Interview with Jefferson Airplane Bassist
Jack Casady

October 17, 2022

As the bassist for the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, Jack Casady was a pioneer of 1960s psychedelic rock. And while he has maybe received less credit than some of his contemporaries, Casady’s intricate, tone-drive approach played a key role in helping to transform the electric bass into a front-line melodic instrument in rock music.

As I was researching my book on the early history of the electric bass, Jack was kind enough to sit down with me over Zoom for this long-form oral history interview. In it, we discuss his early years growing up in Washington, DC, how he witnessed the growing popularity of the electric bass firsthand, his career with the Airplane, and jamming with Jimi Hendrix. We also dig into the details of how he developed his unique bass style and the various technologies that helped facilitate it.

Brian F. Wright: Thank you so much for making the time to talk with me, and congratulations on receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Jack Casady: Yeah. Isn't that something? That's something I don't think I ever would have imagined as a youth strolling the streets of Los Angeles.      

BW: So, as I mentioned in my email, I'm writing a history of the first 20 years or so of the electric bass, and talking to you will hopefully help me sort out some of the last bits of the book.

JC: That period of time that you're covering is really the sea change in electric bass playing, of course. And And I think that's a good period to educate people about. The transformation from the stand up bass into the electric.

BW: So, one of the first big chapters in the book is about Monk Montgomery, and I've heard you mention him in the past, that you were aware of him as a young jazz fan. I was wondering if you were aware of the coverage surrounding him and the electric bass in the jazz press at that time?

JC: Yeah. I remember reading Downbeat magazine, you know. And I remember the great controversy of the electric bass entering into the jazz world. And of course, a lot of that was hoopla. My impression at the time was that the electric bass was not treated very kindly in the beginning. And I remember thinking that that was just ridiculous. And when I saw the Montgomery Brothers in a jazz club in Washington, DC, it was fabulous. Monk took some early flack for that, but of course, now it's all it's so obviously expected. But he was he forged ahead. He was ahead of his time, or perhaps more accurately, it was the others who were behind the time.

BW: Did that negative coverage influence how you felt about the electric bass before you started playing it? 

JC: No, not at all. I just thought it was a ridiculous. My way of learning and finding the bass guitar is a whole story. And I'm sure for Monk too, it was a whole story too. I don't think he was trying to make a statement with it. My guess is just that the instrument spoke to him and so he played it.

BW: Speaking about seeing shows in DC when you were growing up, how did that shape you as a musician?

JC: In the late 50s, early 60s, there was a lot of crossover. They had a lot of rockabilly coming through DC. There was rhythm and blues at the Howard Theater. Jackie Wilson and Ray Charles, and just an endless list, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, The Coasters. Bobby Blue Bland. Ray Charles. And at the same time, there were a lot of jazz clubs in DC, so you got a lot of the cats that were coming out of the New York scene and coming down.

BW: Yeah. So through the DC music scene maybe in some ways you were exposed to a lot more electric bass players than most people were?

JC: I was exposed to hardly any. It was all stand up bass players. Ray Charles, his band had a stand up bass, Bobby Blue Bland, stand up bass. There was hardly anybody playing electric bass when I started out. The only guys that were doing it were rockabilly bassists playing that [original Fender Precision Bass], the blonde one that looked like a Telecaster. But the first real breakthrough, I think, in the R&B world was, of course, James Brown, who started to build that sound. But if you listen to the early James Brown's records, like "Please, Please, Please" and all of that, you'll hear the bass play a more traditional walking role. It wasn't until a couple of years later that you started to get more syncopation between the bass and the drums, and that was because it a bass guitar.

BW: So James Brown's band having an electric bassist was actually quite rare then?

JC: Absolutely. Although, you started to see it more and more. Because, of course, you could put it in the trunk of the car, and you can't put a stand up bass in the trunk. But also there was the development of the Fender Bassman amp with for ten-inch speakers. That was a big deal. When you played that with an early Fender bass, not only were you heard in halls, but it was distinct and clear. And remember those days there was very little sound reinforcement, if at all. When I went to the Howard Theatre in '57, '58, '59, you know, there was a very little sound reinforcement on stage. What you heard was the stage sound.

BW: And when the electric bass starts to creep in, the volume it provides has got to be a huge contrast compared to the upright?

JC: Yes. But it's the volume coupled with the clarity of the instrument.

BW: So, when it comes to your own journey, you started out on guitar? Is that right?

JC: Yeah. I got my first guitar at age 12, at Christmas time, from my parents. They had heard me playing my father's Washburn nylon string guitar that he had played in college. He was a dentist, but he was an audiophile in the late 50s. He built Heathkit amplifiers and Hi-Fi systems, and he belonged to the American Jazz Society. And my parents, God bless them, that Christmas there was an envelope on the tree that said, "This entitles you to 12 music lessons." I started off with a teacher named Harry Voorhees, who was a big band guitarist." So I played for a little while, and then Jorma and I struck up a band together when I was 13 and he was 17. And we played Buddy Holly stuff, we played Johnny Cash, you know, things like that that were popular at the time. Jorma wasn't playing fingerpicking style at all then. With my my newspaper route, I bought a new 1958 Fender Telecaster for $115. I wish I still had that! 

