Jorma Kaukonen stays focused on the music ahead of Hot Tuna show in LA with Little Feat

By Dave Gil de Rubio

In light of the spate of music biopics and memoirs that have come out, anyone expecting lots of hot dish from “Been So Long: My Life and Music,” Jorma Kaukonen’s autobiography from a few years back, is advised to look elsewhere.

Kaukonen, as part of Hot Tuna, is on tour with Little Feat and will play The Theater at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on Aug. 12.

Despite the fact that the Jefferson Airplane founding member experienced his first dalliance with fame during the group’s halcyon late ‘60s Haight-Ashbury days, it’s more of an intriguing and straightforward account of Kaukonen’s life path. It’s a big reason why he decided to pass on doing a project like this when he was first approached about doing it about a decade or so ago.

“In the mid to early 2000s, I had an offer to do a book with somebody else as a co-writer. It was somebody that I liked and I hadn’t really thought about it. At the time, the idea of a co-writer made sense to me because I had never really done any writing of that magnitude,” Kaukonen recalled in a phone interview. “But it became apparent that the publishing company that we had been discussing things with wanted all that salacious stuff we talked about that I don’t have in my book. As soon as I realized that they wanted me to dish dirt on people that were more famous than myself, I thought I didn’t want to do that. So I just shelved the whole idea. The same thing happened when I didn’t make the cut for the “Janis: Little Girl Blue” PBS special because Janis and I never had sex or did drugs together. We just played music.”

Born in Washington, D.C. to Beatrice Love (née Levine) and Jorma Ludwig Kaukonen, Sr., the younger Kaukonen boasts Finnish lineage through his paternal grandparents and Russian Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. Given that his father was a State Department employee, quite a bit of traveling framed the future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s life. In experiencing living in far-flung locales like Pakistan and the Philippines, Kaukonen took to keeping a diary, a habit that carried into adulthood and was an enormous boon in providing the finite detail that flowed through “Been So Long.”

“Here’s the thing, even as a kid, I liked typing because I couldn’t read my own handwriting. For lack of a better term, I always journaled stuff when I was a kid. Back in the late ‘90s, I started a website. It wasn’t interactive like the ones are today. Before there was blogging, I was still journaling. I just always enjoyed doing that,” he said. “For the book, I let the process be my inspiration. So once I sat down, I would start out by knowing that I had to spend three hours that day writing. I’d sit down and maybe the first few minutes, it would be labored. But once I got into the flow, I found that I could do it.”

The book’s narrative thread is wrapped in a straightforward honesty about Kaukonen’s journey, with self-examination that touches on his addiction and self-recovery, his troubled first marriage and still-thriving current one, his musical journey, the creation of the Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp and the joy of fatherhood. Sprinkled throughout are lyrics that provide handy narrative bridges.