FANS READY AS HOT TUNA DISHES IT OUT ONCE MORE

When Hot Tuna plays one of only a dozen “temporary reunion” dates at the Bacchanal nightclub in Kearny Mesa on Sunday, it will be the first time guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady have played together in nearly a decade.

And ever since the concert was announced several weeks ago, the pair’s die-hard legion of fans, who have been mourning Hot Tuna’s passing since 1977, have been practically beside themselves with anticipation.

“We’ve each done a lot of different things, a lot of different kinds of playing, in the last nine years,” Kaukonen said from Los Angeles, another stop in Hot Tuna’s current tour.

“And in my case, at least, most of it’s been unmemorable. That’s why it feels so good to play with Jack again--I mean, it seems we’ve been together, off and on, for most of our lives.”

They sure have. Kaukonen, now 45, and Casady, three years his junior, first teamed up in a series of garage bands in Washington while both were still in high school.

A short while later, they both moved to San Francisco, where Kaukonen briefly backed Janis Joplin before reuniting with Casady to form the instrumental backbone of Jefferson Airplane, the legendary San Francisco group that, along with the Grateful Dead, is credited with giving birth to the acid-rock movement of the middle and late 1960s.

From the start, Kaukonen’s explosive, textured guitar work and Casady’s thudding bass lines paved the trippy musical path that vocalists Marty Balin, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were to follow to new heights of psychedelic madness.

By 1970, however, the Airplane was on its last legs. And mostly out of “sheer boredom,” Kaukonen recalled, he and Casady formed Hot Tuna as a sideline venture to more fully explore their blues and folk roots.

Three years later, the Airplane broke up for good, and Kaukonen and Casady made Hot Tuna a full-time pursuit. Eventually, they drifted away from the all-acoustic blues and folk tunes of its early years; Kaukonen and Casady began adding an assortment of sidemen to the band’s lineup and by 1977 were dishing out a bone-crunching blend of straight blues and heavy metal that caused one national rock magazine to call them “America’s answer to Led Zeppelin.”

And at that point, Kaukonen said, he and Casady decided to call it quits--even though their fans stuck with them right to the finish.

“To us, it was sort of the end of an era,” Kaukonen said. “Our sound had changed tremendously over the seven years we had been together, and finally we realized we had just kind of run out of ideas--all we were doing was rehashing the same old musical baloney.”

In the years that followed Hot Tuna’s split, both Kaukonen and Casady seemed intent on burying their acid-rock pasts.

First, they each got short, new wave haircuts. Kaukonen even went so far as to die his hair a whitish Billy Idol blond. Then they formed a couple of punk-rock bands.

Kaukonen called his Vital Parts and never quite broke out of the San Francisco nightclub circuit, while Casady’s band, SVT, scored a minor national hit in 1978 with “Heart of Stone.”

They kept at it until 1984, when they both--once again, independently--decided to return to their roots. Casady teamed up with former Jefferson Airplane singers Marty Balin and Paul Kantner.

And Kaukonen went back even further in time to the days before the Airplane’s 1965 formation, when he was playing acoustic blues and folk as a solo artist.

When a one-week trial tour “proved to us both that it can still be fun to make music together in 1986,” Kaukonen said, he and Casady decided to do it again--and again.

“I kind of like the idea about it,” Kaukonen said. “So now, we’re thinking about making this at least a twice-yearly event, with our current tour being this year’s ‘twice.’ We’re sticking to the acoustic stuff, which Hot Tuna played initially--and which Jack and I started out with when we were both still in high school, almost 30 years ago.

“And the neat thing is, we’ve played with so many different people in the last 10 years that we’ve each improved. On top of that, the old songs have a whole new flavor to them.

“When I first proposed the idea to Jack, he was worried; he told me, ‘I don’t know if I remember the songs.’ I told him, ‘That’s great--so you play them differently.’ And that’s what he does--but no less well.”

Kaukonen laughs. “One thing that is the same, though, is the way we look,” he said. “We both have long hair again. My hair used to be long and brown, then it got short and white, and now it’s long and brown again.

“There’s also some gray. But what can I tell you? It’s been a long time, you know.”