BW: If you did, it would be worth like $40,000.

JC: In any case, that's how I started out. But Jorma was three and a half years older and so he went off to Antioch College as I'm still finishing out high school. So I start joining a lot of rockabilly bands and some country bands. In the summertime, I would be playing country, rockabilly, or R&B music. Nobody was writing their own music particularly, it was just a club circuit, but it was really flourishing in Washington, D.C. There were so many different clubs. There were jazz clubs, there were rockabilly clubs, there were country clubs, there were R&B clubs. There was the champagne room where you play sort of like Las Vegas stuff, you know, like Louis Prima and that kind of stuff.

BW: So were you playing mostly to adult audiences?

JC: That's a good point. Now, to get into these clubs, you had to be 18. Of course, I started playing almost full time in clubs when I was 15. Playing five sets a night, four days a week or something--much to the to the detriment of my high school learning experience. And when I was 15, playing with Jorma before he left, we took my brother's draft card, because he was 18, and whited out the all the print. And there was this new thing called a mimeograph machine. And I would use that to make duplicates of this card stating I was 18. I look at those pictures now, and I look 15, [Laughs] 

BW: How did you come to switch to electric bass?  

JC: I had a good friend named Danny Gatton. He was a great guitarist out of the Washington, DC area. He just had an ear that he could hear everything. I mean, he could hear and just play what he heard. I've never had that kind of talent, but he did. But in any case, one of the summers--I think was 1960, the summer I turned 16. Danny said, "Listen, Jack, do you know of a bass player?" Because by that time you saw more electric basses around. The Fender Precision Bass was in regular use by most of the club bands at that time. And it happened really quickly. It happened just in within a couple of years. He says, "Listen, my bass player is sick. He's really sick. Do you know a bass player.? I said, "No, I don't." And he called me back and said, "Jack, I'm stuck here. I've got a good gig. It's for six weeks of the summer. Why don't you play bass?" I said, "Listen, I've never played bass before." He said, "How hard can it be? It's only got four strings!" [Laughs] So I borrowed his Precision Bass and I did the gig, making 115 bucks a week, which was great money in 1960. And you know, there was just something about the bass that spoke to me. It was a sea change. You know, I could have continued on as a guitarist, I think, and been an okay guitarist, but the bass had this resonance that I was drawn to. A bit of background here. I went to a lot of classical music concerts in Washington, DC, and I loved hearing the orchestra work through the bass section into the cello section. That had always moved me, you know, listening to Prokofiev or Rimsky-Korsakov, particularly the Russian composers, where they really use the bass. And so when I got my hands on on that bass guitar, I just said, "This is great!" I just started started playing it and and for me, it was a natural fit. I started playing it right away with two fingers. I played with a pick with the guitar, but with the bass, I  wanted that thicker sound. I guess I was chasing the stand up bass sound.

BW: So it's after that that you get a Jazz Bass and a Bassman?

JC: That summer, I finished the job. Halfway through the summer, I saw the ad for the new Fender Jazz Bass, and I just read about it. And it said the nut was a little more narrow and it had two pickups, and obviously more tonal variations. So I ordered it. I remember it was really expensive. It was like... 

BW: $300, maybe?

JC: Well, I think it was $270, or something like that. And I got it at the same place I got my my Telecaster guitar, Chuck Levin's music store in Washington. And I ordered it and got it, and I just fell right in love with it right away. I could work the neck a little better, because I don't have giant hands here. That first Jazz Bass, I wish I had that today. It was stolen a few years later, just before I came out to California in 1965. That bass had the concentric pots, so that you had a tone-volume, tone-volume for each pickup, and I think in 1965, it went to that one-volume, one-tone setup. But in any case, then my work increased exponentially and at that time then I really started playing with all kinds of kinds of bands. And I was going into all the Black clubs that I could get into, jazz and R&B. I never had an issue about anything. Everybody was polite, you know. I was just a kid that wanted to learn. So there was this one Black drummer, I forget his name now, that I met doing a pickup job somehow and for some reason he liked the way I played. And he got me gigs with him playing a lot of gospel music in these real little churches. Maybe all told, I did 20 of these or something, but they were so educational in getting a feeling for a certain kind of music and getting an opportunity as a white kid... And some of these were after hours, what they call after-hours gigs, too. Those weren't necessarily gospel, but they they would start after the closing hours of the clubs and they'd be in private homes and things like that. But with that I got I got exposed to a lot more of the African American music in Washington, DC at that time than I [otherwise] would have. 

BW: Was it this drummer that got you that stint playing with Little Anthony and the Imperials?

