JPG: Going back to something you said earlier. That’s pretty amazing that you were able to drive in and out of Woodstock. I thought all the roads were closed and artists could only get in via helicopter.

JK: Well, that’s the story of my life. Everybody gets the airplane but us. I don’t know why it out worked that way but it just did. We came in and…we got in. I don’t how that happened. Believe me because we’ve all seen the aerial photographs. We drove in on back roads. We had a guy, and, believe me, I have no idea how it actually worked out but it did.

The other funny thing that correlates to that too is every now and then when I’m doing interviews with quote unquote younger people they go, “Wow! It must have been great on your tour bus…” And I go, “Listen. In that era of rock ‘n’ roll no rock ‘n’ roll band had tour buses, country bands did. It didn’t exist. We traveled in rented Ford LTD wagons. A lot of times we carried the equipment in the back of the wagon. The Airplane did have an equipment truck. It was like a UPS truck with the sliding doors on the side but ours was a delivery truck for some bread company in San Francisco.

JPG: Kind of like when there’s talk of punk rock and the DIY aesthetic you were figuring it all out as you went along.

JK: Exactly.

JPG: Which may not have been all fun then but there probably was a degree of fun and innocence.

JK: To be honest with you I think it was fun then. For me I’ve been into music for a long time and I’ve been making some money playing music but not at the level that I got into with the Airplane. And for all that to be happening was so amazing, especially after all the nay saying from your parents. “What are you gonna do when the bubble bursts?” all that kind of stuff. To actually find that we had a career and that all this stuff would happen, that we could travel around and people would come to hear us play was magical. I still feel that way.

JPG: That it’s still magical?

JK: It is. Think of quote-unquote that at our age people still come to hear us play, it’s magical.

JPG: And I imagine you can sense from the stage who is really into it and who isn’t.

JK: Yeah. Jack and I talk about this a lot. We’ve been playing together since 1958 and from a quote-unquote professional, sort of like a spiritual point-of-view, it’s all we ever wanted to do. And even when we were playing seedy bars in high school, it’s all we ever wanted to do. No matter what the gig was, and even up to today, it was all we ever wanted to do.

JPG: That reminds me of something I recently read on Bruce Springsteen where he was talking about how if Born to Run didn’t sell his career with Columbia Records was probably over. Despite that, he saw no other option but music because, as he put it, “I don’t know if it would have finished us because what the hell else were we going to do?”

JK: Yeah, exactly right. [laughs] He wasn’t qualified…

JPG: It’s what I told people years ago that mocked classic rock era artists who went on tour. What else were they going to do? They started as teenagers. It’s all that they know.

JK: Yeah, right. That’s an interesting sidebar. We understand that popular music thing is ephemeral in terms of longevity. You never know what’s going to happen. Jack and me and me solo, we sound like us and we do what we do but the thing is the people who come to hear us play, our fans, allow us to mutate and change. Sure, maybe they’d like to hear something from the soundtrack of their life that we don’t play anymore but they let us do that, and that’s a huge blessing. It really is.

JPG: I’ve seen you a couple times electric when you did the Furthur Festival and since then every time I’ve seen you it’s been acoustic. And, as much as I enjoy it, there’s part of me that’s like, “When are they going to go electric again?”

JK: I’ll tell you something funny. We don’t go out electric a lot because it depends on the jobs. You’ve got to get the money to pay for all the stuff because we do have buses now and stuff like that. I read this interview with Billy Gibbons years ago and somebody’s asking him, “You guys are still touring after all these years. What keeps it fresh for you?” His answer was, “Buying new gear.” As a guitar geek you laugh at that but there’s a lot of truth in that. “You know, we’re going out again. I’m going to get me a new amplifier or get this old guitar…” or whatever.

JPG: That was one of the things that got you in Jefferson Airplane. (When he auditioned for the band they provided Ken Kesey’s Echoplex tape delay unit. The new sounds available thrilled the blues purist.)

JK: It was. Just the electricness of it all. “This looks like fun.”

JPG: I’m sure it would be…new noises.

JK: Absolutely! I couldn’t have put it better myself.

JPG: Going to recent history and the Fare Thee Well shows and Trey Anastasio being such a controversial choice…

JK: I thought it was a great choice personally. They had a lot of great guitar players that could have cloned that Jerry thing…Trey is a great guitar player. There’s no doubt about it. Once again, they didn’t set out to clone their thing. I thought it was really cool. I heard some of the stuff online and thought, “Wow! It’s really cool.”

JPG: Your latest solo album, Ain’t In No Hurry, Listening to it, it sounds like you’re playing in my living room. It has that sense of intimacy.

JK: [Laughs] We recorded that in our little theater down here in Darwin [Ohio] over at the Fur Peace Ranch. In a way it was like sitting in a living room because that wasn’t far from where my living room was. To be able to do that, record that at home and have all my pals there, it added another dimension…it’s the least self-conscious album I ever worked on.

As an artist, sometimes you always look at yourself under the magnifying glass. There’s always something that makes you self-conscious that you need to overcome. At least there has been in my case but not in this case. It was absolutely unself-conscious.

