Hot Tuna
This article originally appeared on Circus, April 1971
"THE JEFFERSON Airplane" Jerry Garcia has said, "are a bunch of crazy madmen. Together, they have their own unique chemistry which is like a very special kind of dope."
At the Fillmore East for their traditional Thanksgiving concert, attention was focused on a new kind of dope that the same family had invented called Electric Hot Tuna. And recently it was Electric Hot Tuna that topped the Fillmore marquee as Grace Slick and Paul Kantner stayed home with their newborn, and Marty Balin mused on the past and future.
Electric Hot Tuna centers around Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen. Jorma is the classic San Francisco musician. His first music was folk guitar. In fact there is a tape of him accompanying Janis Joplin in 1964 on which she sings 'Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out', and 'Hesitation Blues' while Jorma's wife types in the background. There's a version of 'Hesitation Blues' on the acoustic Hot Tuna album sung by Jorma.
Casady went to high school with Jorma and took up the bass because "everybody else was playing guitar and there weren't very many bass players around." But like Jorma he was heavily influenced by the black blues greats. The Jefferson Airplane first got together around the beginning of 1966 at the peak of acid's influence and novelty and many of the folk roots were left behind. Hot Tuna started as a look back, but is now the most organic part of the Airplane trip.
They prefer Hot Tuna, those who are in it, to the Airplane, because of its freer form and its jamming. There are no favorite hits shouted out. Instead there is a total ear for music, endless flowing, natural music.
Jorma is of Swedish descent as is his wife Margeretta who has a thick Swedish accent. Together they are the most striking looking couple of the Airplane family, Jorma with his broad shoulders, classic chiseled features and luxuriant auburn hair and Margeretta with her brilliant orange-dyed hair and movie star face. "In Sweden," laughs Margeretta, "they like to think that everyone has blond hair. They called Jorma's dark blond, but they couldn't figure out a way to call mine blond." They visited Sweden a couple of years ago, and found themselves treated as freakily as in the rural USA.
"On the plane," confides Jorma with the sly grin of a bad boy who made it big that typifies a side of the Airplane that makes them so lovable, "we translated all of these curses that don't really exist in Swedish, figuring we'd need them. Sure enough, as soon as we got to the hotel we ran into trouble. There was this guy in the elevator, a huge elevator, who had two suitcases. We started to go in but he looked at us and screamed "no no it's my elevator," so Margeretta jumped in and started screaming all those curses at him, things like 'shove a fire hydrant up your mother's ass and stuff'." Jorma met the elevator at the next floor where the freaked out native was about to exit. He was greeted by the sight of Jorma slightly bent over repeatedly kissing his fingers and tapping his ass with them. The poor man dropped his suitcases and ran.
On stage the music develops in layers. First it is Jorma and Jack alone. Jorma facing the audience and singing while he plays guitar, and Jack the definitive bassist strolling back and forth, totally into himself. Sometimes he hides behind the curtain, sometimes he turns his back; every once in awhile he turns to Jorma and they soar into a musical blend that no two other guitarists can copy. When it flows it's high music and the tone is always good time take it easy, a bubbling stream of notes that never ends. They never play the same any two nights. Whereas the Airplane started its career wildly spontaneous, and gradually evolved to a controlled cohesive show, Hot Tuna began with a perfect knowledge of their material and instruments, and hence is free to jam, to flow and to interact. Their sound brings back the old phrase folk-rock.
But then phase two develops: Will Scarlet appears on stage. He is six feet four, and lanky. His harp is as controlled as John Sebastian's but funkier. His voice is in the same folk blues range as Jorma's and they sound almost like brothers. Although only 21, he is the harp virtuoso of the time. Already he is being asked to play on many albums, including Louden Wainwright's second LP.
Will Scarlet is followed by Papa John Creach. Papa John takes forever to set up because of his arthritic condition. He is a middle-aged black fiddler whom you hardly notice when he first appears. But at last he takes out his bow and the room is suddenly filled with the mellowest smoothest fiddle you have ever heard. He was brought into the group by Airplane drummer Joey Covington who had known him several years before. Sammy Piazza is the drummer for Hot Tuna – apparently Covington and Jorma don't get along within Hot Tuna. (On the Hot Tuna album the drummer was the Dead's Micky Hart.)
Now every permutation possible takes place. First Papa John is featured and the rest of the band becomes back up. Papa John will be releasing a solo album in the spring and it promises to be the most alive cosmic album of the season. Papa John is a very magical person with a Buddha-like grin and a warm way with words, his personality is matched by his impeccable unique fiddling. He is really the star of the show.
Or is he? Will Scarlet usually sings a couple of songs and he is as delightful as Jorma or John. And then a half hour or so of music. Casady always seems to be at the center of it – his mind locked into Jorma's. Sometimes Jack will stand next to Papa John, other times he'll stand back to back with Jorma and they'll do the same Temptations dance step, step for step without so much as a glance at each other. The entire band seems plugged into the same musical source. It is approaching what the Dead do with Riders of the Purple Sage. When Marty Balin is with them, he joins in at the end on cowbell and harmonies.
