Don’t You Leave Me Here
by David L. Ulin
My brother couldn’t feel his fingers. We were in the main building at Fur Peace Ranch — the Meigs County, Ohio guitar camp established in 1998 by Jorma Kaukonen, known for his work in Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna — and he was trying to perform the Reverend Gary Davis’ “I Am the Light of This World.” The intimidation factor was high. Davis, after all, had been Kaukonen’s mentor, and was a blues fingerpicker and songwriter of uncommon subtlety. Kaukonen had recorded the song on his 1974 acoustic solo album Quah. Now, my brother was trying to work through the opening changes, in a circle of twenty-five guitarists. Kaukonen himself was five feet away. It was a Friday morning in late June, the beginning of a three-day introductory fingerpicking workshop, and we participants had been asked to play for thirty seconds, to demonstrate what we could (or couldn’t) do. I was a few seats to my brother’s left, and I could sense both his anxiety and the rising of my own. Although I’d once been a fairly serious amateur musician — writing and recording songs, playing in a band — I was new to finger-style, and it had been twenty years since I’d played very much at all. Preparing for this weekend, I had taught myself a few loose fingerpicking figures: a simple blues in E, the opening to Bob Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain.” I watched my brother play a chord, stop, recast it, stop and start again. Afterwards, he sidled up and murmured, “That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.” My own goals were less ambitious, or maybe I just didn’t have his guts. Either way, when my turn came around, I took a moment to survey my options. Then, I launched into the ragged sustained D chord that kicks off the Dylan song.
We had met up, my brother and I, a few hours earlier, in a rental car office at the airport in Columbus, a hundred or so miles to the northwest. In a sense, however, we’d been on this journey for more than forty years. Kaukonen was a touchstone of our adolescence; I was fourteen when I first saw him, with Hot Tuna, in 1976. That night — a Sunday, school the next morning — the band stayed onstage well past midnight; I’d been dutiful enough to call my mother from a payphone in the lobby, but not dutiful enough to leave the show. How could I explain to her what this meant to me? It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I was familiar with the Beatles, with Jim Croce, with the American Graffiti soundtrack and Jesus Christ Superstar. I owned cassettes by Simon & Garfunkel and The Guess Who. But the Airplane and Hot Tuna, all those 1960s San Francisco bands, changed everything for me. Their music pulsed like an explosion, chaotic, volatile, steeped in feedback but also rooted in folk and blues. Kaukonen’s guitar surged through the center of it all. On “Plastic Fantastic Lover” (“all the red tape is mechanical rape / of the TV program waste,” singer Marty Balin wailed), his lead lines burned molten, while his acoustic picking on “Embryonic Journey” rang like drops of sudden rain. “I thought he had lost his mind,” Kaukonen would later write in his memoir Been So Long, recalling producer Rick Jarrad’s insistence to record the track for the Airplane’s 1967 breakthrough, Surrealistic Pillow. “A folky, finger-style piece on a rock-and-roll record? I thought there was no place for it.” According to conventional wisdom, he wasn’t wrong. But that was the whole idea, that conventional wisdom didn’t matter, that rock ’n’ roll was big enough to encompass anything. Half a century later, Kaukonen’s career stands as a testament not only to that breadth but also to its influence; as my brother kept insisting to anyone who would listen: “I learned guitar to play his songs.”
In that sense, our trip to Ohio was something of a reclamation project, a way to reconnect with music that we loved. I’d been wanting to come for at least a decade, but life kept getting in the way. It wasn’t the weekend so much as the run up to it; I’d spent four months playing myself back into shape. The experience was, by turns, exhilarating and daunting, reminding me of how much I had loved it while forcing me to confront (again) my limitations, everything I didn’t know. This was why I’d drifted away from music in the first place: Call it frustration, boredom, an inability to move beyond a certain style of play. Part of my intention was to learn something different, something I had never tried. For my brother it was different; he’d been playing just two years. As often happened, then, we were on different trajectories, entering from inverse sides. You could see it in that introductory session — he had planned his performance, practiced with the idea of doing something difficult, whereas I had made my choice on the spot. Preparation as opposed to improvisation … this was a key distinction in how we approached things, although there were other ways in which we were alike. We were both enthusiasts, although we could be reticent to discuss how we felt. We had spent the last twenty years at something of a distance, not estranged but caught up in the complications of our lives. Children, career, the slow grind of existence; the last time we’d traveled together, in 1998, we had flown to New York for our grandmother’s funeral. Now, we were here, sharing a small cabin for three nights, sleeping on single beds three feet apart. It felt like childhood, another sort of reclamation, with the added layer of not only getting to meet but also to learn from one of our longest-standing musical heroes, a guitarist who, until now, we’d encountered from the audience side of the stage.
