Podcasts about Hot Tuna

En esta entrega 15.2025 de La Ruleta Rusa hemos escuchado y comentado la música de:Huanastone. Son of Juno (2024)Weedian. Trip To Scotland (2024)Soft Ffog. Soft Ffog (2022)Electric Sandwich. Electric Sandwich (2022)Eberson. Between Two Worlds (2021)Hot Tuna. The Phosphorescent Rat (1973)

NOCHES DE VINILO, ESTELARES.Qué bandas y qué músicos nos acompañaran!!!Los ingleses : Fleetwood Mac.Todo el rock de :Hot Tuna.El mago de la guitarra :Jimi Hendrix.El sonido infernal de :Mott the Hoople.Grandes de verdad :The Band.El señor del blues :Muddy Waters.Los hippies presentes :The Mamás and The Papas.El trovador :Jim Croce.Juan y más de la genial Cristina Peri Rossi.No te lo pierdasEn la radio en la cual el rock es el motor de cada día.El Aguantadero.En sus jóvenes 15 años.

PopaHALLics #139 "Deception"The truth is, er, fluid in the pop culture discussed in this episode, from a married spy trying to determine if his spouse is doing wrong, to an Australian pretending to have a fatal disease for profit and influence, to a supervillain seemingly going straight who might still be very bent. In Theaters:"Black Bag." In this spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, a legendary intelligence agent (Michael Fassbender) must determine if his wife/fellow spy (Cate Blanchett) has committed treason—and whether his loyalty is to his marriage or his country.Streaming:"Apple Cider Vinegar," Netflix. In this limited series based on true events, two young women (Kaitlyn Dever and  Alycia Debnam-Carey) set out to cure their life-threatening illnesses through health and wellness, influencing their global online community along the way. Unfortunately, they aren't really ill. "Daredevil: Born Again," Disney +. Marvel's blind superhero returns, sort of. After a disturbing event, attorney Matt Murdoch (Charlie Cox) hangs up his Daredevil suit. But wait—does his nemesis Kingpin/Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) have an ulterior motive in running for mayor of New York?Books:"Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis," by Ian Zack. Davis, a blind street preacher and amazingly talented guitarist, is not as well-known today as contemporaries like Son House and Lightning Hopkins. Yet, as this 2016 biography explains, Davis had an outsized influence on music because of his many guitar students and admirers, who include Bob Dylan, Stefan Grossman, Eric Clapton, Hot Tuna, and more. "The Blackbird Oracle," by Deborah Harkness. In the fifth installment in the bestselling All Souls series, witch/Oxford scholar Diana and vampire geneticist Matthew seek to avoid the testing of their twins' magical skills. Attempting to forge a new future for her family, Diana must face "a confrontation with her family's dark past and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power."Music:On PopaHALLics #139 Playlist (Rev. Gary Davis), experience the music of the blind guitarist/street preacher (see "Say No to the Devil" above) as interpreted by Jackson Browne, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Mavis Staples, and more, as well as Davis himself. We've also added a few tunes by Kate's new discovery, the 1960s/70s French rock band Les Variations.Click through the links above to watch, read, and listen to what we're discussing.

Here is my Grateful Dead Hour from March 17, 2025. Music includes The Grateful Dead, Hot Tuna, Jackie Greene, Spirit and more. Enjoy.

He just wants to work on the drums all day To commemorate four centuries in business, the Zildjian cymbal company commissioned Aaron Latos to build 400 snare drums from the same alloy that goes into their rides, crashes and high hats - staple elements of a jazz or rock drum set. Recipients include Sheila E., drummer's drummer Steve Gadd (Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover") and tatted celebrity Travis Barker of Blink 182 (who survived a plane crash and dated Kim Kardashian). The anniversary passed in 2023 and Latos, who moved last year to Beacon with his wife and two young children, is 10 units shy of fulfilling the order. In the meantime, he's trying to perfect the manufacturing process for his own line of snares, tom-toms and bass drums crafted from nickel silver, which he assembles nearly from scratch in his Newburgh shop. Only the washers and tension rods clamping down the hoops that tune and tighten the drumheads are machined off-premises. By year's end, he plans to move the lathes, drills and rollers to a space in Beacon double the size of his current spot. Latos, 36, hails from West Virginia and made a living drumming in recording sessions and touring with country singer Margo Price. He performs around town with the Stephen Clair Band and takes on select students and studio projects. Drummers are notoriously picky about their gear and setup. Drum and cymbal angles must hit every time. Some prefer wood over metal snares. Others argue over tuning techniques. Every cymbal sounds different and comes in myriad shapes and sizes. Latos is so detail-oriented that he patented a snare drum throw-off system, the mechanism that lifts and holds down the coiled snare wires that add snap to the two and four beat of nearly every pop and rock song. His patent for the butt plate, which anchors the snares, is pending. "I'd have more patents, but they're expensive," he says. As far as he knows, Latos is the first to make nickel steel drums. He digs the sound, but the manufacturing process is like wrestling an alligator and presents "the most annoying and frustrating fabrication characteristics" that are "difficult to cut and work." The raw material arrives in long, flat sheets, like the plies of wood used in most drums. Labor consists of rolling, shearing and brazing them together. His loud, hefty snare drums pay homage to models used by big band jazz drummers in the 1920s and '30s designed to cut through 17-piece outfits in the days before specialized microphones. Weighty shells for his floor and rack toms are capped by silvery stainless steel and solid brass copper-colored hoops. Bass drums come with brown wood hoops. The end results are so striking that each piece looks like a sculpture. A basic snare costs $2,000 and a full drum kit starts at $10,000. Customers range from doctors and lawyers to pros, including Bob Meyer, a jazz cat and early adopter, Jeremiah Green of Modest Mouse (who died in 2023) and Harvey Sorgen, who has played with Hot Tuna, Derek Trucks and Paul Simon. Latos' workshop is relatively tidy, although gold and silver shavings litter the floor, including the rug in the cozy corner with a couch, turntable and pile of vinyl records capped by Mel Torme, Chuck Mangione and Haitian group Bossa Combo discs. "Every 22 minutes or so, I come over and flip the record," he says. "It helps me focus on what I am doing and what I should be doing." Latos Drums is located at 11 Spring St. in Newburgh and at latosdrums.com.

This week, Kate and Christina talk about their Roller Derby escapades and after-snacks, Super Bowl crying jags, and don't understand how holidays work.  

