THE LINE ON YOUR SUM mer 2004 cover featuring the electric guitar—“An invention that changed the whole world of music”—reminded me of the line that Life magazine used on its June 28, 1968, cover featuring me and my Jefferson Airplane band mates: “Music that’s hooked the whole vibrating world.” Just a few years earlier I had been immersed in traditional music on the acoustic guitar (as I am now again). I had eschewed all things electric. George Harrison, with a little contemporary help from a friend, changed that.
One day in late 1964 my friend Steve Mann, a brilliant guitar player, came up from Los Angeles to visit me in Santa Clara, where I was finishing college and teaching guitar. He convinced me that one of the sugar cubes he had in his pocket would really open my world as a musician. A couple of hours later we’re in a VW on Highway 101 somewhere near Sunnyvale. A semi pulls up behind us, filling the rear window with its bumper and grille. We’re probably going only 20 miles an hour in the rush-hour traffic, but it scares me. As I contemplate impending death, someone turns on the radio. When the tubes warm up, the first thing I hear is George Harrison’s solo in “She’s a Woman” on his Rickenbacker 12-string. It changed my life. Not only did it get me through that moment, but for the first time since my friend Jack Casady and I had a high school rock ’n’ roll band, the electric guitar became a real instrument again for me. And that prepared me to be open, just a little at first, to Paul Kantner’s suggestion a few months later that I join the rock ’n’ roll band he was forming up in San Francisco.
Jorma Kaukonen
FUR PEACE RANCH
POMEROY, OHIO