Jorma and David
I remembered once in San Francisco, seeing Kaukonen on Battery Street, in front of the Old Waldorf, the now-defunct club where I had often watched him play. This was the summer of 1980, and he was wiry, in a tee shirt, tattoos unfurling down his arms. I stood at the fringes as he made small talk with a cluster of fans, before we all went inside for the show. The first morning at Fur Peace was not unlike that, as I sat with some other students and watched Kaukonen do his rounds. Thirty-nine years later, the guitar hero had mellowed into an elder statesman, gray and goateed, tattoos faded, dressed in jeans and black clogs. Still, given where we were and where we had been, that felt like a trick of the light. Again, my brother moved first, coming down the steps to introduce himself, while I trailed a step or two behind. Kaukonen was affable if guarded, reminiscing about a stand of shows he’d recently performed. He disappeared before we sat down to lunch, returning for that introductory demonstration, after which he — along with David Wolff and Tom Feldmann, the weekend’s two other instructors — broke us into three rotating groups. We were mostly men and mostly middle-aged. One had brought his twenty-year-old son. As for acuity, the range was broad. I was in a group comprised mostly of beginning pickers; we spent the afternoon with Feldmann, working out the first few bars of “Lord Have Mercy,” an instrumental composed by Kaukonen during the sessions for Quah. It was humbling: D to G to C to E minor, chords I’d shaped with my left hand since I was in my early teens. The key to picking, though, was in the right hand, particularly the alternating bass played by the thumb. That was where the complexity emerged. I understood this, had seen my share of fingerpickers in performance, but to try it for myself was another matter, as if I’d never picked up a guitar. “It’s all about the right hand,” Kaukonen repeated, and his style of playing offered a case in point. He built his songs from simple chords, most often open, enhanced by shortcut fingerings. “Anybody play an A like this?” he mused at one point, barring his left index finger at the second fret across the second, third, and fourth strings. I raised my hand in recognition; I’d been relying on that very cheat for forty years.
“Are you left-handed?” Kaukonen responded.
“Yes,” I answered, unsure where this was going.
He laughed and told me: “So am I.”
All of this was stuff I’d never considered … or maybe I’d just assumed that if I became a better player, my tricks would simply fall away. But playing, Kaukonen wanted us to remember, was a process, an interaction between musician and guitar. “Some players,” he said, “do a lot on the fretboard. I don’t have the talent for that, so I strip things down all the time.” If, on the one hand, that seemed self-effacing — don’t have the talent? We were here because of how his work had moved us — it was impossible, as he broke down standards like “99 Year Blues” and “Dime for Beer,” not to see how this connected to a larger point-of-view. These songs were not heirlooms, they were living. They responded, as it were, to touch. This meant that every one of us had to find our own passage through the music, and it would change each time we played. Take Kaukonen’s career as an example. Born in 1940, he began to play gigs at Bay Area coffee houses in the early 1960s, before founding Jefferson Airplane with Balin and rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner in 1965. He and Airplane bassist Jack Casady formed Hot Tuna in 1969 as a side project; their first release was a live album of acoustic blues, three of which (“Dime for Beer,” “How Long Blues,” and “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”), Kaukonen broke out as part of a six song breakfast set on the morning of the workshop’s final day. Fifty years separates that pair of performances; Kaukonen will turn seventy-nine on December 23. His fingers, he acknowledges, are not as supple as they used to be. And yet, that too is the point, that he has grown with the music, through the decades of his life. The songs sound similar but also different; his voice is deeper, his phrasing has evolved. Before arriving I had wondered some about intention; what makes a master musician, one who jammed with Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin, want to teach an amateur like me? But here’s what I discovered: That was the wrong question to ask. Yes, Fur Peace Ranch is a substantial operation; in 2020, fifteen weekend workshops have been scheduled. That’s a necessity of the business, which is run by Kaukonen’s wife Vanessa, with whom he dreamt up the idea in 1989. The ranch occupies 120 acres. It has a full-time staff. Besides the cabins and the main building, there’s a café-style dining hall, a bathhouse, a library, and, up a small rise, Fur Peace Station, a 200 seat concert hall that books performers year round. But in the end, that’s all just infrastructure. What’s important is the music and what it means.
