Can you even imagine what San Francisco was like as a creative environment in the early ’60s? The Beat Generation leading into the hippies and the Summer of Love? The kind of environment where a young folk singer named Janis Joplin would get together with a young guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen to play various shows, and where one day in 1964 Jorma would turn on a tape recorder and capture a few songs while his wife was typing in the background.
The tape became legendary but also unavailable except in some poor bootlegs – until last year, when Jorma released it on vinyl and CD for the first time, and hell yeah I grabbed this on Record Store Day. It’s only a few minutes, but it’s a piece of goddamn history – two of the most important artists of the ’60s and well beyond, playing for themselves, probably just to hear how they sounded. And man, Janis was already Janis.
I don’t get star-struck too often, but we got to see Jorma play at @thecolonialtheatre just a few weeks back – fifth row, right in the center, and all I could think the whole time was: that’s the guy. That’s the guy who played Monterey and Woodstock,not to mention a million others. That’s the guy who played with Janis Joplin.
Because it’s short, they were actually able to press this at 45 rpm – meaning I needed to put a big post-it on the cover to remind me of that fact.
Not entirely clear where I’m gonna file this – Joplin? Kaukonen? Typewriter?
With you 100% on Jorma. He just makes me HAPPY (“Quah” would be a Desert Island Disc for me), and I have been equally starstruck over the few times I have seen him live. Remember a most memorable show at Valentine’s, especially . . . wrote this for Metroland:
Jorma Kaukonen brought two of his current Hot Tuna band-mates (keyboardist Pete Sears and guitarist Michael Falzarano) to Valentine’s last Saturday, lighting the room with eye-moistening musical depth and brilliance. While Falzarano and Sears’ left hand provided elegant, under-stated rhythmic patterns, Kaukonen’s guitar and Sears’ right hand laid down a seemingly-endless series of perfect, emotive riffs, fills, runs and solos. But not pointless, endless showboat solos, mind you. These solos added to their songs. These solos were succinct. These solos were shaped by restraint and demonstrated their players’ understanding of the fact that four beats worth of silence can sometimes say much more than four beats worth of sixty-fourth notes.
Kaukonen sang Saturday night as well, filling the room with his smooth croon, laying out tales that were less about drinkin’ and fightin’ and shootin’ the muleskinner’s wife than they were about the real, simple things that most real, complicated people face every day: matters of faith, matters of love, matters of life. Kaukonen himself was full of life onstage, coming across like a veritable buzzcut Santa Claus with a gold tooth, wearing a Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame t-shirt because he’s in it, delivering the goods and sharing or cookie or three before vanishing into the night. It certainly seemed like everyone in the room was happy with the presents he left them.
I’m a little bit kicking myself for the 117 or so times he played Albany and I just passed on it (look at Al Q’s list for JB Scott’s, sometimes he played twice the same month) – but my fear, which I didn’t get into in the post, was that I wouldn’t be into it. I love the Airplane so much that I wasn’t sure I wanted whatever it was Hot Tuna (a name I could certainly have done without) was doing. As I’m about to write for an upcoming Jorma entry, it was his incredible Fur Peace Ranch concerts during the lockdown that a) made me realize what a fool I had been, and b) helped get us through the lockdown. More on that soon.