Today we're talking the various ways you can serve hot canned tuna, Ben's recent car accident, restaurant liquidation auctions and The Book.As always, find us here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/774902433251568https://www.instagram.com/chefbenrandall/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-the-weeds-with-ben-randall/id869521547intheweedswbr.comhttps://www.redbubble.com/people/enzwell/shopintheweedswbr@gmail.comhttps://www.speakpipe.com/InTheWeedsWithBenRandall

Record Store Day Black Friday is November 29, and as we ramp up to the big day we offer the first of two specials. Pt. 1 features Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, talking about the double album RENO ROAD, a collection of acoustic blues field recordings made with his longtime musical accomplice Jack Casady and released on Black Friday as an RSD Exclusive. In this conversation, Jorma recalls the heady times of the 1960s, and pays his respects to many of the fallen legends he's worked with over the years, including Paul Kantner, Janis Joplin, David Crosby, Phil Lesh, and even Jaco Pastorius. For more information about Record Store Day Black Friday (November 29) visit RecordStoreDay.com The Record Store Day Podcast is a weekly music chat show written, produced, engineered and hosted by Paul Myers, who also composed the theme music and selected interstitial music.  Executive Producers (for Record Store Day) Michael Kurtz and Carrie Colliton. For the most up-to-date news about all things RSD, visit RecordStoreDay.com)   Sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (dogfish.com), Tito's Handmade Vodka (titosvodka.com), RSDMRKT.com, and Furnace Record Pressing, the official vinyl pressing plant of Record Store Day.   Please consider subscribing to our podcast wherever you get podcasts, and tell your friends, we're here every week and we love making new friends.  

It turns out it's not all about the bass when talking with my hero, iconic legend, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Jack Casady, of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. We did a deep dive into Jack's family history, which is documented back to 1600s America on one side. There's Irish, there's Jewish, smoked whitefish on Sunday mornings whilst being raised Protestant. There are stories aplenty of Jack's father with whom he shared a passion for music and a complicated relationship. Jack found a banjo and a guitar in their attic, where his musical journey began. Jack shares the details, suffice it to say, his solid work ethic, intelligence, talent, and perhaps his penchant for alcohol took root here. Unlike his father, Jack got to live his passion, and got sober 34 years ago. Bravo, sir! He tells a most poignant tale with a prop of losing his father thisclose to a lovely milestone. One of many very moving moments shared today. Jack took us through his early musical influences and experiences, and a couple of non-musical ones like his paper route… he spoke of Danny Gatton, meeting Jorma, how he went from guitar to bass, the invitation to join Jefferson Airplane, in my top 5 bands of all time, what that was for him creatively - those days, San Francisco, those people, Signe, Marty, Paul, then Grace, Skip, Spencer… and the lifestyle, going club to club, playing and supporting each other, The Dead, Big Brother, Jimi, and recording Voodoo Chile, and the impact Mitch Mitchell had on the music, Jimi, and on Jack. We talked The Filmore, West, and East, the special pull of New York, Woodstock, how that went down for Jack & Jorma, and the aftermath… Hot Tuna, how and why… he and Jorma and why it still works almost 60 years later… SVT, The Starship, KBC… teaching at Fur Peace Ranch, and now virtually - you too can study with Jack! He played Somebody to Love on his signature Diana and almost made me cry, and, at my request, his iconic White Rabbit riff, in my top 5 songs of all time and the reason I picked up a bass 40 years ago. Speaking of Diana, Jack spoke of their life together and their fight to keep his wife alive after her cancer diagnosis. He was visibly overcome and still for a few moments when speaking of her passing over a decade ago. The bright side, he announced he's betrothed to Debra Evans, who was part of Diana's care team. Lots of full-circle moments, Jack shares a birthday with my son, Harry. We're all connected, aren't we? This was a dream come true for this Airplane, Hot Tuna, loving, bass-playing wanna-be. One for the books. If someone had told me when I was a girl in Queens playing the grooves off Surrealistic Pillow that I would one day sit down with Jack (and Jorma), I would've wanted what they were having. I was probably already having it. And look at us now, all three, clean and sober. This old girl is grateful beyond words for this wondrous day with Jack. Jack Casady Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Wednesday, 11/13/24, Noon PT, 3 pm ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/4hOGeUs

Featured Songs: 00:38 - Hot Tuna - 09-21-24 - Death Don't Have No Mercy - Aladdin Theater - Portland, OR 07:50 - Goose - 10-01-24 - Ship Of Fools - The Troubador - Los Angeles, CA 12:50 - Eggy - 10-16-24 - Hungry Like The Wolf - Meow Wolf - Santa Fe, NM 31:13 - Daniel Donato - 10-20-24 - Valhalla - Ardmore Music Hall - Ardmore, PA 41:25 - Sturgill Simpson - 10-21-24 - Juanita - Koka Booth Theatre - Cary, NC See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Remember that time David took a bunch of 9 year olds to the Bandits game?

Jorma Kaukonen Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Let your fingers do the running to the play button. Please! One of the greatest, funnest, most illuminating conversations I've had the privilege to share, Jorma Kaukonen, iconic legend, musical hero, rock god, (I mean, come on!) exceeded all expectations and then some. From early days in Pakistan with one pop 45 to Ricky Nelson, and Buddy Holly, 15-year-old returning expat Jorma, took up guitar and soon was in his first band, The Triumphs, with bandmate, Jack Casady, still his bandmate and best friend today, 65+ years later. Beyond amazing. And the fact that they were rehearsing moments before Jorma and I went Live blows my mind. A testament to their ongoing greatness. We talked about Antioch, and not exactly being encouraged to return. Janis, and The Typewriter Tape, San Francisco, Monterey, Hendrix, Jerry, Marty, Paul, Grace, and Jorma's nickname that became the Jefferson Airplane - his invite to Jack Casady. Psychedelia, Surrealistic Pillow, the making of––in my top 5, and it was made in less than two weeks! Woodstock - getting in and getting out and Grace Slick's unforgettable - “Good Morning, People.” What was unforgettable for Jorma. Goosebumps for me. Hot Tuna, how and why it started and continues to flourish. Jorma and Jack! The recent end of Hot Tuna Electric - the why - simple - not totally undoable. The Book, Been So Long - chock full of golden nuggets like those shared here. Years of teaching and concerts culminating in The Fur Peace Ranch, now sold, but will be picking up in Jorma and Vanessa's new locale. To keep up with the indefatigable Mr. Kaukonen https://jormakaukonen.com The cherry on top of this chat that seemed to fly by in an instant was Jorma indulging this rabid Airplane/Surrealistic Pillow fan, playing his Embryonic Journey, with a fab Jack sidebar (see the Live comments) and then a gorgeous, Take Your Time, for his daughter. This is one for the books. I'll cherish it always. Because Jorma's so important to me it was important that I do right by him. So grateful it was so much fun. I'm gonna be smiling for a long time to come. Jorma Kaukonen Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Wednesday, 9/18/24, 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/3XowPt2

WBCQ/The Planet airdate: 9/7/24 Welcome to Fluxedo Junction. Each episode we bring you the best music of all genres from throughout the world, and this week we'll be speaking with singer/songwriter/guitarist Michael Falzarano. As a member of both Hot Tuna and New Riders Of The Purple Sage, he's been an influential presence on the jam band scene. Now with his latest group The Englishtown Project, he's joined forces with members of the Zen Tricksters and others to pay tribute to that genre's roots. They'll be performing at the Boulton Center in Bay Shore, NY this Saturday, September 7th.

