50 Years Ago: Meeting Jorma and Jack

Today marks the 50th Anniversary of a very special occasion in my life. 

It was on October 9, 1971 - also a Saturday - when my friend Mike Hennel and I (both 15) made plans to go downtown by bus for a very special event. Hot Tuna were in town to play a concert at Cincinnati's Taft Theater. It was the first concert either of us had gone to without our mothers driving us to the venue. We were now fully grown, bus-taking men, and we were so green that we actually bought our tickets at the door.

I have to precede this memoir by noting that, when I first started listening to Jefferson Airplane in early 1970, and then when I saw them perform live music on pre-PBS NET later that year, my whole attitude to music was somehow galvanized. I literally went crazy about them, buying all their albums, listening to them every day, and being led to the siren call of the bootleg recordings in the basement room at Kidd's Bookstore. It was in that same basement in 1972 that I discovered CAN's SOUNDTRACKS album as an import in the bin next to Jefferson Airplane's UP AGAINST THE WALL, which was a bootleg of those television appearances that so electrified me, and this somehow exemplifies how the Airplane had made me much more open to different, more challenging music. So when Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady's spin-off group came to town, I had to see them. And I also knew, at the ridiculously young age of 15, that I somehow had to get backstage to meet them and have a moment. 

Prior to the show, after some initial haggling with a stage manager who got progressively more drunk as the evening passed, Mike and I managed to get backstage. As Mike was relieving himself, not expecting me to have any luck, I happened to see violinist Papa John Creach (who I recognized from ROLLING STONE) coming out of a room that music was softly coming from.

I said, "Papa John, is it OK if I go in?"

He kept on trucking and didn't even look back as he said, "Sho, baby!"

So I walked up and gently opened the door, expecting something other than their actual dressing room to be there. It was a two-roomed area that smelled of incense. Standing there, right inside the door, were the other three quarters of the band (Jorma, Jack, and drummer Sammy Piazza) warming up for the show. 

I was right there with them - and they were performing! Just for me, but without knowing it.

Jorma's back was turned to me. I didn't want to interrupt so I waited for a moment when I could announce myself and just listened quietly. Jack was the first to take notice of me and he signalled Jorma with his eyebrows, as if to say: "We have a visitor."

Suddenly the song cut off, dead silent, and Jorma turned to face me. Jorma is still a formidable man today but he looked like a very tough cat in 1971. Can you imagine my terror?

I've heard well over 150 hours of live Airplane and Tuna shows in the intervening years and I have known Jack and Jorma to STOP playing a song midway through exactly twice. The only other time was at ALTAMONT.

My stomach dropped as I apologized for the intrusion. He immediately put me at my ease, because I felt that I'd pulled the plug on something sacred. I introduced myself and asked if it would be possible to have an interview at some point. Jorma had every right to be annoyed but he was cool. Gently guiding me back through the door, he said "Maybe after the show." 

I walked in a stunned daze back out to the outer area and found Mike looking for me. I told him what happened, and he thought I was kidding him. Jorma had said "Maybe." I was kind of skeptical that we'd be able to get backstage a second time, but I knew I had to try. 

This is pretty much the way they looked that night, but Jack was stage right.

To this day, it's still the single loudest concert I've ever attended. I think the opening act, Eli Radish, may have sterilized me for life with the lightning shafts they sent through my nervous system. When Jorma came on and played his first notes, his volume was literally stinging and stark - until Jack's bass lumbered in with a surprisingly gargantuan depth and warmth. They were so loud, we literally had to change seats and proceeded to look for a pair with better cushioning. At this time, Hot Tuna had a single live acoustic album out, and I think the second one, a live electric record, was maybe just out - but the concert was the first time I'd heard their electric configuration. Just like the Airplane had led me to seek out other psychedelic bands, even jazz artists, Hot Tuna sent me off in search of records by blues artists from the Reverend Gary Davis to R. Crumb and His Keep-On-Truckin' Orchestra. Will Scarlett, who played harmonica on their first two albums, was not present, which provoked someone in the audience to ask where he was. "In Mill Valley," Jorma said.

At some point, Jorma announced that this next number would have to be their last because the hall had to close by 10:00 for some reason. The audience grumbled, then he stepped back up to the mic and added, in a faked shock attitude, "Did I hear somebody say 'Bullshit?'" - and everyone in the house shouted it back at the stage. They closed with a long performance of an instrumental that had not been released yet, but which would eventually become "Eat Starch Mom" on the Airplane's last studio album, LONG JOHN SILVER in 1972. When they started playing it, Mike and I made our move. 

The stage manager was pretty ripped by this time, and he quite properly didn't take my plea of press credentials very seriously. By this time, I was already a film and music writer for my school paper, but I wanted to write about this adventure for a friend's science fiction fanzine. I think he finally got tired of haggling with me, or maybe just thirsty, and he let me pass. We were able to stand in the stage wings, watching the performance from up close for the last five or six minutes of the performance.