JC: Yes. He got me that gig. You know those groups would mostly pick up musicians in different cities. So there would be the singer and the backup singers a lot of times, and, if they had a stint in a club, they'd have their arranger/guitarist come in town and they put a band together. For the Little Anthony gig, this  drummer was tasked with putting the band together for this club gig, and a guitar player wearing a sharkskin suit came and got us into shape.

BW: Now, for a gig like that, were you playing off lead sheets?

JC: It was head arrangements. Yeah. I mean, there were always lead sheet and I would learn to read those, but generally it was chord sheets and things like that. And there were some things that you could prepare ahead of time--of course all the records were recorded, and if you had any sense at all, you'd do plenty of learning before you showed up on the spot. Then you could deal with the stuff that you had no idea about. And so that was good training for me to learn how, you know, to be prepared, know your stuff.

BW: So this must have been around the time that you and your dad rebuilt that Bassman amplifier.

JC: Well, true. Actually very true. And, you know, that's a good point.  My first amplifier, going back to 1957, came from one of my guitar teachers, who sold it to me for like 35 bucks or something. I came home with this amplifier and my father was outraged that he had sold me this, as he said, "this piece of crap." And he looks at the tubes and the amplifier and says, "This is all outdated stuff. You take that right back." And he made me take it back. So he says, "We're going to build you an amplifier." So he orders an 8-watt Heathkit, tubes and all, and orders a cabinet. We pick it out of a catalog. And he and I built the amplifier together on the dining room table every night after dinner. That's what I call really supportive parent, you know? Now later on, I think that summer in 1960, after I got the Fender Jazz Bass, I bought the Fender Bassman amplifier to go along with it. And so I played that whole summer with that. A year later or so, I said, "You know, Dad..." I guess I had a propensity for playing louder...

BW: You were blowing speakers.

JC: And I said, "Some of these speakers are buzzing sometimes, and I think I blew out one of the speakers." And he says, "You know, I've been reading about some new speaker enclosures, and there's a new approach coming out. It's called the Infinite Baffle." And he says "Let me let me do some studying." And he goes in the other room and reads the manuals and things, because he gets Hi-Fi publications mailed to him all the time. That's how you learned in those days, And he came back and said, he said, "Okay, son. According my calculations, if we do this right and use those four 10-inch speakers, the enclosure is going to be about the size of the furnace in the basement." And we both laughed. And I had just gotten my '50 Pontiac.. So this was when I was 17, I guess. And it was a huge car. So I said, "How about if we build it to the dimensions of the back seat of the Pontiac?" So we did that. And of course we called it the coffin, because of the size.

BW: What's interesting about this story is that it seems like that this left a lasting impression on you. Years later, when you were working with Jefferson Airplane, you were constantly playing these custom modified instruments and amplifiers and it seems like you can trace that impulse directly back to your dad?

JC: Absolutely. I mean, really, absolutely. Because he once told me, "If something doesn't work right, you make it better."

BW: Speaking of gear and tech in this era, I read that on that first Jazz Bass you had a P-Bass pickup added to it as well?

JC: That was much later. That's what I did out in California.

BW: That wasn't in the DC years.

JC: No, but we could talk about it now. Right before I came out to California, that 1960 Jazz Bass was stolen. And I arrived out to California at Jorma's request to join the Jefferson Airplane, and, basically, I arrived without a bass. I had to borrow the other bass player's bass. So, in San Francisco, I went out and bought a new Jazz Bass, which was circa 1965. And right away, for some reason, I don't know why, I wanted to get a pickup near the neck to get a fuller tone. So I had someone install an extra P-Bass pickup. 

BW: But even then, right in that that early Jefferson Airplane era, you realized that you were interested in tone and wanted to be able to shape it as much as possible?

JC: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, that's interesting because I was starting to really get discouraged with music. First of all, the draft was going on then. In 1962, the Vietnam War was starting to heat up, and I'm 18. Now i've got my own draft card, not the one that I printed. So I take a year off. I don't go to college right away. And I end up doing a gig in in Orlando, Florida and I spent the summer down there, almost three months playing, which was great. But by then I know I've got to get my tail in college or else I'm going to end up in the army. So I get into what was then Montgomery Junior College. I couldn't get into a regular college, my grades were terrible from high school. And so I get in school there and I major in music, but it was impossible in those days to actually major in music officially if you don't play a classical instrument. And so I had take up piano. I'd never played that before. I was really awful.

BW: But it was enough. It was enough to keep you out of the service.