Sara visits with rock icon Jorma Kaukonen and his brilliant wife and manager of Hot Tuna, Vanessa Kaukonen. They discuss his musical career and their CBD brand Jorma's Choice. [Ep121]

Esta semana, en Islas de Robinson, entre 1972 y 1973, tiramos de clásicos. Suenan: THE MOVE - "DO YA" (1972) / STEELY DAN - "REELIN' IN THE YEARS" ("CAN'T BUY A THRILL", 1972) / BIG STAR - "WHEN MY BABY'S BESIDE ME" ("#1 RECORD", 1972) / MOTT THE HOPPLE - "ONE OF THE BOYS" ("ALL THE YOUNG DUDES", 1972) / PETER FRAMPTON - "IT'S A PLAIN SHAME" ("WIND OF CHANGE", 1972) / FAMILY - "CHECK OUT" ("IT'S ONLY A MOVIE", 1973) / SPOOKY TOOTH - "ALL SEWN UP" ("WITNESS", 1973) / HOT TUNA - "EASY NOW" ("THE PHOSPHORESCENT RAT", 1973) / JOE WALSH - "MOTHER SAYS" ("BARNSTORM", 1972) / STRAY - "HOW COULD I FORGET YOU" ("SATURDAY MORNING PICTURES", 1972) / GOLDEN EARRING - "ALL DAY WATCHER" ("TOGETHER", 1972) /Escuchar audio

Born in New York City and raised in the Caribbean as Richard Gerstein - Richard T. Bear boasts a career that spans more than 40 years, one that led to a string of acclaimed solo albums and collaborations with a number of influential icons, including Al Kooper, Stephen Stills, former Rascals Gene Cornish and Dino Danelli, Kiss, Pat Benatar and many more. He has shared stages with artists such as Dave Mason, Mick Fleetwood, the Doobie Brothers, Richie Havens and Odetta. T. Bear penned "Love and Pain," a track found on Take Me Home, one of Cher's most successful albums and also tallied several hits on his own, including the single "Sunshine Hotel" from his debut album Red, Hot and Blue. He has appeared on a number of recordings including CSN's Southern Cross, Billy Squier's Tale of the Tape and The Blues Brothers Soundtrack album. After taking some time to focus on his own sobriety, T. Bear became an early activist helping others with addiction. His self-imposed hiatus lasted nearly three decades, and now T Bear is back with two striking new releases, Fresh Bear Tracks and The Way of the World, his first studio albums in 25+ years. Richard is a distinctive singer and talented keyboard player. His latest albums feature a host of special guests. From Stephen Stills, Robby Krieger, Edgar Winter, Walter Trout, to former Paul McCartney & Wings members Laurence Juber and Denny Seiwell and The Heartbreakers' Benmont Tench. His latest album, The Way of The World, was written and recorded as the world emerged from the pandemic. It boasts a stunning set of 13 original songs. Musically, it's a stirring melodic mix of blues, rock n roll, Americana, and roots. T. Bear's first album spawned the single “Sunshine Hotel.” A remix of the song climbed to #4 on the world dance charts before becoming the dance staple that it remains today. Richard has appeared on numerous recordings by iconic artists including Crosby, Stills and Nash's Southern Cross, The Blues Brothers Soundtrack, Richie Havens Mixed Bag II, Kiss members Gene Simmons and Peter Criss' solo ventures, as well as Toby Beau's hit single My Angel Baby. As a soloist T Bear found his initial inspiration in the sounds of the British Invasion. At age 13 he was writing his own songs.  An early break came when he was working at Manny's Music in New York City when Hot Tuna's Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady stopped in and hear him improvising on piano. They were impressed enough to ask him to sit in with them during a Hot Tuna show at the famed Fillmore East. He worked for a time as Carly Simon's road manager and opened shows for the likes of Jeff Beck and Richie Havens before moving to Los Angeles.  In 1983, he took a lengthy hiatus from making music to get his personal life in order before returning to action in 2017. Fast forward to the present and T Bear is so excited about the new album.  As he puts it, “Making The Way of the World was like getting a new pair of glasses. I see everything more clearly and in focus around me. These are songs that made me think and dream. It's an oasis for the mind.” Meet Richard T Bear this week as he unravels his incredible story of survival and comeback against all odds. I hope you really enjoy this episode.  

The Mets lost to the Marlins yesterday, preventing the sweep. The Mets really needed a sweep there as they have the Orioles and then a West Coast trip. Gio wonders if Boomer thinks Karl Ravech's hair is real. We also talked about Aaron Rodgers playing or not in the final preseason game. Boomer thinks it's important to get in there before the Monday night game in San Francisco. But you also don't want him getting hurt in the preseason. C-Lo returns for an update, but first we talked about the John & Suzyn t-shirt the Yankees are giving away tomorrow night. C-Lo has audio of the Yankees losing to Detroit at the Little League Classic. Frank The Tank talked about the latest Mets loss. Lots of screaming and spitting. Mike Francesa checked in about the Hawk Tuah girl throwing out the first pitch for the Mets. In the final segment of the hour, we have audio of Sal Licata trying to explain Hawk Tuah girl to Joe Benigno. Joe thought she was the ‘Hot Tuna' girl.

