Jorma Kaukonen Quotations

I have been teaching guitar all of my playing life. I really needed to do this. Where the ranch is now there were only prickly bushes and poison ivy. It has exceeded our wildest expectations for me and my blues-picking buddies.

Our fans have been with us a long time; they just don't stay up as late.

I was basically a blues-folky kind of guy, Jack came from various R&B things in D.C., everybody was coming from a different place. And Grace didn't sound like anybody else.

Even though I don't have a major label, everyone is doing it by themselves.

That's where the rubber meets the road. You get sharper when you have to play for someone else, not just for yourself.

But I'm a rock 'n' roller. I will always sound like me.

If I could bottle that and teach it, it would be great, ... We're always springing something new on each other. We also always leave space for each other.

...I liken feedback to the effect of when you go surfing; you can get pummeled by a wave, but if you balance the forces right, you can have a dandy ride ... that's pretty much what feedback is...

I'm not sure I ever pleased Ian [Buchanan] with my progress, but he continued to tolerate me. I had to work at everything that I did. Well, it wasn't work; it was fun actually.

With the bass it's another thing. I don't need to use alternate thumb-picking as much. Even though Jack says he loves it. My thought is that it might irritate him somewhat.

I can only be me. I do what I do, I'm not a jazz player. ... I don't play jazz standards, at least not in any recognizable way. It's not my turf but I have plenty of respect for that style of playing.

If you make the same mistake 3 times, that becomes ‘your arrangement’

... just because a guitar is old doesn't make it good... I've seen guitars that were old but weren't as good as the reissue ... for me, it's not the age that makes it happen, it's the quality of the instrument...

Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good. I agree with Jim [Lauderdale] in that I think the really good ones are songs that when you hear it [sic]...there's just something about it that touches your heart, and you don't know why.

I was writing a lot of true love songs-true love almost gone wrong but saved at the last moment...Many of the best songs get written in a state of abject misery. I prefer to write fewer songs and have less cataclysmic events in my life...Some hit songs are really stupid, and who knows why they're hits. But a lot of hit songs are really good.

My dad was president of the Finlandia Foundation for a number of years and there was a period of time when he tried to get me in. I'm glad I finally got in.

Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.

My dad is from Ironwood and the last time I was in Marquette was in 1995 when my dad was still alive. Dad would have loved this. Even though my family is long gone from this area it still feels like home.

I started with the chorus of that song, kind of like a fun bouncy thing to play, and then one of the lines popped up: 'I got things to do today, people to see, things to say.' I wrote about a dozen verses for it, but no song needs to be that long unless you're Bob Dylan. So when we recorded it I started to tear it down to some of the lines I thought were the funniest.

The blessing of this music is that it is fun to do and it keeps evolving.

We do a wealth of stuff (live), drawing from over the years.

I don't care if my lettuce has DDT on it, just as long as it's crisp.

We were on a tour, and there were some chord formations that were tough for me to play when I was a kid...it had become apparent that there was some stuff I wanted to do that [would require me] to learn how to do that. So I wrote the song and used some of these chord formations so I would have to play them. I thought it would be a great teaching vehicle for a while, and it was, but it ended up as a performance song.