More Folk Rock
• Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides make this the best sounding Hot Tuna we have ever played
• If you like the kind of music Brits such as John Renbourn, Stefan Grossman, Bert Jansch and the like were making back in the ’60s this should be right up your alley
• Live, all acoustic, mostly Blues and Rags, this is about as far from the Jefferson Airplane as you can get
• 4 Stars: “Kaukonen remained the accomplished fingerpicking stylist he had been before joining the Airplane, while Casady dispensed with the usual timekeeping duties of the bass in favor of extensive contrapuntal soloing, creating a musical conversation that was unique. The result was less an indulgence than a new direction.”
Top quality sound for both sides of Hot Tuna’s classic debut album. It’s the best Hot Tuna Hot Stamper to ever hit the site for a good reason — it’s hard to come by clean copies of this stuff, and even when you do most copies don’t sound all that good.
Schmitt and Zentz
A pair of big names behind the recording managed to achieve some of the better live sound of the day. I refer of course to none other than Al Schmitt, producer (and winner of 23 Grammy Awards to date), and Allen Zentz, engineer (who later went on to found Allen Zentz Mastering and Recording).
This vintage RCA original pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What outstanding sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:
•The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
•The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
•Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
•Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
•Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on Hot Tuna
•Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
•Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
•The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
•Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
•Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
•Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
•Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Hesitation Blues
How Long Blues
Uncle Sam Blues
Don’t You Leave Me Here
Death Don’t Have No Mercy
Side Two
Know You Rider
Oh Lord, Search My Heart
Winin’ Boy Blues
New Song (For the Morning)
Mann’s Fate
AMG 4 Star Review
Friends since their teens, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady had developed a musical rapport that anchored the Airplane sound but also existed independently of it, and shorn of the rock band arrangements and much of the electricity (Casady still played an electric bass), their interplay was all the more apparent.
Kaukonen remained the accomplished fingerpicking stylist he had been before joining the Airplane, while Casady dispensed with the usual timekeeping duties of the bass in favor of extensive contrapuntal soloing, creating a musical conversation that was unique. It was put at the service of a batch of songs by the likes of the Reverend Gary Davis and Jelly Roll Morton with the occasional Kaukonen original thrown in, making for a distinct style.
Kaukonen’s wry singing showed an intense identification with the material that kept it from seeming repetitious despite the essential similarities of the tunes. (Harmonica player Will Scarlett also contributed to the mood.) The result was less an indulgence than a new direction.
Background
Hot Tuna began as a means of relaxation for its two principals Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady while on tour with Jefferson Airplane, eventually becoming a separate entity within that band to the point of performing as its opening act.
In the beginning, Hot Tuna would play in the style of electric Chicago blues often augmented by Airplane members, such represented by a cover of B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby” on the live Airplane album Bless Its Pointed Little Head. For their first album, Kaukonen and Casady decided rather on an all-acoustic set, playing the country blues of the pre-World War II era.
The Reverend Gary Davis had been an early influence on Kaukonen, and two of his songs were included on the album, with an additional pair included on the 1996 reissue. Casady and Kaukonen demonstrated their familiarity with early jazz and ragtime as well as blues by the inclusion of “Hesitation Blues,” recorded by the Victor Military Band in 1916, and the inclusion of two numbers attributed to Jelly Roll Morton.
They also ignored any purist notions of the delta blues with their cover of “How Long Blues” by Leroy Carr, who not only was not from the Mississippi Delta and did not play guitar, but was also one of the commercial urban blues successes of the 1930s.
Wikipedia