Hot Tuna Heats Up Again on Tour : Jefferson Airplane Veterans Soar Over Old and New Ground

It has been exactly 15 years since the last flight of the Jefferson Airplane, the seminal San Francisco acid-rock band that charted a musical course through the late 1960s and early ‘70s counterculture.

Internal friction had caused the engines to burn out, and changing public tastes had drastically reduced the number of passengers willing to endure the turbulence of psychedelic instrumentals and anti-Establishment lyrics.

But for the past two months, three members of the Airplane’s original cockpit crew--singer-rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner, lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, and bassist Jack Casady--have been flying high again, for the first time since 1973.

“It’s really neat that we’re able to do this,” the 47-year-old Kaukonen said. “Over the years, together and apart, the three of us have cultivated a wide selection of fans. And the music we do is really timeless. It’s as good today as it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.”

On their inaugural tour, which includes a stop tonight at the Bacchanal nightclub in Kearny Mesa, the trio is soaring over both familiar and unfamiliar territory.

There are, of course, the obligatory Airplane acid-rock anthems: “Martha,” “Wooden Ships,” “Volunteers,” “Trial By Fire,” and “High-Flying Bird,” an outtake from “Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,” the group’s 1965 debut album.

The band plays vintage folk and blues classics, like Fred Neil’s “That’s the Bag I’m In” and Mose Allison’s “Parchment Farm,” that Kantner and Kaukonen, as an acoustic duo, used to perform in Bay Area coffeehouses in the pre-Airplane days of the early 1960s.

There are several new originals, including “America” and “Mariel,” that Kantner recorded last year with Casady and his Airplane vocal co-pilot, Marty Balin, as the KBC Band.

There are also covers of contemporary topical tunes like “Comandante Carlos Fonseca,” a Nicaraguan nueva cancion , or new song, Kantner first heard while on a weekend trip to Managua last July for an international book fair and arts festival.

“It’s a tribute to one of the founders of the Sandinista government who died in battle in 1976,” said Kantner, 46. “I was at a concert by a Nicaraguan folk band, and their music brought tears to my eyes.

“It was so much like the stuff that came out in San Francisco back in the 1960s, when everyone was so hopeful and so innocent, with one eye on history and the other on the future.

“And this song, in particular, jerked my heart away; it made me be a child again. So I whipped out my little Sony and taped it. Later, I translated the lyrics from Spanish into English.”

After the Jefferson Airplane broke up in 1973, Kantner and fellow singers Balin and Grace Slick regrouped as Jefferson Starship. Kaukonen and Casady, who had been moonlighting for several years as Hot Tuna whenever the Airplane was in the hangar, turned their part-time acoustic blues duo into a full-time electric trio.

Starship was the bigger success, scoring hit after hit with songs like “Miracles” (1975), “With Your Love” (1976), and “Count on Me” (1978). But with the subsequent departure of Slick and then Balin, Kantner said, he began to find himself outnumbered on band votes about album material and musical direction.

And three years ago, Kantner, like Slick and Balin before him, left what he now bitterly refers to as “the incredible shrinking band.”

“I hung on for a year beyond what I should have,” Kantner said. “The band has always been a democratic situation, and after Grace and Marty left, everyone started disagreeing with me.

“I was fighting it for several years, but eventually it got so frustrating that I just gave up. And now they’re falling apart under their own weight.”

Upon leaving Starship in 1985, Kantner said, he spent most of his time writing songs and recording an album with Balin and Casady. Casady and Kaukonen subsequently resurrected Hot Tuna, which had broken up in 1977, and the two began touring the country, once again as an acoustic blues duo.

But with the addition of Kantner last January, Hot Tuna’s look, and sound, have been strikingly similar to the look and the sound of the old Jefferson Airplane.

“One of the things I’m able to do with Jorma and Jack is have a lot of fun, making music, just as we did in the early days of the Airplane and even before,” Kantner said. “We’re doing no music business stuff; we’re just going around, playing.”

“Paul and I haven’t had the chance to play straight acoustic guitar together in about 25 years,” Kaukonen added. “And it’s something I’ve always wanted to do again, because it worked so well back then. Amazingly enough, it’s working even better today.”