JC: Yeah. So I stayed there for a few years and kept playing in clubs and things like that. But things were starting to change, you know. People were starting to play Beatles music. But, even still, the club work was quite stodgy and nobody was writing their own stuff or anything like that. It was really detrimental to me. I was always playing other people's music, and I couldn't find any place to really grow. So when the summer of '65 came, Jorma and I were having a phone conversation, and I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. And he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Well, I'm in school keeping out of the Army. "Listen," he said, "I just joined this folk rock group." This was August [1965], and he had just joined a couple of weeks earlier. And I said, "What? You, the purest?" He said, "Yeah, and I got electric guitar." And he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "The usual thing. I'm playing bass, you know, and working the club circuit and all that." And he said, "Your playing the bass? Well, we could use a bass player." He wasn't fond of the one that he had. And he said, "Are you any good?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "All right, let me call you back." So he calls back three days later, he said, "Listen, we got this manager. He promises to pay us 50 bucks a week, whether we work or not." And he said, "Would you like to come out?" I said, "You're on." So they bought me a plane ticket. I'd never been on a plane.

BW: And you actually had no bass at this point?

JC: No. [Laughs] Like that's going to stop me! And so I took that plane trip out. I think it was the middle of October, or the early part of October, something like that. I came there, borrowed a bass, rehearsed three days or something like that with Jefferson Airplane. Then we played our first gig at Harmon Gymnasium. And I had the geeky mustache, with the corduroy jacket, you know? The school look, with the horn rimmed glasses, and the hair shaved and all that stuff. And so I looked around me and everybody had like Beatles haircuts or longer. Some of the guys had really long hair, and I thought it was strange. [Laughs] But right away I realized that it was what I had been looking for. They were playing some cover songs, but they were doing it a completely different way than they were on the record. And everybody was from a drastically different background. Signe Anderson was a folk singer with a sort of alto sound, you know, a very low, husky voice. Marty had a high voice. He had done some some professional singing as a pop singer in the early 60s. Paul Kantner had spent time on the beach with Dave Crosby and buddies of his writing folk songs. His favorite kind of folk music was more like The Weavers, you know, vocal harmony stuff. Jorma, of course, playing the fingerpicking blues, and me coming in with with R&B experience and a little jazz. Within four months, we were recording our first album, and when I listen back to that album now, I realized I had really developed a style of my own. I just had no place to put it before. So all of a sudden it was like I had all the tools and the approach. We just went in and played the music that we had been playing in person. But it was really interesting because all of a sudden I had a place to play, with people that were making original music, and I wasn't being told what to play on the bass. I had to be responsible for writing and creating my own bass lines.

BW: So, when you first arrived in San Francisco and were encountering the Haight-Ashbury for the first time, what was that experience like? What were your initial impressions of it?

JC: Oh, it was a completely different world. I'm coming out of the East Coast. I'd been playing in a suit, you know. Here the approach was completely bohemian. I found it really very strange at first. The first few months, it just rained constantly, and it was like a black and white movie until the following summer when the sun came out. And all of a sudden everything turned into color, kind of like the Wizard of Oz. The psychedelics helped along with that too. [Laughs] But, I'd never smoked a joint or anything before I came out to California.

BW: When you were recording the first Jefferson Airplane album, was that the first time you had worked in a studio recording environment?

JC: In a studio, yes. Because my father was who he was, I had a top of the line 1960 Wollensak tape recorder, which was very sophisticated at that time. But that was my first time recording in a proper studio.

BW: Thinking about this first album first Jefferson Airplane album, two things are happening that strike me.  One is you now have this new third pickup installed on your Jazz Bass, which to me feels pretty unique. I haven't heard of anyone else doing that. So, in some ways, you maybe have access to more tonal combinations than anyone else in that era.

JC: Yeah, I think you're right. To be clear about that, what I did was got three concentric pots because I wanted to control each pickup.

BW: And blend them.

JC: And blend them together. And sometimes that tone was a combination of those pots being opened all the way or pulled back a little bit. You pull one pickup back, and the tone would open up a certain way. You pull another one back... All you'd have to do is scoot that baby back and that that would change the waveform just a little bit. But you're also listening to everyone else too. You’re listening, you’re processing it all, and you're trying to fit your sound into all of it--not just to get clarity and everything, but to make it work. It depends on what was happening in the music. If I'm emphasizing the rhythm part or if emphasizing a melody part, I will shift the tone. That being said, once I set the tone the way I like it, then my tone shaping comes from moving my right hand up and down.

BW: But the other thing I am interested here is that, in interviews you gave back in the '60s, you sometimes kind of complained about not getting as good a bass sound as you had hoped for. 

JC: The thing is, I mean, you got to understand. Back then I'm on an upward projection. I'm 21 years old, you know. I'm just working this stuff out. But now I listen back to it... Jorma and I did a little tour playing Airplane songs, and we had to listen to all this stuff. And we listened to that and thought, "God, how did we ever do that stuff?" We had to relearn a bunch of material. It wasn't just relearning the songs, it was it was relearning the shaping of your fingering positions, relearning how you thought through that process back then. So it was really fascinating. In retrospect, I wouldn't change a thing today. Because that was the truth. That was how I played [at that time].

BW: So, not to psychoanalyze you or anything, but when I'm reading interviews with you from the 60s, I get the sense that you were always in a sort of perpetual search for newness. Like, you never want to be bored. You don't want to just keep repeating yourself. You just want to keep pushing forward. Do you think that is how you felt back then?