Hour 1 Boomer and Gio are back this morning and we started with the Giants preseason game against the Texans. We talked specifically about Daniel Jones' performance. Boomer likes that Brian Daboll kept him in the game to make up for the two early interceptions. Boomer was generally encouraged by the way the Giants offense did throw the ball down the field. Boomer said he is feeling an edge that's coming from the Head Coach. Gio is a little worried that Daboll losing weight is going to change him as a coach. In the past, when head coaches lost weight in this town it didn't go well after. C-Lo is in for Jerry and is here for his first update but first we talked about listeners confusing Anthony Gallo with Big Zoo. C-Lo has the sounds of Clay Holmes blowing another save as the Yankees lost to the Tigers at the Little League Classic. Jerry is hosting a golf tournament later today and Boomer & Gio are playing in it. In the final segment of the hour, we talked about the golf tournament Jerry is doing later today that we are playing in. Boomer wonders what Jerry will be wearing on the golf course. Boomer hopes it's his MC Hammer pants.  Hour 2 Gio has been hearing a commercial on the overnights where they encourage you to adopt a teen. Gio thinks this would be perfect for Al. We also talked to Al about Hawk Tuah girl and the missing Malaysian Airline. C-Lo returns for an update but first we talked about Peter Schwartz doing a WWE entrance at Fanatics Fest. C-Lo starts with Clay Holmes blowing the save again as the Yankees lose to the Tigers. In the final segment of the hour, we found out that Peter Schwartz did not pay for his ticket to Fanatics Fest. Boomer also talked about Jalen Brunson vs Aaron Judge as far as ‘King of New York'.  Hour 3 The Mets lost to the Marlins yesterday, preventing the sweep. The Mets really needed a sweep there as they have the Orioles and then a West Coast trip. Gio wonders if Boomer thinks Karl Ravech's hair is real. We also talked about Aaron Rodgers playing or not in the final preseason game. Boomer thinks it's important to get in there before the Monday night game in San Francisco. But you also don't want him getting hurt in the preseason. C-Lo returns for an update, but first we talked about the John & Suzyn t-shirt the Yankees are giving away tomorrow night. C-Lo has audio of the Yankees losing to Detroit at the Little League Classic. Frank The Tank talked about the latest Mets loss. Lots of screaming and spitting. Mike Francesa checked in about the Hawk Tuah girl throwing out the first pitch for the Mets. In the final segment of the hour, we have audio of Sal Licata trying to explain Hawk Tuah girl to Joe Benigno. Joe thought she was the ‘Hot Tuna' girl.  Hour 4 Daniel Jones threw 2 interceptions in the preseason game against the Texans, and one of them was returned for an easy pick-6. But there were many positives from his performance as well, and Boomer was happy to see them throwing the ball downfield instead of dinking and dunking. Both Boomer and Phil Simms thought he finished the quarter really well. The Giants are favored by 1.5 right now over the Vikings for week 1. The Niners are favored by 5.5 over the Jets. C-Lo returns for his final update of the day and starts with Clay Holmes blowing his league leading 10th save of the season. In the final segment of the hour, we just got word that former talk show host Phil Donahue passed away.

By Kurt Beyers- Edited by L Casserly Boomerang BeatTo introduce his new album, Front Porch Philosopher, Norman Collins offers “I Wanna Rule Somebody,” a pure piece of hard-driving, rock guitar and messaging in which the subject is the betrayal of belief and trust.The album and the single will be released on May 22.Guitar and a steady, hard fast drum begin, but not just to philosophy's beat. In this song, we get rock metaphysics. After the rest of the band crashes in, setting the rhythm and harmony of the argument, Norman introduces the subject:Join my church, I canSave your lifeTake my hand, and I mightWant your wifeThe song, and the album, are full of Norman's brand of progressive Americana. It is a fusion of a lot of different kinds of music —but mainly rock, blues, soul and country — and delivered hot and sweet.“I Wanna to Rule Somebody” is rock with what he describes as something like “Led Zeppelin goes country punk.”Oddly, the only tone that might be called “philosophical” is Norman when he's talking about the album.What does he want to say about “I Wanna to Rule Somebody” or Front Porch Philosopher“Well there's — I hate to brag — but there's some pretty good guitar playing on there. If people like guitar playing, there's good solos and,” he pauses, thinks a second, continues, “oh, nice chord changes. And interesting arrangements.”Which is a sedate, academic way to talk about music that, fast or slow, gets the pulse involved in listening and drives lyrics into heads like nails into walls.Let me prove, that you     Got a soul     Join our faith, underMy controlProposition-conclusion, proposition-conclusion. Drums provide punctuation.I wanna to rule, rule somebodyI don't care about who it isNorman knows his music and, as in “Get Back in the Car,” “What the Cat Dragged In” and “All I Wanted Was Roses,” he also knows how to put a story into lyrics.Norman has been making music, playing, and touring with a wide variety of musicians and bands since the late '60s, mainly out of San Francisco, though he was born and raised in St. Louis. He has also lived and worked in Nashville.Progressive Americana, for him, he says, “has something to do with a little bit of country and blues,” but influenced by much of American music from the last century. That becomes clear as he talks about influences.“Everybody has the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Chuck Berry as influences,” he said. “But I also like bands like, say, The Lovin' Spoonful. Nobody seems to mention them much. I like them a lot. I bought every album by them.”He includes all the English invasion bands, not only the Beatles and the Stones but bands such as the Zombies and the Kinks. He puts in San Francisco bands like  Jefferson Airplane, Neil Young, Hot Tuna and others. As he goes on, he comes to people as varied in time and place as Howlin' Wolf, Sturgill Simpson, Rodney Crowell, BB King, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, John Lee Hooker, early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green.Progressive Americana indeed. His 2023 EP, Something to Say, has almost come to define the term for much of South America.“Hey Marie,” a single from that album, went close to viral on that continent and in Spain, said Larry Casserly, Norman's artist manager. “Due to my flexibility and experience, I enjoy the opportunity to stay busy here on the West Coast” Collins mentions. The band in Something to Say and Front Porch Philosophers is Norman Collins and the Tumblers.“I've been performing my own songs since I was 28,” he said. “I had a pretty popular band here in San Francisco, The Confessions, back in '81, and since then I've never been out of an original band.Front Porch Philosopher has a mix of old and new material. “I Wanna to Rule Somebody” and others are older tracks redone with a new producer/ arranger, Paul Kraushaar owner of PSR Recording. “Paul did a great job with these songs. The songs are more aggressive,” said Norman. “The guitar playing is more aggressive, the drums are more aggressive.”“We are mostly playing festivals and clubs type venues right now, and I'd like to take a step up in that direction” Norman states. “I know this new release will provide for more recognition and a chance to tour more places, larger venues and hopefully attract attention from an Indie label that believes in this music and might be willing to invest in this project,” said Norman. “This band,” he said, “is ready to go.”Get ready and go with Norman Collins and the Tumblers and connect on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/creator-to-creators-with-meosha-bean--4460322/support.