JPG: That makes me wonder if the way that you want music that you’re involved in to be has that been the same all these years from Airplane to Hot Tuna to solo artist?

JK: Well…the Airplane’s a different breed because I didn’t write enough. The Airplane was sort of a gestalt organism and the whole was absolutely greater than the sum of the parts. The way that we interacted when we were in the creative process, the way things came out were a direct descendent of that approach to stuff. When we stopped interacting on a first person basis toward the end of the Airplane’s run that’s when it ceased being fun to me. We started to get into a formula.

But anyway, I don’t think I ever seriously intellectually sculpted what was happening in the studio. Although, like a lot of the ‘70s Hot Tuna recordings – in our defense it was the ‘70s with a lot of guitar overdubs, lots of stereo stuff floating around because everybody had stereos back then. I was just thinking about the stuff of late, I still have a tube stereo and all that kind of stuff. I was listening to this Rosanne Cash song, “Runaway Train,” the other day from her King’s Record Shop album. I played it for one of my kids and her learning coach. And when you listen to this with a real stereo not some stupid earbuds and all that stuff, the art of what they did in the studio with a really stripped-down song – it’s very minimalistic – is so cool.

When we did “Ain’t In No Hurry,” we weren’t focusing on that Brian Eno thing, the studio as a creative tool, as much. We were really trying to recreate a live sound pretty much. But some of that stuff popped up again. And because I really like stereo…I know, I’ve got a surround sound thing with my TV but I hate listening to music on it. I really like listening to stereo music with speakers. And when we did that we wanted it to sound good on a stereo. We did it in vinyl, too.

Like I was just telling my daughter. We were up at Best Buy or one of those things and she wanted to get new earbuds and mom said don’t spend too much money on this. I said, “Are you really listening to music on this?” because she plays piano and sings and stuff. She said, “Yeah, I’m really into it.” I go, “Then, we’re going to buy you a real set of hifi headphones because if you’re going to listen to it – earbuds are great, I use ‘em on the plane or on the bus – but that’s not what the sound is all about. To get a full dynamic range – speakers or headphones – that’s what it’s all about.” When she put ‘em on with the demo at the store, she went, “Yeah, I get it.”

JPG: I’m curious about your opinion about the Beats headphones. I’ve heard great things from some and that they’re overpriced crap from others.

JK: Okay [Laughs] Dr. Dre is a genius. Those are expensive. I’ve got an 18 year old son and we’ve talked about this. The Dr. Dre headphones, they’re very bass heavy, obviously. I don’t think you need to spend that much money for them. Skoota Warner, who played drums for us for a number of years, he said that the House of Marley headphones, which you can get for under a 100 bucks, are just as good. The answer is you probably don’t have to spend that much, of course. They could be Bluetooth and all that stuff, and they’ve got the cool looking “b” on the outside of ‘em. But, in my opinion, I would just get a nice pair of Sony Studio headphones. Spend like a 100 bucks for it and be done with it. But, I know that the kids who love those Dr. Dre headphones really love ‘em.

JPG: Speaking of new technology that’s supposed to sound good, are you familiar with Pono, Neil Young’s digital music system?

JK: No, I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. People who listened to it said it’s really great. I don’t know what you need to have in your system to listen to that format. I’ll definitely have to listen to it because I am a stereo fan. I love that stuff. I really do.

Now, when I did Blue Country Heart in 2002, we recorded that on SACD, that Super Audio format, which kind of like beta [videotape] was a lost format. That was a great-sounding digital format, and unfortunately like beta it didn’t take off.

JPG: Because I get picky with how music sounds I still haven’t embraced the whole mp3 and digital music format. Much of it sounds too tinny and AM radio like to my ears.

JK: Listen, I have an iPhone. Do I listen to it when I’m traveling? Yes, absolutely. You plug that into your stereo, whatever it is, and you can hear the inadequacies and the compression. When you play a well-recorded CD or piece of vinyl or being a Neil Young fan I’m sure the differences you can immediately tell.

Back in the mid-60s in San Francisco, I had a mono FM radio because the sound was better and, of course, at that time it was classical and jazz on the stations. Then, when they went to multiplex stereo, which we now know as…all FM radio is stereo now, we flipped. And then when they started playing rock ‘n’ roll on it, it was like, “How good does it have to get?”

JPG: Once in awhile, when I’m listening to an older album, I think about how it must have blown people’s minds to hear things like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper or Rubber Soul for the first time.

JK: Sure, absolutely. I’m not a huge Beatles fan but those are two great albums. I’ve got this record on vinyl but it even sounds good if you call it up on your computer. Ike & Tina Turner, a song called “If You Can Hully Gully (I Can Hully Gully Too).” Lyrically speaking, this is not War and Peace but aside from Tina being great at all times, in this song Ike Turner has one of the great rock guitar solos of all time.

JPG: Last thing, I wanted to say that my best friend is someone I’ve known since kindergarten. So, it’s great to see you and Jack not just being lifelong friends but also lifelong musical compatriots.

JK: He’s my oldest friend. And if the three of us were doing this interview, we’re not the same people. We’re really different guys but we’ve never had a band meeting. We don’t argue about stuff. It’s great.

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