JC: Yeah, absolutely. But you got to remember, the band was progressing. That album was recorded just four months after the band was formed. And we kept playing a lot of locally. We weren't a national act or anything, but we started to develop. And then, towards the end of that summer, Signe wanted to raise a family and we were all just chomping at the bit to get this all up and running. So there was another band in town called Great Society. We were both playing the same clubs and. And Paul wanted to replace Signe with another girl, because he wanted to have a female sound in the band. 

BW: Because he liked the harmony.

JC: Those thick harmonies, yeah. And so I said, "Listen. I've heard Grace Slick before. I really like her." I was really quite impressed with Grace's individualness, and I think that ties into what you were saying about not wanting that sameness.

BW: And also her tone, in a sense.

JC: Now Signe had a beautiful tone, a great tone, especially for the harmonies. You listen on that first album, those harmonies are fantastic and no other band was doing stuff like that. But when I first saw Grace, she marched right up to the edge of the stage and looked right in the audience. She wasn't one of these folk singers that was trying to blend into a harmonic sound, and I kind of liked that. And right away she sparked a lot more of the creative juices. The way she fashioned the notes that she's sang, the attack of the notes, the way they'd be emotional and the way she worked with the words. Her personality was coming through. And I just loved the really unique timbre and tone of her voice. So I said, "Listen. Let me go over and talk to her." So after her show we were hanging out and talking and I said, "We're rehearsing over here. How would you like to come over and join us, and sing a couple songs?" You know, without too much preamble. And she said, "Sure." So she came over to to where we were rehearsing at that time and sang, and I asked her, "Would like to join our band?" And she said, "Yeah." And all that had happened by the end of 1966, going into 1967. Then we had to learn how to play with her, and it was tough at first because her vocal range was up where Marty's was. So we had nobody in the middle anymore. So Marty had to make some adjustments. And that's why the harmonies became less tight, in a way. The singers became more like individual instruments, And I liked that. I think in the beginning, Paul found that not as pleasing, since it wasn't pure harmony anymore. But it was a sea change in the band because Grace sang like another instrument. So that's why Jorma, Grace, and I got along so well, because she was up there like a jazz instrument playing. And that was a totally different sound. Marty played with us, but he really preferred that we act as backup with his singing on top. With Grace, she got right in the trenches with the boys, and she would play off of the licks that were coming off Jorma, the licks that were coming off of me. And it opened up our sound a lot more. So it didn't take long for us to get into the real entity that I think of as Jefferson Airplane. Also, by that time, Skip Spence had left to start his own band and we had Spencer Dryden come on drums. He was a brilliant drummer that had all this jazz training, and that really changed the rhythmic aspects of the band because Spencer approached playing more like a jazz drummer. He did a lot of really unique rhythm stuff that was free, and that freed me up on the bass to come at the songs with a different approach.

BW: To back up for just a second, I wanted to ask about this moment before Grace joins the band, when the Airplane is starting to play gigs like the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Berkeley Folk Festival. And you were sort of the first rock band to be let into these prestigious festivals?

JC: Yeah. And the jazz guys were put askew with that too, kind of like they were with Monk Montgomery playing an electric bass. It was the same thing with Bob Dylan picking up a Stratocaster and all that.

BW: And I think about critics at the time, like Ralph Gleason, who were starting to talk about this new San Francisco sound.

JC: He was fabulous. He was different. Ralph, God bless him. And there's even a little book on Jefferson Airplane that he wrote.

BW: Yeah, I was just looking through it.

JC: That book is hilarious. It's great. We're all so serious in it. [Laughs] But the thing about Ralph is, he listened to us. He listened to what we were doing without the preconception of, "oh, this is a rock band playing a jazz festival" or whatever. But Ralph, coming over from the jazz world, he got a lot of flack for saying, "Hey, these guys can play." I'll never forget, he really gave me quite a few compliments on my approach for breaking away from what a rock band bass player would typically play. And once we became pals, he and I would talk about all the various jazz guys. This was a really exciting time for me, because we were writing all our own songs and I and I'm drawing from the jazz world, if nothing else, to free me from having to play like a typical rock bassist. But Ralph was great about that. He'd come in and hear how everybody actually played. I remember at the time we did Basin Street West, sharing a bill with Dizzy Gillespie. And you know, they were trying to promote us. They we're trying new things out: Jefferson Airplane and Dizzy Gillespie, go figure. But after we played our set, and I was just so proud to be playing on the same stage as Dizzy Gillespie, Dizzy came up to me and said he really liked my bass playing. He said he had never heard anything like that and he didn't expect to hear anything like that from a folk rock group or whatever we were billed as at the time.

BW: When it came to Gleason, it seemed like at that time he was really making a pitch for rock to be taken seriously as a more grown up art form, more so than what it was in the '50s and early '60s?

