right to Jerry, asking, ‘What do I need to do in order to fit in?’ ‘Cause the band didn’t need what I could do as a solo fingerstyle guitar player.
“And what he told me was learn to play in the holes, and learn to leave holes, which is good advice for a lead player in a band.
“He was just one of the immensely talented guys that put the work in all the time. ‘Cause it’s not magic. You can’t just touch a stone and be able to do that. As a banjo player, he obviously gravitated later on in his career to play the pedal steel guitar, which is an incomprehensible instrument to guys like me. He was just one of these guys who could play a lot of instruments really well.
“Now the bar’s always getting raised, and these days we can go almost anywhere string music is loved and find some 20-year-old kid who can play Dobro and banjo and all those instruments really well. It wasn’t like that back then, but Garcia could play everything really well.”
Bob Weir
“Bobby didn’t say much back in those days. I’ve read things where he said he would go and watch me play, and stuff like that, and to be honest with you I have no recollection of that.
“But Bobby’s a freaking genius on a lot of levels. He’s one of these guys that’s been able to give substance to his strings for a very long time, whether it’s the show at the Sphere in Vegas or any of that kind of stuff. He’s a get-it-done kind of guy.
“But I remember, back then he went to get lessons from Reverend Gary Davis. I’d met Reverend through Ian Buchanan, who was my mentor, but I never studied with him. And I’ve never talked about this to Bob but I’ve seen the effects. He went and studied with Rev. Davis, and the chord shapes Bob used were Reverend Davis’s chord shapes, and these were not typical kinds of things most fingerstyle guitar players use. It was interesting, really interesting, ‘cause he was playing with a pick, not his fingers. It was really cool, actually.”
Paul Kantner
“[University of] Santa Clara was a very conservative school back in ‘62 when I started there. It was the dark ages in a lot of ways. I met this guy named Bob Kenzie, and in the first month or so I was in Santa Clara he said, ‘There’s this guy you need to meet. He went to Santa Clara last year and dropped out.’
“So we drove over the hills of Santa Clara and we went to the beach, and in a shack on the beach was Paul Kantner. I don’t know if he was surfing, but there was certainly a surfboard leaning up against the house, and he was playing a 12-string guitar. Even though we weren’t playing the same kind of thing — he wasn’t a blues player — we decided out of self-defense against the world we needed to get to know each other. And we did, and one thing led to another over the years.
“Paul was more of what we would call in that era a commercial-style folk singer. He listened to more contemporary stuff rather than going back to the masters, as me and my self-important friends liked to do. His thing was to put a group together.
“I remember he moved to L.A. and he lived down there with [David] Crosby for a while, and he had a commercial folk group — him, a lead-ish guitar player and a girl singer. In a way it was precursor to what the Jefferson Airplane would be. When he came back from L.A., he spent a little bit of time in San Jose, then moved to San Francisco. And the next move would be Jefferson Airplane.”
John Cipollina
“What an interesting player he was. He played with his fingers, but he wasn’t a ‘fingerstyle’ guitar player. When we talk about psychedelic guitar he was, in my opinion, one of the precursors and one of the finest exponents of true, San Francisco psychedelic-style guitar.
“I remember thinking at the time that what he did just fit with what Quicksilver [Messenger Service] was doing. Their rhythm section was pretty solid, so there was a lot of room for him to be John, and there’s no question — for me, at least — that his sound is the sound of that band, aside from the vocal harmonies. But the instrumental sound of the band, that was him.”