I got a vivid sense of this the second afternoon, when we turned to the old Jelly Roll Morton blues “Dime for Beer.” It’s a terrific song, one of my favorites, and it opens with a killer lyric: “Now don’t you leave me here / Said don’t you leave me here / Now pretty baby if you go / Leave me a dime for beer.” In a 1938 interview with folklorist Alan Lomax, Morton claimed he’d written it “about the year of nineteen-five, when I was about twenty years old,” but its provenance is more elusive — which reiterates the fluidity of the form. Kaukonen is mindful of this history; to get us in the mood, he queued up Morton’s recording of “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (regarded by many as the earliest surviving jazz song) on his phone. As we listened, he rocked his head and tapped both feet against the floor. “Thought I heard Buddy Bolden sing,” Morton drawled from the tinny speaker, and briefly, it was as if time had collapsed and he were with us in the room. “Beyond bad ass,” Kaukonen said, grinning, when the track finished. Then, he turned to “Dime for Beer.” Again the song was simple, G7 to G to F to C, and again, Kaukonen showed us the ins and outs of his approach. “There’s a lot of ways to skin this cat,” he said, not for the first time. Later, Wolff and Feldmann would share their own glosses, their own moves, hybrid chords and fingerings — not to confuse us, but to open up our sense of what was possible, the song as living thing again. That night at dinner, Kaukonen joined my brother and myself, eating with us and a couple of others as we sat on high stools at a table in the café. “You getting everything you need?” he asked. I made a joke about how much my fingers ached; we were playing several hours a day.
“By the time you leave, you’ll have callouses on your right hand,” Kaukonen said, and when I replied that I could feel them taking shape already, he nodded as if something had been affirmed. I asked about fingerpicks, which he uses — “you got all that equipment on there,” Airplane singer Grace Slick once kidded him after attempting to slap hands onstage at Radio City Music Hall — but he advised against them, saying he’d prefer to pick with his fingers, but this was how he learned. Again, the serendipity of process, the techniques we develop from what we’ve been taught or can achieve. A lot of ways to skin this cat, indeed. If my brother and I had come here as part of a journey, most striking was how natural it seemed. I’d rented a guitar at the Ranch to avoid traveling with mine from California. I mentioned that I liked the tone and action, and Kaukonen said he’d strung the instrument himself. On the walls hung images of friends and fellow travelers: Garcia, Crosby, Stills & Nash. We chatted about instruments and shows. “I needed that brittle sound,” he recalled, referring to the echo-laden treble of his early electric work, “to be heard over Jack and Paul, who played a twelve-string. It was the only available sonic space.” Kaukonen folded his left hand to demonstrate a bit of chording; it looked like he was playing air guitar. My brother and I made eyes at one another. He snapped a bunch of photographs. We did our best to play it cool, but how many times had I — had each of us — done exactly this while listening to Kaukonen’s music, dancing around our rooms pretending those riffs were ours? Later, in the cabin, it was as if we had been given something. It was as if we belonged. “We ate dinner with Jorma,” my brother said more than once. The strangest part was that it didn’t seem strange at all.
The afternoon of the third day, we all trooped up the low hill to Fur Peace Station for the student performance. I’d been on the fence about participating — I had never played in front of people much and not at all for many years — but that morning, David Wolff had helped make up my mind. “You’ll regret it if you don’t,” he told our group of novice pickers, as we worked on “99 Year Blues.” Wolff was a superior teacher, great at cutting to the chase. “The brain gets in the way, as usual,” he said, urging us not to think too much. So I took his advice and carried my Kaukonen-strung guitar into the theatre, where I found a seat and waited for my turn. Here, too, my brother seized the moment; he’d been wanting another chance to show his chops. After an opening duet by Kaukonen and his thirteen-year-old daughter Izze, he stepped up to play, again, “I Am the Light of This World.” I shot his performance on my phone as he bent over the fretboard, fingers deliberate, playing neither fast nor slow. “What you want is consistency in tempo,” Kaukonen had admonished. “Pick a tempo you can play the hardest part.” My brother followed his advice. From stage right, Kaukonen gently tapped both feet in rhythm to the music. It was his beat that carried my brother home. One by one, we all got up to play songs ranging from “Heart of Gold” to “Ripple.” The father and son performed an instrumental blues duet. When it came time for me, I mounted the steps to the stage, as nervous as I’ve ever been. I’d spent part of the morning scratching out a pair of options: the Mudcrutch song “Scare Easy,” which I could fake credibly, and a composition of my own called “So Tired (of You).” As I had the first day, I made my decision in the instant, although this time I, too, chose the higher stakes. What had I come for, after all, if not to push myself, to do what I wouldn’t ordinarily do? After three days, I wasn’t about to fingerpick, but sharing an original felt like an equivalent sort of risk. I introduced the song, flubbed the opening, stopped and started over. And then I was in it, the river of the music, senses heightened, aware of every finger position, every strum. It was as if I had been plugged into an electric socket. Like the blues we had been learning, my song had a blurry provenance; the lyrics were mine, but I’d borrowed the chord changes from a couple of old rock ’n’ roll tunes. And yet, that seemed appropriate, in every meaning of the word. Sitting there in front of the others, in the concrete moments of my playing, I could feel the music breathing, I could feel it as it quivered into life. It was as if it had never quite existed until I performed it. I was terrified but I was present. I was fully here.