JC: Well, I mean, listen to Jim Burton playing that stuff with Ricky Nelson and tell me that's not art. But, the thing is, for the elite East Coast writers, it wasn't. But anybody that knew anything knew that all those guys were great. I mean think about the guys that played Appalachian folk music and bluegrass. Are you telling me bluegrass isn't an art form? Give me a break, you know? It just wasn't considered an "art form" by the New York newspapers.

BW: And, in some ways, this is similar to what you were saying about Monk Montgomery. That there's this critical elite...

JC: Well, this is where I get to put the screws to you, the writer. Because once it's written in newspapers or magazines, it's in stone.  And, you know, back then everything was interpreted through the writers, any movie or stage play or performance, and the critics have their own world, and they get their own power within that world. What was interesting about that period of San Francisco is nobody cared about that. In LA or New York, it was all about how many records you sold, how many people came to see you play. Now I'm not I'm not saying we didn't care about drawing good crowds or anything, but we weren't in it for that reason. We were lucky. We were the first ones to get recorded out of the San Francisco scene, and hopefully we opened the door for a lot of other people. At the end of the day, though, your success is marked by your ability to create good music. But we out there trying to write a catchy hit single so that we could get a hook out there into the market. Luckily, Grace was responsible for writing two really catchy hit singles: "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love." And that opened all the doors for us. But, for us, our in-person performances were the most important. Here's the big one about the San Francisco scene: it was the audience. Because the very next day after playing the Fillmore Auditorium, you'd be in the audience yourself, just a member of the audience listening to another band. And you were left alone that way. People were very cool. And there were so many other kinds of artists in the scene, the poster art people, the people who wrote poetry, the people who made clothes, the people who worked with electronics. It was a whole scene.

BW: When it comes to those people who worked with electronics, how important were they to the band's development?

JC: Well, first there were bands like the Cream and Jimi Hendrix, and they started to work with volume, sheer volume. Then all the people in the electronics world in San Francisco became interested in that. My good friend Owsley Stanley, may he rest in peace started developing sound systems for the Grateful Dead and us. And we built our own speaker cabinets using Macintosh power amplifiers. For what? Greater tone! We started to build or assemble a preamp sections and boards and things like that that would amplify the vocals to match the power that was coming out of stacking four Marshalls together on stage, or four Fender Twins like Jorma used. And so all of that developed in the scene and for a good five years it was really something special and small and contained in the San Francisco. 

BW: And so it's actually the community as a whole that is benefiting everybody?

JC: Oh, absolutely. The emphasis was on the experience. On the art form, the visual art and the audio art.

BW: Can we go back to "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" for a moment?

JC: Yeah. So those were recorded about a year after we did our first album. And we had a new Ampex four track to work with the vocals and move things around. And that became Surrealistic Pillow, which, in my opinion, is the album that captured the atmosphere of those times.

BW: When I listen to it compared to the first album, your bass playing sounds much more intricate.

JC: Well, but we were writing more songs with that in mind. And as I started to develop more in the bass world, I was doing more of that. Like, for instance, "Somebody Love You." It's a good rock song. God bless Grace and her husband for writing that song. It's got great rock changes. For me as a bass player, playing in F#, that's murder! You've got your open E to come up and close it down on F#. You've got some space before the lowest note and that octave just sits in that track really nicely. What I wanted to do with the song, rather than play a bass drum lick kind of part was... The way it was being played, the way Paul Kantner was playing 12-string guitar on that song, took up a great chunk of the sound on the track. It wasn't just that it was a big sound, but all the harmonics that came off of those strings, you know, it just covers a lot of space. And so Jorma and I and Spencer were left competing for that sound. So I immediately dove into it. I wanted to put a rolling, moving bass line in there, so I was still in some ways coming out of the jazz world. But I wanted to put an aggressive bass line in there in order to move that song, to compete with that 12-string guitar but also to match up with what Grace was doing with her vocal. So I was playing to Grace, that's how I was playing. Jorma was playing his lead lines and rhythm in there, so I was able to just roll those notes around. I'd start in the low end and just move that up through the range of the bass guitar and come back down with the hooks.

BW: So it was a mix of you working out your individual style while also really thinking about how your bass line would function as a counter-melody against everything else.

JC: I mean, when you talk about working out your style, it's a work in progress all the time. So that's just the state of my style on the date on that that that recording. Really, I was thinking about what I wanted to do for the song, which was to really keep that punch. Just keep punching away in that song. And not punching away like a bass drum would punch away playing quarter notes, but punch away at it in a way that would keep the aggressive movement of those lines up through the bass's register.

BW: If I may, I wanted to run an idea by you. I don't know if you'll buy my argument here, but one of the things I hear when I sit and try to play along with that recording is that your bass line has this sort of heavy downbeat followed by rhythmic syncopation and chromaticism. Personally, hear a lot of R&B in it. I hear a lot of what I think of as maybe early funk, a James Brown kind of rhythmic approach, albeit in a completely different kind of context.