When Jorma walked offstage that night, wearing a Felix the Cat T-shirt, he walked right toward me with a really happy face and a firm handshake. I thought he might need to be reminded of our earlier brief encounter, but he said, "C'mon up 'n' we'll rap awhile."

So we followed him upstairs. He was wearing those black leather pants with the diamond patterns down the sides, and it occurred to me that he was the skinniest cat I'd ever seen in my life. Inside the dressing room, Jack disappeared into the next room with a friend, leaving Jorma to handle the press duties. He asked if this was for a school paper or something, and I told him my intentions. I basically just wanted to make contact, ask some basic questions, and get a better sense of what this spin-off thing was about. As we talked about the Woodstock movie, the suspenseful state of Jefferson Airplane, the pleasure of live performance, and how the band were preparing to go into the studio to record their first non-live album, Jorma apologized - saying that they had to be out of there by a certain time, "but we've still got some time" - and started undressing while fielding questions, stripping down to his skivvies and getting into a pair of jeans and a different T-shirt. 

He was incredibly friendly, curious, and giving; I've never forgotten how kind he was to me, in giving me that time. I just wish, in retrospect, I'd had the benefit of some more years, more listening, more preparation, so that I could have asked some of the questions that I've lived with in the half century since. And I wish I'd had the courtesy to ask Sammy a thing or two. But, as my questions began to turn trivial, I realized we should just say thanks and get on with their evening. I don't know where Papa John was through all this.

Before parting company, I had to step into the next room to have some sort of moment with Jack. Jack has always been especially important to me because my late father had been a bass player; it was one of the few things I knew about him, and the purpose of the bass was always mysterious to me because I was never able to hear it on my transistor radio or the cheap record players I grew up with. But when I first saw Jack on television, I heard and understood bass for the first time, what it was, what role it played, and how far it could reach. Jack is much more than a bass player. He's a storyteller. When I first saw him after stepping into that little room, he was standing in a corner with a lady friend. I remember being surprised that he was shorter than me; Jorma was too, but he had an enormous aura (that's the only way to explain it) that made up for it. Anyway, I walked over to Jack with an outstretched hand - just as he was starting to put on what may have been the same sweater he wears on the cover of BLESS ITS POINTED LITTLE HEAD. 

"Hold on a minute," he said. With deliberate suspense, his hand shot slowly through the large, bell-like sleeve and then into mine. I remember that his hand felt really soft, not calloused as I expected from a bare-handed player. "Great show," I told him. He smiled at his lady friend in a self-satisfied way, then at me, and said "Thanks." Short and simple - nothing as profound as the many great conversations we've had as musician and listener in the 50 years since - but those few moments covered a lot of bases (no pun intended). Surprise. Gratitude. Suspense. Humor. I couldn't have written a better brief encounter, and it's been a mental snapshot I've looked back on a lot, with some incredulity that I was just a kid and somehow made that moment happen.

Looking back at this now, as (I must confess) I often do, it means a lot to me that Jorma and Jack were still active members of Jefferson Airplane when we met, that they were still the guys they are in the television shows that were burned into my brain, that they were still actively making the music that I continue to have this inexplicably singular and committed relationship with all these years later. In 1974, I would meet Paul Kantner and Grace Slick backstage at the RKO Albee Theater, just down the street from the Taft, on their first Jefferson Starship tour, and though I still enjoyed the music they made, the specific complex chord the Airplane struck as a unique musical personality was no longer there.

Five months after that remarkable evening, my friend Mike - who loved their music too - died at the age of fifteen. Sometimes, when I think of his early death, I'm reminded that he was the only other witness to this uncanny occasion, the only proof I had that it actually happened. We didn't take a camera; hell, we didn't even ask for autographs, and we were both too stunned and wrapped up in our own replays of the evening to talk much on the bus ride home. 

Obviously, I've never forgotten. 

I've never crossed paths with Jorma and Jack since, even though Jorma and I live in the same state. He owns the Fur Peace Ranch in Meigs County, Ohio, where he and Jack teach guitar/bass instruction and perform acoustic and electric sets on occasion, which always sell out very quickly. On February 13, 1993, I got to see and hear Jack and Papa John with Paul Kantner and original Jefferson Airplane vocalist Signe Anderson in a Jefferson Starship Acoustic Explorer configuration. I didn't get backstage that night, but when Papa John walked onstage playing "Over the Rainbow" (one of Donna's favorite songs), everyone stood to applaud. I was standing just six chairs from the stage and I know that he looked directly into my eyes, sustaining a frenzied note, until they welled. Hot Tuna are scheduled to return to Cincinnati in December to perform at the Ludlow Garage, but the ticket prices are way out of my range.

Today, I look back on the night of that concert and the fact that I took it on myself to meet these guys as the first truly quantum step I ever took outside my own world, my own teenage monotony. Thanks to that occasion, I learned early on that dreams exist to be realized. As the song goes, Won't You Try?

Hands down, the best $4.50 I ever spent.  

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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