Hot Tuna Won't Relive Glory Days Of Jefferson Airplane

Hot Tuna Won't Relive Glory Days Of Jefferson Airplane
MODE Speaks To Bassist Jack Casady

by Benjy Eisen

“I wanted to be a good musician, and I wanted to be true to the music, and I’ve had a certain brush with rock stardom as it were, but that’s just perception; it’s got nothing to do with what you want to do with the instrument that you chose to play,” explains Jack Casady, former bass player for Jefferson Airplane and lifetime band member of Hot Tuna, “That’s your craftwork and your artwork. You want to try to be more in contact with the music and the instrument and try to play it better. And when you do that, you do different things.”

On an August morning in 1969, Jack Casady and his boyhood friend Jorma Kaukonen looked out over a crowd of 500,000 as they took the stage at Woodstock. Journalists have made it difficult to identify Casady without attaching him to that legendary festival; however, for him, it was just another show. “History makes something out of it but I’ve got to get up every morning and do the day’s work. And we all do,” he says.

Casady grew up in Washington, DC listening to his brother’s blues records and tireless selections from his dad’s bottomless jazz collection. He hadn’t even heard of Jefferson Airplane (or any of the “new, psychedelic rock music”) when Kaukonen called him from San Francisco and asked him to join the band. When he found out the band’s manager offered to pay them $50 a week, regardless of whether or not they had gigs, he took the bait. The year was 1965.

“So I came to a fog-filled city that was foreign, not hospitable, and cold and foggy. It was more like a cold black-and-white movie than it was spring and flowers and rocking in the park. And I’ve always kept that image in mind because people tend to paint things so rosily in the past. Not that there weren’t fabulous times that I had in the mid-’60s and with Jefferson Airplane, an all the other bands in San Francisco at the time, and the atmosphere. When it was a small community it was a lot of fun.”

The Jefferson Airplane scored the psychedelic movement’s first big hit when they released Surrealistic Pillow, which would spawn the hits “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” and put San Francisco on the musical map. But that was 1967. It’s 34 years later now, and Jack Casady is 57 years old. He has no desire to regroup with Jefferson Airplane when he could be pressing onward, doing things that are just as exciting for him now as playing “White Rabbit” was for him then.

“The kind of things you do at this age, right now, hopefully will reflect an amount of living and depth, not just the degradation [of aging]. There’s no reason why I should be burned out and worthless and saying that I was great when I was 20, but I went downhill from there.”

When Casady and Kaukonen left in 1972, the band renamed themselves The Jefferson Starship. Meanwhile, Casady and Kaukonen, who had formed Hot Tuna as a side-project a few years earlier, decided to go full-time with it. Originally an acoustic duo, additional band members — and even electricity — were sometimes added, and Hot Tuna became a chameleon, changing from duo to quartet, from acoustic to electric, back and forth, as Casady and Kaukonen used the band for various indulgences. For the past few years, Hot Tuna has returned to their original acoustic duo format.

“It’s very exposed music,” notes Casady, “Basically Jorma and I come up, we sit down in our chairs, and we play. And you know, you’re right there. You’re right inside the music if you want to let yourself be. That’s what we do. That’s the great thing about creating that atmosphere where people can kind of step into that special room with you. And with all its warts and bumps and bruises.”

Although some early songs from the Airplane have survived (such as Kaukonen’s instrumental guitar piece, “Embryonic Journey”), Hot Tuna has mainly been playing songs relevant to the moment rather than attached to a particular moment in time, such as the Summer of Love. “If you put some miles on, why not put that to good use rather than chasing your high school graduation party?” Casady says.

Hot Tuna will perform at Whitaker Center on December 5. Call 214-ARTS for tickets.