JACK CASADY: BASS LINES AND MILESTONES

He’s the legendary presence felt beneath some of the most timeless psychedelic, rock, and blues music ever recorded, and Jack Casady continues to live a rare and storied life. His signature tone, feel, and rangy approach to playing bass have provided him with a still in-demand career.

WORDS: Paul Davies | IMAGES: Supplied

And with his fellow original Jefferson Airplane musician, guitarist extraordinaire Jorma Kaukonen, with whom he formed the Airplane offshoot band Hot Tuna, he has an abundance of tour dates booked performing Acoustic Tuna. Not bad for an 80-year-old veteran from the vanguard of the modern music business whose enthusiasm for his calling is as infectious as ever.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SIGNATURE EPIPHONE BASS

Jack sits before me on our Zoom call from his Channel Island home in Jersey, with his signature Epiphone bass thrumming in his hands, passionately keen to tell me its story: “I started out with Epiphone in 1997; the last century,” he emphasises. “I approached Gibson through a good friend of mine, Mike Lawson, who was working with Gibson at the time. I discovered the Les Paul version of this bass in 1983, and I hadn’t realised that there was a nice F-hole arch-top semi-hollow body already out there by Gibson.”

He considers, “I had played the short-scale version of Guild in the late sixties, like the one I used at Woodstock and around that era, because I really liked the openness of the tone of the semi-hollow body.” Settling into his comfort zone, Jack continues with his thoughts on his creative obsession with the evolution of modern bass guitars: “I started out playing guitar at age twelve and moved to the bass at sixteen, with, of course, the Fender bass, and started out playing the jazz bass, and that’s what I used in the early part of my recording career. But when I discovered the hollow body instruments, I really liked that open sound. And I’ve kind of always chased the stand-up bass player jazz guy sounds,” he confides.

A UNIQUE COLLABORATION WITH EPIPHONE

“Mike Lawson was working with Gibson, and they weren’t interested in reviving this short-lived Les Paul version. They did a run of about a couple of hundred in the early seventies, and they didn’t hit it off very well. But I loved it when I rediscovered them, and I said I’d like to make it. I like this bass and the way it’s set up. The neck style feels so nice to me, as does the tone. But I said I want to work on the pickups, but Gibson wasn’t interested. Instead, they turned me on to the Epiphone division, and they were. Jim Rosenberg, the president of Epiphone at the time, gave me carte blanche. He said, ‘Jack, you can build this instrument any way you want. You can put three pickups on it, two pickups, one.’ I said, ‘what I really want is one super top-of-the-line component pickup, and I’ll place that in the sweet spot that I like.’”

MEMORIES OF CRAFTING AND REDISCOVERING A STOLEN BASS

Talking about the technical aspect of his Epiphone Signature Jack Casady bass also brings back a flood of personal memories for Jack as he reveals to me: “We tried different magnet combinations and different strengths of magnets and different gauges of wire and all that kind of stuff. I learned all that stuff from my father, who was an audiophile. He was a dentist, a professional man: doctors, dentists, and lawyers are all in my family, and this was in the fifties. He loved electronics when he As I mentioned, Jack is naturally a bass obsessive, as he details his current acoustic setup: “Over the years, I’ve had a couple of different approaches. Lately, luthier Tom Ribbecke has made a series of true acoustic bass guitars with a big body and a unique design. It’s called the Diana Bass Series, after my late wife Diana who passed away in 2012. It has a deep body on it, but it’s an arch-top design. What we’re doing now, since we stopped doing the louder version of Hot Tuna, is playing the acoustic flat top rather than going into the electric world.” He adds with a huge smile: “We’re just dropping the electric because we figured, well, I’m just turned eighty and Jorma is eightythree going on eighty-four, and, maybe, we’ve got a shot at another ten years if we don’t completely lose our hearing, ha ha.”

THE BEGINNINGS OF HOT TUNA

Jack recalls the exact moment when the embryonic Hot Tuna started: “We were fortunate because I think there were a couple of concerts in New York where there was some sort of technical problem, and Paul Kantner said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys go out and play a couple of things while we get this all fixed up’? So, we did. Luckily, we had that format to slide into with an audience where we could present some of this material that we loved.”

He says: “But in Jefferson Airplane, everybody wrote. Everybody. There were a lot of different styles between Grace Slick and her approach, Paul Kantner’s, Marty Balin and Jorma, who later started doing more writing, but there was a lot of territory to cover in only so much time within the structure of any one concert. So, this was sort of an intimate, almost like a small combo jazz approach to the kind of music that we enjoyed, and as the months and years built up, we started to expand that and see where it would lead to as a kind of a new direction, while we were doing the Jefferson Airplane at the same time. So, it’s very natural. This came out of sitting in hotel rooms night after night and playing.”

RECORDING WITH JIMI HENDRIX

This was a fertile and groundbreaking period in music, which also found Jack playing on a famous recording session with Jimi Hendrix at Electric Ladyland Studios as he reveals the backstory to this milestone meeting: “Bill Graham was our manager, and with Bill and all the musicians of the San Francisco scene, we would talk about who our influences were, and the kind of people we admired. Bill Graham was unique in that he loved to put a combination of musicians and influences from different worlds and backgrounds on the same stage at the same time during a show, and he put on wonderful shows.

In any case, Jimi Hendrix came through, and he jumped over to England and got his start with his band, and he came back to the United States and played these places. We became friends through meeting at The Fillmore,” he smilingly recalls. “We practised next door to each other all the time. Mitch Mitchell was a good friend of mine. I loved his drumming. I loved the way he approached the drums in the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I think that’s what made them unique. I don’t think it was ever like that again once he was gone,” Jack asserts.

A JAM SESSION TO REMEMBER

“To jump ahead to your question. We (Jefferson Airplane) were in New York. I think we’d done the Dick Cavett Show, something like that, and Jimi was working on what became his double album, and he had taken a break and gone down to see Steve Winwood who was in Traffic. We had also gone over to Steve Paul’s Scene club to see Traffic play because we had just heard their debut record release, and it was their first stateside tour. We all met over there, listened to their set, and Jimi invited a whole bunch of us back to his studio, along with about twenty other people, and at about 06:30 in the morning, after listening to him do some overdubs and whatnot during the night, he said, ‘let’s play some blues’. So, we did, and it was great.”

Jack tells me more: “Jimi and I and others had played together before and jammed at rehearsal, so we weren’t strangers to each other. I found him to be a nice fellow, straightforward and wonderful to play with. He just looked you straight in the eye, and you got down to business and played. So, we did Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) with Steve Winwood playing the Hammond B3, Mitch Mitchell, myself, and Jimi. Then at about 07:30, we had to pile into the LTD Station Wagon and drive down to Washington, DC to do a gig that night. And that’s what you can do when you’re twenty-something years old!”

A FINAL WORD ON GRACE SLICK

I can’t allow my conversation to finish with this lucid, endearing, highly engaging, and generously affable legend without asking about the only other surviving member of Jefferson Airplane and one of the first front-ladies of rock, the remarkable Grace Slick: “I talk to her all the time. See, I live in Los Angeles as well as here in St. Martin, Jersey, Channel Islands, and she lives out in Malibu. It’s just Grace, Jorma, and Jack left out of the original band, and she’s just as sharp, witty, and acerbic as ever. She’s a wonderful painter and artist. She’s a good person, and I love her. One of these days, you’ll have to do an interview with her.” I’ll say Grace with a huge helping of Hot Tuna to that.