JC: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, R&B was a big part of my formative years in DC. But it wasn't like I was setting out to achieve that, you know. That's the kind of thing you observe through reflection or something. But at the time, buddy, the trees are going past you and you're going 90 miles down the road, you know. And you got to keep your eyes on the road. You're not sitting on a lofty helicopter looking down.

BW: That's the benefit of what I do, I guess. I get the lofty position. [Laughs]

JC: Exactly. You know, it always cracks me up when writers think that it's like "Well and then I decided to do this..." Let me tell you, it's not quite that way, at least not for me. 

BW: So much of it is instinct. But maybe it is what you had for breakfast that morning. There are always so many factors.

JC: Well, but don't forget that when you talk about instinct, instinct comes through preparation.

BW: It's a mix of instinct and preparation and your own personality and everything else.

JC: Absolutely. But at the end of the day, your phraseology has to create a thought that is clear. Just inspiration or just free form playing and all that doesn't work in a song form where, at the end of the day, it doesn't come into focus, you know? Your craft work comes into play but you also have to execute it well.

BW: Speaking about coming into focus, I think "White Rabbit" is such a good example of this because your bass line has that really hypnotic effect that emphasizes the song's psychedelic trippiness.

JC: And its stolen from "Bolero," from Ravel. That opening with the snare, you know? I mean, that's the whole thing. It's a repeated quadruplet that starts off low and it pulls you in as it comes into focus. But it's just hypnotic, and that's that's the thing that does it. It was a fluke. I just started playing it. I think in rehearsal we started it off, and it just sounded good, you know? It just happened. I came in with Spencer and then Jorma came in with that lead introductory line, which is incredibly brilliant. It's great because he'd listened to a lot of Middle Eastern music through all of his travels and whatnot. He absorbed a lot different melodies coming out of different regions. And, in that moment, the whole just fell into place. that line just pulls you right in and then, bam, Grace starts to sing the song and to tell the story.

BW: Well, and what you're doing in this era, it seems to me, is trying to transform the bass into a kind of equal voice, like a lead instrument in some way.

JC: I mean, in classical music, the bass is an equal voice. Why shouldn't it be? Now what you're saying is true, but what you're talking about is a perception, an expectation. In rock, people expect a lead guitar to come in with a melody, but before that it was the saxophone, right? But when the guitar band started, all of a sudden everybody's trained to expect things a certain way. They weren't trained really to hear an electric bass go high up on the neck and come back down.

BW: Well, there's this quote from Spencer Dryden in Modern Drummer magazine, where someone asked him about what it was like to play with you. And he basically described you as playing what he called a "real deep guitar." That's what he called it. By which, I think, he meant that you weren't playing typical, standard bass lines.

JC: If I could talk with him today, and I wish I could, we'd have a fascinating conversation. Because, perception wise, I played off of Spencer. And I've realized more and more every day how brilliant his playing was, how sophisticated and how delicate the playing was, even when he was hitting the drums hard. And as we moved into that louder and louder format, in order to get that that sensual loudness, that was tough on Spencer. And that's why we started changing drummers, because we were after a big sound, like the sound that Ginger Baker got or something. But it's interesting when you look back on it You listen to Mitch Mitchell playing with Jimi Hendrix--and I had the pleasure of jamming with those guys a bunch of times and even making “Voodoo Chile" on Electric Ladyland--and he's out of the jazz world, too. When you listen to his playing and all that stuff, you hear that Jimi Hendrix isn't really like the heavy metal that came after that. It's really quite subtle stuff. And the reason that Hendrix period worked was Mitch Mitchell. That's what the different sound was. Because when Hendrix went with other drummers later on, it was a much straighter approach. That jazz approach wasn't in there. So both Mitch and Spencer, you know, they really had those jazz chops.

BW: The subtlety.

JC: The subtlety, but also there's a lot of stuff going on in there. I mean, listen to us on that long version of "Voodoo Chile." At the breakdown in the center, Mitch is playing all kinds of crazy stuff.

BW: To go back to that quote from Spencer for a second, he's implying that you were playing more like a guitarist than a bassist, I think. But I wonder if that was how you saw what you were doing?

JC: You've got to read all those interviews with a grain of salt. I mean it's just a phrase he's using to describe things the best that he can. What he's saying is I'm playing it as a bass guitar. That's probably what he was talking about, which means you can do the kind of things on there, on the bass guitar, that you can't do on a stand up bass.

BW: Right. And I think that's very much the same way that people like John Entwistle and Jack Bruce also talked about the electric bass.

JC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they are bass guitars.

BW: You brought up Jimi Hendrix and Cream. And I know that in his memoir, Jorma talks a lot about how those two bands had a really big influence on the direction of the Airplane’s sound. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. What was compelling about those bands at that time?