Backstage the scene is relaxed and friendly. When the band was in New York the McDougal Street folk elite had come to pay their respects to them. David Bromberg who has played on Dylan's last few albums was there talking to Jorma. So was Eric Frandsen and John Hammond.
Penny Arcade leaned against a sink there. "Don't do that," said Jorma. "We were once playing in a big room down south that seated about fifty people," he sarcastically began a story, "and Jack was leaning on a sink tuning up and he broke it and water started pouring out." Jack continued the story – "We were supposed to go on and I had to tune my bass, so we just looked at each other and didn't tell anybody about it and went out and started playing. Water started flowing out on the stage but we just looked at each other meaningfully and nobody did anything." The punch line – "and pretty soon we were all floating down main street playing electric boogie." Everyone laughs. It is hard to tell whether they wait for someone to lean on a sink wherever they go to tell the story – or whether they have a storehouse of such tales. Like their music they communicate from the same source from that "special kind of dope" that Garcia refers to.
Also backstage is Augie Blume. Blume is a guru-looking character, in his late thirties with whitish blond hair and a matching beard. He was formerly head of promotion for RCA records where he became the only person at the company who could communicate with the Airplane. Now he handles all promotion exclusively for them. "After all the bullshit I've had to promote" he says, "it's a complete pleasure to work with these guys. Papa John is just an incredible man."
Unlike some of their California friends, the Airplane are not provincial. The Grateful Dead had seen the Andy Warhol movie Trash a couple of nights before and didn't like it. "Man we hated it," someone from the Dead family said, "it was filthy and disgusting, all those people shooting up man – all those speed freaks – it was a drag. It was the most depressing film we ever saw." But Margeretta insisted that it was fabulous, "I saw the opening on the coast," she said to Jorma and Jack, "and it was fantastic. I want to take you to see it." So they went and the three of them loved it and laughed all the way through it. Afterwards Jack said, "now I know why they call the Grateful Dead dead, they just don't know what good clean fun is." Needless to say, the difference in movie tastes had no lasting effects on the friendship between the two leading west coast music clans.
At this writing, the Airplane still had not announced on what record label they would record. Usually relations between an artist and a record company are boring business transactions not of interest to the general public. But the Airplane has had a stormy time on RCA, having been harassed on political content, "obscenity," and album covers. The gradual increase in leverage that the Airplane gained as a result of larger and larger record sales is a happy barometer of the changes that the music business has, of necessity, undergone in those last few years. It is rumored that the Airplane now want their own label, but need a major distributer. Reportedly, RCA offered them 1/2 of a million for the honor, but the outcome is still in doubt.
The whole trend of groups starting their own labels is an interesting one. The Beatles started it of course – and since then the Beach Boys, Youngbloods and Moody Blues have followed suit. The result is larger artist share of royalties, and closer control of who handles various business transactions for them. In the past, artists and businessmen looked at each other's occupations as remote and forever separate. Now the artists are taking responsibility for their own economic welfare, while businessmen are forced to relate more than ever to the aesthetic qualities of their product.
What does the Airplane do with the money they make? Well there are a lot of people that they support and there are huge expenses in the logistics of existing as a group. Bob Weir of the Dead explained what they do with their money in an interview that Lisa Robinson did for Creem Magazine, and the answer is relevant: "We support the hippie scene around us – not just family but the craftsmen and artists and stuff like that. And we have electronics crews who are exploring new horizons in sound and video for that matter too. And they need support – and we're just about the only people who can give it to them – us and the Airplane. And that's expensive. And we have to more or less subsidize them by giving them projects – and that becomes expensive because of the work and parts...they have to stay alive too."
With the huge expenses and the rigors of being a rock group like the Airplane, the need to stay creative and free is especially great. This was undoubtedly part of the reason why new "groups" have had to form out of the same people – groups like Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship. The reason for the new names is to get a new musical start. It would have been incongruous for the Jefferson Airplane to sing 'Hesitation Blues', and the people who came to see the Airplane probably would have screamed for 'Volunteers' or 'White Rabbit' during Jorma and Jack's exquisite jams.
Much of the reason behind the new group scene has to do with an attempt to escape the bondage of the past "Jefferson Airplane" trip, without abandoning it. When they are the Airplane therefore, they do all of the crowdpleasers, but when they are Jefferson Starship or Hot Tuna they do new stuff. Odds are that as those groups get more famous, they may bring more people in and release more albums under ever changing names.
Electric Hot Tuna has liberated the Jefferson Airplane and given them more life than they have ever had before. When Marty Balin gets his thing together, the balance will be even more ideal. On a radio commercial, Jack Casady explains "The waitress came up to us and said what do you want to order?" so we said "how about hot tuna" and then we said – "hey that's the name for the group – Hot Tuna." Though Pauline Fordham calls the ad "diabolical," it expresses the existential nonsense that gives them their appeal. They are good because they are good because they are good. How about Hot Tuna indeed?
