Still In Tuna: At CSMH, Jorma Kaukonen Shows Why Octogenarians Still Tour & Boomers Still Buy Tix

There was no scoreboard visible when a four-piece version of the band Hot Tuna played on the stage of College Street Music Hall Wednesday night.

I was looking for one, or for some help with keeping count. Jorma Kaukonen, leader of the ​‘60s-spawned blues-folk-rock combo, was tiptoeing through the delicate top notes above the shuffling bottom-register rhythm of his guitar arrangement of the Rev. Gary Davis’s own reworked version of ​“Hesitation Blues.” It popped just like it did back when Richard Nixon was serving his first term as president.

I was trying to calculate how many times Kaukonen has performed that song live. I heard him perform four decades ago at Toad’s Place. It sounded great then, too. He has recorded and toured steadily since joining Jefferson Airplane in 1966 and then in 1969 forming the side (and in my view more consequential and enduring) rootsier blues-folk act as one-half (with bassist Jack Casady) of Hot Tuna. Hot Tuna recorded ​“Hesitation Blues” in 1970. That’s … give me a minute … 53 (?) years ago.

Let’s say Kaukonen has performed it 15 times a year on average since then. Fifty-three times 15 … if College Street had that scoreboard, it might have read 795. If not higher.

That’s a lot of versions of ​“Hesitation Blues.”

Doing the math, I wondered: How does Kaukonen keep it fresh? Does he keep it fresh? Why keep playing it (besides the fact that it’s a great song)?

And … why shell out money to watch him play it?

That led to a broader question. Kaukonen turns 83 years old before the year’s end. Why do these Baby Boomer acts keep touring and performing and playing their old songs? (In some cases they need the money. But in other cases, performing seems to keep them alive.)

And why do we Baby Boomers shell out serious money to watch them do it? Is it nostalgia, a grasping to recapture embers of long-lost passion and transcendence? Or is it a continual process of mining meaning, discovering deeper or new experiences from time-honed treasure?

That had until Wednesday night been an academic question for me. I don’t shell out money to watch my old music heroes; I last saw Bob Dylan after his disappointing Yale baseball field show in 2004. The previous times I felt I could afford to shell out money to attend (excellent) shows at College Street Music Hall, the headliners (Brandi Carlisle, I’m With Her) performed music written, recorded, and released in this century.

And truth be told, I wouldn’t consider shelling out 76 bucks to hear Hot Tuna. My friend did. He had a ticket to spare and generously invited me to tag along.

I’m so glad he did. It was fun to hear and watch the tall, white-haired Kaukonen summon an uninterrupted stream of delicate blues lines, inventive and flowing chord progressions, and punctuated acid-rock licks from his guitar. It took me back. It also took me forward.

And I gained some insight into the never-ending octogenarian Baby Boomer concert biz.

To some extent, Hot Tuna’s show was a preserved revival set: The arrangements and restrained improvisation between bassist Casady and Kaukonen. Faithful versions of the classics. Unlike with, say, Paul Simon or Mick Jagger or Elton John, who sound like half-range karaoke versions of their old selves when they sing their old hits, Kaukonen’s voice sounded exactly the same, at least to me, as it did during the Cold War: Deadpan, restrained vocals that supported rather than rose above the fluidity and heartfelt wandering of his fingers’ work on guitar. 

Kaukonen was fully plugged in; the show was part of the band’s fall 2023 ​“Last Waltz” tour — not a farewell tour, but the last one (they say) they will play electric. They plan to continue touring acoustic in 2024.

As in the past, Kaukonen also barely spoke to the audience. He and the band let the music talk.

But there were parts that were indeed different. I listened closely to Kaukonen’s 8,435th rendition of the Gary Davis classic ​“Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” In this case it seemed to turn predicted strums or single-string solos into silent moments, followed by newly discovered patterns to draw from the minor and seventh chords that give the song its haunting power. 

Also, I don’t remember seeing Kaukonen stand up from his stool at Toad’s back in the day. At College Street, he didn’t have a stool. He stood the whole time. Actually, he wandered most of the time. He stooped and stalked the stage like Dick Van Dyke’s Mr. Dawes Sr. stalking the bank boardroom in Mary Poppins. Sometimes he faced the audience. Sometimes he turned to face the drummer for a private viewing of a solo. 

The most interesting surprise of all was the incorporation of a fourth member to the guitar-bass-drum trio: Steven Bernstein, who’s not part of the full tour. Bernstein alternated between a soprano trombone and a trumpet all night. Sometimes he played soft single extended notes to add texture to the songs. But often he hit a foot pedal and transferred his instrument into … an electric guitar. At least that’s how it sounded. On many numbers Kaukonen strummed the rhythm while Bernstein unleashed wicked plucked-sounding hard-rock leads or slid into what sounded like stringed, not horn, solos.

I recognized about half the songs Hot Tuna played, which felt like revisiting old friends. I also enjoyed meeting the ones I didn’t recognize. Despite Kaukonen’s clear vocal delivery, I couldn’t make out the lyrics this time. (Perhaps it was a glitch in the Music Hall’s usually optimally balanced sound system. Or just as likely it was typical Baby Boomer Auditory Burnout, hearing loss from more than half a century for frying our eardrums with a steady diet of numbingly loud music.) But the lyrics weren’t the point. Never were.

Toward the end of the second set, Hot Tuna was kicking into higher gear. Kaukonen hadn’t yet, for the 5,700th or 5,701st time, sung ​“Genesis,” the classic from his 1974 solo album Quah. I was looking forward to hearing it for the 900th or so time; it always lifts me to a higher place even if it never heads in any particular direction after setting sail. But the hour was approaching 10 p.m. Like true Baby Boomers in the age of Gen Z, my friend and I headed for the door. Not because we had lost interest. Because it was past our bedtimes. Kaukonen and his fellow geezers, on the other hand, were just getting started.