Jorma Kaukonen
Local fans will get the rare opportunity to hear a plugged-in version of Hot Tuna when the band performs Wednesday night at York's Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center.
Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady, the Hot Tuna mainstays, will be joined by Stroudsburg native G.E. Smith on guitar, mandolinist Barry Mitterhoff and drummer Scooter Warner. Steve Earle also is on the bill.
Kaukonen, however, says fans should not expect a return to the "Rampage Years," that period in the mid-1970s when Hot Tuna abandoned its roots in the blues and morphed into a hard-rock band bordering on heavy metal.
"Let me put it this way," Kaukonen said during a telephone interview, "you won't need earplugs for every song. This is not the 'Rampage Years' revisited. By some strange quirk of fate, we've all grown up at least a little bit."
Kaukonen has grown up more than a little bit, and the numbers are starting to mount.
Consider. Kaukonen, who rose to fame as the lead guitarist for Jefferson Airplane, turns 70 in December. Hot Tuna, which he and Casady started as a side project while both were members of the Airplane, has been around for 41 years. And Kaukonen and Casady, who once played in the same band while they were teenagers growing up in Washington, D.C., have been playing together for 53 years.
None of that fazes Kaukonen, who maintains an active career as a solo artist and Hot Tuna member; helps run the Fur Peace Ranch, a music and guitar camp he has on his 119-acre property in southeast Ohio; and is the father of a 4-year-old girl he and his wife, Vanessa, adopted from China.
"I do keep busy," Kaukonen said. "I've been healthy. I'm able to do what I love to do. I've got it all going on. I've got a career. I've got a family. And people still want to hear me play. How much better than that can it get?"
Of course people still want to hear him play. A finger picker, Kaukonen is a brilliant acoustic guitar player and owns an utterly distinctive style on the electric. He is No. 54 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
When he first joined the Airplane, which played at both Woodstock and Altamont, he had little experience on electric guitar, having grown up mostly playing acoustic country blues.
"I was fortunate because I met Mike Bloomfield very early in the Airplane's career and, for some reason, he took pity on me and sort of opened a door for me to figure out stuff to do on the electric guitar," Kaukonen said. "I knew nothing about it except it wasn't as big as an acoustic guitar and you plugged it in."
He and Casady formed Hot Tuna in 1969 when the Airplane wasn't doing much touring. The project took Kaukonen back to the blues and gave him a vehicle to introduce the world to the work of the Rev. Gary Davis, a bluesman who is one of Kaukonen's favorite artists.
Hot Tuna also provided Kaukonen and Casady with the perfect vehicle for furthering their careers. The band, which has veered between acoustic and electric versions both in the studio and in concert, could arguably be called one of the first bands made up of rock musicians to specialize in so-called "roots" music.
Hot Tuna, however, hasn't recorded a studio album since "Pair a Dice Found," which was released in 1990.
Kaukonen said that will soon change because he, Casady, Mitterhoff and Warner plan to go into the studio in November to record a new album.
"Jack and I, we've been going, 'Oh, we should record,' but we never get around to it, you know," Kaukonen said. "Not that we don't want to, but he lives in California. You know how it is. Before you know it, decades have gone by. But we got to talking about it, and we actually have new songs we love playing together."
Smith, who once led the "Saturday Night Live" band and played with Bob Dylan and Hall and Oates, won't be recording with Hot Tuna because he'll be touring in the fall with Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd member who will performing "The Wall."
Kaukonen said the Hot Tuna album will be released on Red House Records, which also released his last two solo albums, "Stars in My Crown" (2007) and "River of Time" (2009).
And somehow, when he's not touring or recording, he finds the time to help run his music camp. When he first bought the property, Kaukonen said he had no plans to turn it into anything other than his home.
"Before we even had a building on the property, we're sitting around a campfire and we looked at each other — I've been teaching on and off for many years — and said, 'Wow, it would really be great to have a guitar camp here,'" Kaukonen said. "And this friend of mine, who is something of a wag, says, 'You can call it the Fur Piece because it's a fur piece from anywhere.' And I went, 'Wow, that's genius.'
"Then we did what everybody did back then when they got an idea: We made business cards and T-shirts."
The Fur Peace Ranch, which employs about 10 people and is a member of the local chamber of commerce in that part of Ohio, runs in the black, Kaukonen said.
"I really consider myself a regular sort of Joe, but a lot of lucky things have happened to me and, for some reason, the music that set us on fire seems to be timeless in some way, and a lot of people still love it."
It's also true that people make their own luck. And sometimes talent does win out.
Hot Tuna will perform with Steve Earle at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 21, at Strand-Capitol Performing Arts Center, 50 N. George St., York. For ticket information, call 846-1111 or visit www.strandcapitol.org.