This week, we talk to comedian/actor Andy Kindler (Bob's Burgers, Late Night w/ David Letterman, Maron, Everybody Loves Raymond) & Mike Lisk (executive producer of The Best Show w/ Tom Scharpling and host of Egg Foo What?!) about a documentary whose subject matter is dear to both of their hearts (yet full of confusion and mystery for host Chris Slusarenko), The Grateful Dead documentary series, LONG STRANGE TRIP. These two have a history with each other, and out of the gate, an old Zappa argument and apology appear out of nowhere, and then it's off to the races. We discussed whether Bob Weir is essential to the band, the stage banter of the Grateful Dead, Andy's 70s rock band TransFusion, their viewpoints on Pigpen—the original rapper, which of the two drummers had the goods, Mountain Dew vs. Morning Dew, Andy's LSD induced concert going-ons and his naked prog-rock band stories, Mike's experience of almost being trampled at a Grateful Dead concert, pocket pool advice from the band, Tom Scharpling, Robert Hunter's lyrics, Donna & Keith, Mike meeting Garcia as a teenager, sneaking drugs into concerts, digitally erasing crowd nudity from concert footage, why they think they are the quintessential American band, The Velvet Underground and the dissonance of the Grateful Dead, Disco Dead, Marvin Gaye, can you be a cynic and give yourself over to the band, losing punk rock friends to the Dead, Altamont, tape trading, Europe '72, the sadness in the Jerry Garcia story, Hot Tuna, The Warlocks, Dead & Co., how the documentary is critical of a portion of their fan base, the Dead telling their fans to stop being assholes, Mickey Finn's father ripping the band off, the Phil Zone and Mike gives us a crash course on the essential shows and recordings to listen to.So let's time your trip perfectly on this very funny yet heartfelt episode of Revolutions Per Movie.ANDY KINDLER:twitter.com/AndyKindlerMIKE LISK:thebestshow.netEgg Foo What: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/egg-foo-what/id1635904703REVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday. If you like the show, please subscribe, rate, and review it on your favorite podcast app.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. There, you can get weekly bonus episodes and exclusive physical goods just for joining.SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieX, BlueSky: @revpermovieTHEME by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.comARTWORK by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhand Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Josh's Guests: T Bear - Songwriter/Musician Discovered at 17 by Hot Tuna, Richard T Bear played on albums by Richie Havens, Crosby Stills & Nash, wrote Young and Pretty for Cher, worked with Gene Simmons of KISS and lived the rock n roll lifestyle! Kathryn Leigh Scott - star of Dark Shadows Gary Bombalicki & Darrell Wayne interview Kathryn about the popular daytime show recorded live, Dark Shadows had 20 million viewers per episode find us at: www.HeresToYourHealthWithJoshuaLane.com  

Peter Sears (born 27 May 1948) is an English rock music musician. In a career spanning more than six decades, he has been a member of many bands and has moved through a variety of musical genres, from early R&B, psychedelic improvisational rock of the 1960s, folk, country music, arena rock in the 1970s, and blues. He usually plays bass, keyboards, or both in bands. Pete Sears played on the Rod Stewart albums Gasoline Alley, Every Picture Tells A Story (which was listed high in Rolling Stone's top 500 best albums of all time), Never a Dull Moment, and Smiler. He also played on the hit singles "Maggie May", and "Reason to Believe". During this period, Sears toured the US with Long John Baldry blues band, and played with John Cipollina in Copperhead. Sears joined the band Jefferson Starship in 1974 and remained with the group through the transition to Starship, before departing in 1987. After leaving Starship he worked with bluesman Nick Gravenites, and many other artists including Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Maria Muldaur, Rich Kirch, Taj Mahal, and Mimi Farina. (1992 to 2002) he played keyboards in the Jorma Kaukonen Trio with Kaukonen and Michael Falzarano, and with Kaukonen, Falzarano, and Jack Casady and Harvey Sorgen in Hot Tuna. Sears has played with many other musicians through the years, including Dr. John, John Lee Hooker, Leigh Stephens and Micky Waller in Silver Metre; Long John Baldry, Copperhead with John Cipollina, Jerry Garcia, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Levon Helm, Steve Kimock, Dave Hidalgo, Sons of Fred, Fleur de Lyse, Sam Gopal Dream, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Brown, Bob Weir, Los Cenzontles, Phil Lesh, Leftover Salmon, and Los Lobos.[5][6] Currently, he divides his time between the David Nelson Band, Chris Robinson and Green Leaf Rustlers, Zero, California Kind, Harvey Mandel, and Moonalice. Sears has also written and recorded the original score for many documentary films, including the award-winning "The Fight in the Fields" – Cesar Chávez and the Farmworkers Struggle directed by Ray Telles and Rick Tehada Flores. His most recent film, also directed by Ray Telles and co-produced by Ken Rabin, is called The Storm That Swept Mexico (2011) about the Mexican Revolution.

TOMMY EMMANUEL is arguably one of the best and most influential guitarists in the world. From Australia, across America and around the globe, Tommy is packing major concert halls to the rafters with his amazing and brilliant guitar skills. LARRY CAMBPELL & TERESA WILLIAMS are a husband and wife music powerhouse. Larry Campbell is perhaps best known for his time as part of Bob Dylan's band. Teresa Williams is an accomplished musician who has worked with artists such as Julie Miller, Levon Helm, Peter Wolf, and Hot Tuna. ISAAC BEVERS is our WoodSongs Kid who recently won the National Thumbpickers Award!

We caught up with American guitarist and singer Michael Falzarano about: Hot Tuna 1989 on Jorma Christmas LP Further Fest The Jamband Scene Solo Work / Making It Into Rolling Stone New Riders Of The Pruple Sage and more Ep 459 #ATJPod Catch him live with The Englishtown Project  More: http://www.michaelfalzarano.com/ @allthatjampod on IG, FB, and Twitter - www.allthatjampod.com - Subscribe - leave a review - tell a friend. Merch: https://t.co/QgtAisVtbV All That Jam is brought to you by Executive Producers Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Produced and edited by Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Mixed and Mastered by Kevin Hogan. Original Music by Aaron Gaul. Art by Amanda Cadran.