This, of course, is what Kaukonen meant to teach us; it is the through line of his musical life. At first, I’d imagined Fur Peace Ranch as a kind of fantasy camp. But if that’s an aspect — “We are a luxury business,” Vanessa told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2012. “Students don’t need us; they want us” — it’s far from the most resonant one. I’ve often wondered about the tail end of celebrity, what happens when the flash of notoriety expires. Kaukonen appeared at Woodstock and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; he performed “Embryonic Journey” when Jefferson Airplane was inducted in 1996. That represents one kind of full circle, the song he believed was out of place on Surrealistic Pillow coming to signify one of rock’s most essential bands. Fur Peace Ranch embodies another kind of circle, going back to Reverend Gary Davis and Jelly Roll Morton, and extending through Kaukonen and his fellow instructors to the rest of us. The timeline is compressed, but that’s hardly surprising, for the blues remains a living history. Although its roots lie in the call-and-response of African work songs, it emerged on its own terms only on the cusp of the last century. Morton, for instance, first heard the blues in 1902, three years before (or so he said) composing “Dime for Beer.” What this means is that it is both documented and apocryphal, right in front of us and at the same time just a little out of reach. What this means is that it is, like everything, a matter of improvisation, in which, as ever, we get to decide. For Kaukonen, the passway has been winding, and occasionally full of stones. He learned from bluesmen who would demonstrate a song, then send him off to work it through and chastise him for his mistakes. His own approach is tempered, more inclusive, intended to draw us in. This is not to say that we would all become musicians, except (perhaps) in the most private sense. I’m not going to be a player or a fingerpicker; I may never perform again in front of anyone. But that’s not the point, or not the entire point, because the weekend wasn’t just about technique. It was about situating yourself within the music as a kind of practice. It was about how you carry yourself in the world.
We all know fame is fleeting. Just remember the old bluesmen if you don’t agree. But by playing our way into their music, we had been introduced to a lineage more expansive than ourselves. Why did Kaukonen teach? I had been curious about this, how much was business and how much pleasure, whether it was an obligation or a gift. What I learned was that the distinction is irrelevant, that we do what we do because we are who we are. “Game of Thrones is over; I’m all caught up on Ray Donovan,” Kaukonen said when someone asked about it. “What else am I going to do?” He was kidding, sure he was, but he was also telling the truth, that teaching offered a means of understanding, in which we define ourselves not by our achievements, not entirely, but also by our place in a tradition, how we hold it for a moment and then pass it on. We give back, in other words, just as it was given once to us. This, it turns out, was the lesson of the weekend. This, it turns out, was the takeaway. I think of Kaukonen’s tapping feet, the pulse of the music moving through his body, linking him to Morton to my brother across the span of a century.
The last night in Ohio, after the student performance, my brother and I took a walk in the gathering dusk. The evening was thick and humid; fireflies flashed in fleeting sparks along the edges of the road. The following morning, Kaukonen would play his breakfast concert. I would capture the entirety of it on my phone. We would gather our souvenirs and photographs. We would learn the rudiments of one last song. But right now, that was all in the near future. Right now, we were on a strip of two-lane blacktop running through the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio, not far from the West Virginia line. Darkness was descending like a consuming angel, snuffing the land into indistinction, erasing everything. My brother and I talked as we walked, as we hadn’t in a long time, revealing ourselves under cover of the night. We discussed our desires to try new things, to keep it fresh, to avoid, as much as possible, the ruts. This was why I’d returned to playing, to challenge myself, to be present, to clear the stones from my own passway, to reattach to something that had once meant so much to me. This was why I had come here with my brother — why he’d come, as well — to reconnect the bond we shared. Full circle again, all those layers overlapping, past and present, like the music we had learned to play the last three days. Time is short, but if you’re lucky it might offer you a glimpse of reclamation. Or, as Kaukonen reflected, deep in the middle of the weekend:
“This is it, folks, this ain’t gonna last forever. Be here now.”
DAVID L. ULIN is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. He teaches at the University of Southern California.
