Jorma Kaukonensix Strings Cure Many Ills

Jorma Kaukonen Six Strings Cure Many Ills s lead guitarist for the freewheeling 60s rock band Jefferson Airplane, Jorma Kaukonen infused seminal psychedelic hits like “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” with potent guitar licks. Kaukonen, 68, has long stopped Aflying high with the Airplane. He credits the constant of music in his life with seeing him through his reckless young adulthood and keeping him grounded in a rural Midwest life of parenting and teaching. When Kaukonen is not home with the two-year-old he and wife Vanessa adopted from China, he is on the road with acoustic and electric incarnations of his Airplane spinoff band Hot Tuna. At home, the guitar doesn’t get tucked away with the rest of his luggage; the musician and his friends teach at Fur Peace Ranch, the music school the Kaukonens founded near their southeast Ohio farm. All that playing, Kaukonen is certain, has kept mind and fingers nimble. “It keeps the connection between my brain and my hands alive,” Kaukonen says. “And it keeps my hands moving. I’m not as flexible as I used to be, and I think I have some incipient arthritis, but as long as I keep moving things seem to work pretty well.” In his youth, jamming was less an exercise in applying music theory than simple expression. But today Kaukonen keeps his mind sharp by experimenting with unusual chords and harmonies. “As I learn about things that maybe should have learned when I was younger, things that never would have crossed my mind because I wasn’t approaching music from an abstract point of view,” he says, “I find it very exciting.” The guitar, Kaukonen says, helps make music as fulfilling as possible. “When you’re holding the guitar you feel the vibrations against your body. Music, to me, is also physical besides being intellectual and emotional. It becomes a part of your breath.” The guitarist says the music of the tumultuous Sixties resonated so powerfully because of the era’s politically charged climate and the draft. “I got drafted, and I went to some lengths not to go,” he says. “A lot of people went. We all made choices. But it’s not like that today, so you don’t have that kind of pressure where you’re being asked to do something where, if you don’t want to do it, you have to face some consequences.” That personal history hasn’t put distance between Kaukonen and those who have enlisted—a demographic he says needs music’s healing qualities. With acoustic instru- ments in tow, Kaukonen and his band mates have strolled the hallways of Walter Reed Army Medical Center to play for wounded veterans. And the Fur Peace Ranch doles out scholarships to soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, like Cullen Shearburn, 27, a former infantry platoon commander of 40 Marines who had seen heavy fighting while deployed in Ramadi, in central Iraq. “You go away to these violent places and do these violent things, and when you come home, you don’t really come home,” Shearburn says. “There’s pieces of you that are left over there, emotionally, psychologically, sometimes physically. When you go to war, you have to forget part of your life to make it through. Finding yourself homesick could put your life in jeopardy. Anything that makes you a good son or good father or good person—you have to put that aside in hostile conditions like that.” Shearburn, a sales rep for a California tactical gear company, says he had been home from Iraq for more than a year but had not regained many of those pieces of himself until he heard someone playing an acoustic version of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” this summer at the Kaukonens’ Fur Peace Ranch. “Some memories of when I was younger came back, when I would sit around with my folks and we would listen to The Beatles’ White album,” Shearburn recounts. “Until that point I had forgotten that. A lot of memories of what I used to be like, and just a feeling of overwhelming happiness that I had not felt in a long time, opened up and hit me at once. I hadn’t been able to cry since I got home, and I just broke down. It all just purged at once.” Later that day, before performing a blues song, Shearburn thanked the audience of music students and teachers. “I told them this is the first time in over a year that I felt like I’ve gotten back some of who I used to be,” he says. Many aftershocks and bad dreams have since disappeared. “That’s testament,” he says, “to the power of music.” Shearburn connected with Kaukonen. “I could tell that he and I haven’t shared the same experiences,” Shearburn says of the guitarist, “but I think he knows what it means to be repaired in some way by music.” 46 ENERGY TIMES | October 2008 .

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