104 - Pete Sears and Roger McNamee (Moonalice) In episode 104 of “Have Guitar Will Travel”, presented by Vintage Guitar Magazine, host, James Patrick Regan. is at BottleRock and he's speaking with the legendary bassist Pete Sears & Roger McNamee of the band Moonalice. In their conversation they discussed: Pete's original move to the U.S., specifically San Francisco in 1969. We talk about his start on bass in 1963 and his early influences… mostly blues artists, and we talk about his early instruments. They discuss his early band “Sons of Fred” and how ended up working with Rod Stewart on Rod's first four solo albums. Pete tells of us of his early encounters with Jimi Hendrix including a missed opportunity to join Jimi's band. Pete discusses how he ended up with the newly formed Jefferson Starship (formerly Jefferson Airplane) and coincidentally Hot Tuna. They talk about Pete's gear including his basses that were stolen (a 63 Jazz Bass, and Craig Chaquico lost his ‘59 Les Paul) in the infamous riot at a German Starship concert in 1978. They talk about Pete's current projects including Moonalice, Steamhammer and Zero (with Steve Kimock). You can find out more about Pete at his website https://petesears.com Next up, Roger McNamee is an American businessman, investor, venture capitalist and musician and the leader of the band Moonalice. With Roger they discuss the nuts and bolts of the band Moonalice. Including the bands start by T-Bone Burnett and Roger walks us through the bands super star lineups including Lester Chambers, G.E. Smith, Jack Casady, Barry Sless and of course Pete Sears. They immediately talk vintage guitars, Roger is a lover of fine vintage guitars. He tells us about guitars he's given away and the ones he's been given. Roger walks us through the songwriting process for the band. Roger gives us a little Martin history as well as his own. Roger also tells us about saving elephants and trying to create a failed preserve in Red Bluff, CA and ultimately creating it in Africa. You can find out more about Moonalice at their website: https://www.moonalice.com Please like, comment share and review this podcast! #BottleRock #PeteSears #RogerMcNamee #Moonalice #RodStewart #JeffersonStarship #HotTuna #VintageGuitarmagazine #TBoneBurnett #VintageGuitar #guitar #Guitar #acousticguitar #theDeadlies #guitarfinds #haveguitarwilltravelpodcast #guitarcollector #Travelwithguitars #haveguitarwilltravel #hgwt #HGWT Please like, comment, and share this podcast! Download Link

The Kind, a Blacksburg based folk-rock band, is familiar to anyone who has passed through the New River Valley in the last thirty plus years. Formed in 1986, The Kind plays in a variety of styles that ranges from classic rock, R&B, and jazz to bluegrass and country; however, the arena which they most frequently blend their diverse influences is their huge melting pot of Grateful Dead covers. Over the years, The Kind has been privileged to perform with the likes of Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane & Hot Tuna), Rick Danko (The Band), Merle Saunders (The Jerry Garcia Band), The New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Jefferson Airplane. The Kind combines strong lead vocals and harmonies together with intertwining melodies and soulful rhythmic grooves to produce a fun, flowing and danceable experience. They are equally at home in a laid-back acoustic setting or a high-energy electric experience.

The only two likable members of iconic Vietnam War soundtrack band Jefferson Airplane peel away from the group in 1972 and put together a side project called Hot Tuna. Their debut studio album Burgers is pure back porch boogie warmth compared to the bloated and cold catalog of their main band. Classic rock stoner deep tracks all up in this one.

From September 17, 2017: Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, talked about his career and his memoir Been So Long.ABOUT JORMA KAUKONENAs a founding member of two legendary bands, Jefferson Airplane and the still-touring Hot Tuna, Jorma Kaukonen has achieved incredible success. A member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a Grammy recipient, Kaukonen has played with many well-known and historic musicians, including his contemporaries Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. For the first time, he is sharing his story in BEEN SO LONG: My Life and Music. The book will also include an exclusive five track companion album. The tracks include live recordings of "Been So Long," "Song for the High Mountain," "Broken Highway," "River of Time," and "In My Dreams."With a foreword by Grace Slick and an afterword by bandmate Jack Casady, BEEN SO LONG is an intimate portrait of an artist who was at the forefront of Psychedelic Rock and has since become one of the most highly respected interpreters of American roots music, blues, and Americana. Kaukonen's memoir reveals the stories behind the songs, lessons from a life in the music industry, and his reflections on a remarkable decades-long career.BEEN SO LONG charts not only Jorma's association with the bands that made him famous but goes into never-before-told details about his addiction and recovery, his troubled first marriage and still-thriving second, the creation of the Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp, which he operates with his wife, Vanessa, and more. Interspersed with diary entries, personal correspondence, and song lyrics, this memoir is as unforgettable and inspiring as Jorma's music itself.

Hoy casi que podríamos dejar la descripción sólo con el título y ya estaría todo dicho. Una vez al año dedicamos un monográfico a repasar toda la trayectoria de un autor y lo raro es que no lo hubiéramos hecho antes. Desde sus inicios en Fórum hasta que hasta hace bien poquito nos dejó una carrera llena de hitos, un montón de historias, de cosas que aprender y sobre todo una tonelada de amor por esos tebeos que nunca dejaron de apasionarle. Pues eso, con “Carlos Pacheco” está todo dicho. La noche es caliente como el infierno. Todo se te pega. Una asquerosa habitación de un asqueroso barrio de una asquerosa ciudad. El aparato de aire acondicionado es un pedazo de chatarra que no podría enfriar ni una bebida aunque la metieras dentro. Parece el sitio perfecto para escuchar el podcast 324 de ELHDLT Selección musical: 🎶 Letter to the North Star, de Hot Tuna 🎶 We'll Meet Again, de The Byrds 🎶 Wooden Ships, de Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

On today's show, Grammy winning guitarist Jorma Kaukonen shares a handful of personal stories and celebrity anecdotes from the vast catalog of experiences he has had throughout his long and exciting musical career. GUEST OVERVIEW: Jorma Kaukonen is an American blues, folk, and rock guitarist. He is best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane (inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996) and his ongoing performances with Hot Tuna, a band he co-founded with bassist Jack Casady. Jorma's musical journey reflects a rich blend of influences, including country blues, folk, and Americana. His fingerstyle guitar playing and interpretations of American roots music have left a lasting impact. Rolling Stone magazine recognized Jorma's guitar skills by ranking him No. 54 on its list of 100 Greatest Guitarists. His legacy continues to resonate with music lovers around the world; whether performing solo or with Hot Tuna, he remains a true master of his craft. https://jormakaukonen.com/ X/Twitter: @JormaKaukonen

Check out VRP Rocks Radio : https://live365.com/station/VRP-Rocks-Radio-a61270 - the 24/7 online classic rock station unlike any other classic rock radio! Playing deep cuts and forgotten bands, give it a try, you won't regret it! This week legendary bass player and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Jack Casady, joins Paul to talk about his life in music. The Jefferson Airplane / Hot Tuna star talks about how he and Jorma Kaukonen met, joining the Airplane, working with Jimi Hendrix on one his most iconic songs, Voodoo Chile, Woodstock and the Rock Hall Induction! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"There's something happening hereBut what it is ain't exactly clearThere's a man with a gun over thereTelling me I got to bewareI think it's time we stopChildren, what's that sound?Everybody look - what's going down?"Another week of senseless Gun Violence and Wars on Planet Earth, we haven't really evolved in the past 10 decades, have we? Please allow me to take you away on the  Saturday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us this afternoon are Tracy Chapman, Hot Tuna, The Hooters, David Bowie, The Kinks, Love, Orleans, Fleetwood Mac, Thunderclap Newman, Bob Dylan, Grand Funk Railroad, Steppenwolf, The Doors, Cream, Aztec Two-Step, Ian Matthews,, The Guess Who, Jefferson Airplane, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, John McLaughlin, The Comet Is Coming and Buffalo Springfield... 

This week Zach is hyped for Deadpool and Wolverine, Shannon gets his butt checked out, and Justin finally finished Blue Eye Samurai. Zach and Shannon also go on a huge tangent about 90's movies soundtracks.

We caught up with Michael Falzarano (Hot Tuna, The New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Englishtown Project) about the 1983 reunion of Jorma and Jack as Hot Tuna and his part in it.  Ep: 374 #ATJPod Catch Falz and Friends on 02/16/24 at The Turning Point and 02/17/24 at Blue Point Brewing More: http://www.michaelfalzarano.com/ @allthatjampod on IG, FB, and Twitter - www.allthatjampod.com - Subscribe - leave a review - tell a friend. Merch: https://t.co/QgtAisVtbV All That Jam is brought to you by Executive Producers Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Produced and edited by Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Mixed and Mastered by Kevin Hogan. Original Music by Aaron Gaul. Art by Amanda Cadran.

On this week's episode, we conclude our two-part feature Duo Stew, offering up more musical pairs in a variety of styles. We'll hear music from Watchhouse, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Jimmy Thackery & John Mooney, Hot Tuna, Chad & Jeremy, Richard & Linda Thompson and many more. Dynamic duos … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways Ken & Brad Kolodner / “The Orchard” / Skipping Rocks / FenchurchWatchhouse / “Wonderous Love” / Watchhouse / Thirty TigersRed Tail Ring / “Camp Meeting on the 4th of July-May Day” / Fall Away Blued / Self-producedGillian Welch & David Rawlings / “Ginseng Sullivan” / All the Good Times / AconyNorman & Nancy Blake / “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room” / Blind Dog / RounderJimmy Thackery & John Mooney / “Take Time” / Sideways in Paradise / Blind PigDelaney & Bonnie & Friends / “Never Ending Song of Love” / Motel Shot / Real GoneChad & Jeremy / “Yesterday's Gone” / The Best of Chad & Jeremy / One WayKen & Brad Kolodner / “Falls of Richmond” / Skipping Rocks / FenchurchHot Tuna / “Water Song” / Burgers / RCABrewer & Shipley / “Tarkio Road” / Tarkio Road / BMGRichard & Linda Thompson / “When I Get to the Border” / I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight / IslandTim O'Brien & Darrell Scott / “Time to Talk to Joseph” / Memories and Moments / Full SkiesHappy & Artie Traum / “Golden Bird” / Happy & Artie Traum / CapitolPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

This episode was recorded on October 1st, 2023 at the Moss Arts Center in Blacksburg, VA. The lineup includes Hot Tuna, Mick Flannery, Viv & Riley, William Lee Ellis, and Kaia Kater. https://bit.ly/3GapGo7

We curated these clever little vignettes just for you, you're not only our most important fan, you're our favorite fan. You're the best fan! Follow us on Spotify and Apple or wherever you get your podcasts- it makes it feel valued! And Insta! And LinkedIn! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fullyfunc/message

On this Eric Krasno Interview: How Eric got into the music business, working with Tedeschi Trucks Band, Questlove, Robert Randolph, Marcus King, 50 Cent… opening for The Rolling Stones (and reuniting his parents at the show), the story behind his new concept LP, Telescope… how he handled a low point in his career and the big jump in his career that came from this, investing in yourself (great lessons for other musicians), favorite guitars, moving to Cali, laughing, Hot Tuna and LOADS more really cool stuff. Eric opened up quite a bit and this was a fun convo, all around Discover Where the Money's Hiding in Today's Music Business: https://MusicReboot.com Support this show: https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support Eric Krasno is a 2-time Grammy winner for his work as a songwriter and guitarist with Tedeschi Trucks & Derek Trucks Band, and the founder of Soulive, Lettuce, and loads of other projects. He's toured, played, produced or written with people like Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, John Scofield, Robert Randolph, Marcus King, Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead, Aaron Neville, 50 Cent, Christian McBride and loads of others Subscribe & Website:  https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe Cool Guitar & Music T-Shirts, ELG Merch!: https://www.GuitarMerch.com   

NYC/Long Island 40-year singer/songwriter & one-time member of the Drifters in the early 80's Dave Revels with his latest releases “Shine On”, “One Man Woman”, and “Birds & Sleeping Dogs” with Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane! Dave is also the founder, creative director/producer of the award-winning Motown tribute “Shadows of the 60's” ; has collaborated with The Barenaked Ladies, the Persuasions, Steve Van Zandt; credited with the writing the contemporary national anthem “Stand Up America” introduced to schools across the nation, and is the author of “A Natural Guide to Mastering the Art of Entertainment” which he shares his knowledge of the entertainment business  and how to succeed in the industry! Check out the amazing Dave Revels on all major platforms and ⁠www.shadowsofthe60s.com⁠ today! #daverevels #nycsingersongwriter #thedrifters #thepersuasions #shineon #motowntribute #shadowsofthe6os #onemanwoman #birdsandsleepingdogs #jormakaukonen #hottuna #jeffersonairplane #thebarenakedladies #standupamerica #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerdaverevels #themikewagnershowdaverevels   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/support

NYC/Long Island 40-year singer/songwriter & one-time member of the Drifters in the early 80's Dave Revels with his latest releases “Shine On”, “One Man Woman”, and “Birds & Sleeping Dogs” with Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane! Dave is also the founder, creative director/producer of the award-winning Motown tribute “Shadows of the 60's” ; has collaborated with The Barenaked Ladies, the Persuasions, Steve Van Zandt; credited with the writing the contemporary national anthem “Stand Up America” introduced to schools across the nation, and is the author of “A Natural Guide to Mastering the Art of Entertainment” which he shares his knowledge of the entertainment business  and how to succeed in the industry! Check out the amazing Dave Revels on all major platforms and www.shadowsofthe60s.com today! #daverevels #nycsingersongwriter #thedrifters #thepersuasions #shineon #motowntribute #shadowsofthe6os #onemanwoman #birdsandsleepingdogs #jormakaukonen #hottuna #jeffersonairplane #thebarenakedladies #standupamerica #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerdaverevels #themikewagnershowdaverevels   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/themikewagnershow/support

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is Thursday, Sept. 21  The Film Futures Foundation wants to tell the story of Appalachians…and, speaking of film, find out how the WV Film Office can help with your next production…get your Mountain Stage tickets to see Steve Earle, Judy Collins and more…on today's daily304. #1 – From MOUNTAINEER MEDIA – Justin Williams and Ashley Stinnett are the founders of the Film Futures Foundation, a nonprofit connecting the movie industry to Appalachia. Their mission is to unlock the huge economic and storytelling potential of film in the region, shaping a brighter future for West Virginia and the Appalachian region. Their work provides access to filmmaking resources, education, and opportunities, fostering a vibrant and inclusive film community in an underserved region. With the reestablishment of the West Virginia Film Tax Credit in 2022, the Mountain State is one of the most competitive states in the country for funding jobs. The foundation's priorities are obtaining funding to put more gear into people's hands and fund their training programs, establishing a knowledge-based workforce ready for the film industry coming here. Listen to the podcast: https://www.mountaineermedia.org/podcast/episode-108-junior-walk-38j3n-479h5-pdzng-s5668-rnm2g-p2nx7-m9n6a-d8m3m-hm3aw-a6a7c-x8yxl-6kjlj-g88p6-lcg8r-bpfgs-mhxw2-9xn65-brtff-kx45m-bpwcx-s4dcn   #2 – From WV FILM OFFICE – Whether you're looking for the perfect location for your next film project, or you're a crew member ready to undertake your next project, the West Virginia Film Office is here for you. Experienced staff will help secure your perfect location, find skilled workforce, and navigate film permitting. The Film Office is ready to assist with an experienced crew, an established statewide network of governmental agencies, nation-leading fiscal incentives, local business leaders and community representatives that are unmatched in hospitality.  Say #YesWV to filming in Almost Heaven! Learn more: https://westvirginia.gov/wvfilm/ #3 – From MOUNTAIN STAGE –  West Virginia Public Radio's “Mountain Stage” radio show hits the road! This weekend's show in Franklin, Tenn., features Steve Earle. Upcoming shows are set for Blacksburg, Va., and Morgantown before the show returns to its home turf at the State Capitol Complex in Charleston.  Get your tickets now for the opportunity to see legendary bands and artists like Hot Tuna, Judy Collins and more! Visit www.mountainstage.org for ticketing information. Read more: https://mountainstage.org/upcoming-live-shows/   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.

On this episode I interview Hot Tuna Captain TJ Ott who is on the show Wicked Tuna which airs on National Geographic. Capt. TJ, discusses what it's like being a Tuna fisherman, being on Wicked Tuna, and his advice for young folks wanting to pursue fishing.

  FreeWorld is an independent, regionally touring, ever-evolving, Memphis-based musical ensemble who celebrated their 30th Anniversary in 2017. Drawing from influences as diverse as Booker T. & the M.G.s, John Coltrane, Frank Zappa, The Grateful Dead, Steely Dan, and The Meters, these brothers under one multicultural groove have remained a consistently entertaining and informed voice on the Memphis music scene since the group's inception. Rich Cushing is the leader of the band. He's also degreed Medical Technologist in Memphis making him a highly educated bass player/lead vocalist. FreeWorld has been a Memphis fixture from the get-go playing their music on Beale Street for many years. Rich and the band are intent on passing it forward, too by bringing young players on stage! Rich describes part of FreeWorld as a "school." FreeWorld was honored to receive a Brass Note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame in 2012, and they've also had the honor and privilege of sharing the stage with a wide variety of musical legends over the years, including Levon Helm, The Memphis Horns, Billy Preston, Bootsy Collins, Richie Havens, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, Derek Trucks, Hot Tuna, Los Lobos, Merl Saunders, Dr. John, Timothy Leary, John Sinclair, The Bar-Kays, Ann Peebles, Steve Cropper, James Cotton, Mojo Buford, Jimmie Vaughan & Double Trouble, Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, & Jonny Lang just to name a few.   Band members refer to themselves as an onstage freak show, but the only thing freaky about them is their talent. Be sure to check 'em out the next time you venture up the road a bit to Memphis. FreeWorld is just one of the many cool experiences outside Hot Springs Village. Thanks to our exclusive media partner, KVRE • Join Our Free Email Newsletter • Subscribe To The Podcast Anyway You Want • Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel (click that bell icon, too) • Join Our Facebook Group • Tell Your Friends About Our Show • Support Our Sponsors (click on the images below to visit their websites) __________________________________________

Jorma is a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna and we're thrilled to have him back on Takin A Walk.He is always an artist who professes his joy for his craft.Connect With Jorma KaukonenWebsite: https://jormakaukonen.com/YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCZ8JhF-1lVuL5ekOiD-HDjQ?feature=gws_kp_artist&feature=gws_kp_artist About the Show *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN' A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight!  Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family.Website: https://takinawalk.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebuzzknightLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/buzzknightLinkfire: https://lnk.to/takinawalk Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jorma is a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna and we're thrilled to have him back on Takin A Walk. He is always an artist who professes his joy for his craft. Connect With Jorma Kaukonen Website: https://jormakaukonen.com/ YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCZ8JhF-1lVuL5ekOiD-HDjQ?feature=gws_kp_artist&feature=gws_kp_artist   About the Show  *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN' A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight!   Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family. Website: https://takinawalk.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebuzzknight LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/buzzknight Linkfire: https://lnk.to/takinawalk   Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Promo/Upcoming Episode - Jorma Kaukonen-Behind the scenes with a music legend Jorma is a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna and we're thrilled to have him back on Takin A Walk.About the Show *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN' A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight!  Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family.Website: https://takinawalk.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebuzzknightLinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/buzzknightLinkfire: https://lnk.to/takinawalk Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Promo/Upcoming Episode - Jorma Kaukonen-Behind the scenes with a music legend  Jorma is a founding member of the Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna and we're thrilled to have him back on Takin A Walk. About the Show  *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN' A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight!   Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family. Website: https://takinawalk.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebuzzknight LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/buzzknight Linkfire: https://lnk.to/takinawalk   Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we talk with Jorma Kaukonen, electric guitarist extraordinaire for Jefferson Airplane, vocalist/blues picker for Hot Tuna, prolific solo artist, and all-around great guy. At 81 years young, Jorma is still writing, teaching, and gigging with no signs of slowing down. Listen in as we chat about his early career playing Bay Area clubs with Janis Joplin, life in The Airplane, his guitar mentors, speedskating, touring, and teaching guitar at his Fur Peace Ranch in Ohio.

Rip Curl Mirage Activate Boardshort Presents BLITZED! The last Changaz Comp of the year is on right now at Haleiwa and our Aussie CT hopefuls are lining up to make it count. One man who knows exactly what they're going through is 10 year CT veteran and tsunami survivor Richie Lovett who back in 1995 needed to win the at Haleiwa to qualify for the CT. And guess what? The cunt did just that! Today Rich takes us through how he pulled off a miracle under such intense pressure, who he thinks will sack up and cough a bit of nutmeg into their last ditch Changaz campaign, and who he believes will lift the trophies come the final hooters. Essential insider knowledge from the once gorgeous Hot Tuna model.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.