JC: A lot of it was a verification of where I wanted to go, and here these guys are doing it. And so, Jack Bruce with those linear lines, and he's even more linear than I am, I think, in a certain way. And the way he was were working with Ginger Baker. You know, and Mitch and I were buddies and did a lot of playing together. So this kind of confirmed that this was an interesting direction to go to, and we wanted to pull that into the Airplane. At the end of the day, the Airplane worked somewhat in those directions, and then when we broke up in '72 and Jorma and I continued on with Hot Tuna and started to work more in that trio and quartet format, doing a lot more individual writing. And that couldn't have been done with Airplane anymore because everybody was writing. For each gig, you'd only ever get to play two of your songs a night or something like that. So that's how that worked out. But yeah, those bands were very influential. I remember standing out in front of Cream, standing out in front of Jimi Hendrix. And when I played with Jimi... The great thing about recording with them is that I had a hook, you know, to play. They'd come into town, and I can not only play that song, but I'd play "Red House" and a couple other blues songs working in that format with Jimi. But the interesting thing about playing with Jorma, is that he had a tremendous toolbox, thanks to his fingerpicking technique. He could work those fingerpicking songs in a higher volume format. And so we had that and we didn't have to play in a linear format, like Hendrix or Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. We had that sound of the thumb and the two fingers with full chordal work in there with melodies and whatnot. That freed me up to do melodic work. And I developed that even more once we started Hot Tuna.  

BW: I'm trying to get the chronology straight here. So, you see these bands and start to head in new musical directions with the Airplane...

JC: We're talking about '66, '67, '68, '69. That period of time. You look back at it, it's just four years. And so we're doing a lot of stuff all in there. We got a record that breaks out nationally. So we're touring now, and we're going over to England. Those guys are touring over here. Bill Graham is our manager. We're suggesting bands to Bill Graham that that influenced us, like bands from the Chicago blues scene. In fact, the real creative process in San Francisco had a lot to do with Bill Graham and Chet Helms, who put shows on with different styles of music within the same bill. And you can't do that today. I mean, Bill Graham put a Russian poet on next to a jazz band, next to a rock band, all in one night for $3.50. Because he was very concerned about educating the audience.

BW: And in some ways, those bands, the way that you're all listening to each other, what was happening in San Francisco remained a sort of small community, even as the Airplane and the Dead or whoever were breaking nationally?

JC: I mean, don't forget we were busy. We listened like other people, yeah. And the great thing about that period of time, from '65 to say, '72, was that you were listening to a lot of other people's music at the same time you were getting busier and doing your own thing. It became less about being a fandom and more about developing your craft. And, like I said before, the train's moving pretty fast and a lot of stuff's going by you, you know?

BW: To go back to bass playing, this is also the era where you get a bunch of new gear, right? You get the Versatone amp and the Guild Starfire? Can you talk a little bit about how this shift in the gear changed your sound or your approach? What did it offer you that the previous stuff hadn't?

JC: As we were driving the volumes up, I was also trying to find a way to work in some sustain and distortion. Jack Bruce was doing it through really driving up those Marshalls. But I found that Versatone amplifier, made by Bob Hall in Burbank. We were recording '67, I think, working on After Bathing at Baxter's. So that was after we did Surrealistic Pillow, which was a big success. And we had renegotiated our contract to get control in the studio and do studio lock outs. You know, you'd lock yourself in the studio. I think After Bathing at Baxter's was a three-month project. Of course, we had to break and go out on the road and play for 2 or 3 weeks at a time, then come back into the studio. But we were able to have the time to experiment in the studio without watching the clock. Because, I mean, we recorded Surrealistic Pillow in two weeks. The first album in four days. So this time we really wanted to get in and experiment with sounds in the studio. And the Beatles, of course, were experimenting a lot with that too, and later on the Beach Boys and of course Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. But getting that control of the studio was important, even if we were still paying for it. And we worked with Al Schmitt and his brother Richie and Allen Zentz, who were the second engineers. We were recording at Sunset and Ivar at RCA and we were in the big studio where you can put 101 string players, that kind of deal. We were this little band right in the middle of the whole big room. Next door, I think Carol Kaye had left her setup set up, and he says, "Listen, let me show you something." Because we were bringing a lot of amplifiers into studios that were too loud for me to record with. Yeah, because we were trying to get that sound, to see how we could transfer it into a recording studio. But it wasn't working, because it would just close the mics down. So we had to learn that less is more. So I was shown the Versatone and they told me, "Here's a little amp that all the engineers love." And Carol Kaye's recording with that, and it just has a great sound, a great recorded sound. And it's not loud. So I went and purchased one right from Bob Hall, and I brought it into the studio to start playing with it.

BW: When did you start playing the Guild Starfire bass?

JC: Sometime after Baxter's, I dropped the Fender and moved to the Starfire. That Guild, it had a short scale neck, 31.5 inches or something like that, and that neck was a lot more delicate. But what I liked about it was that acoustic sound that I was always chasing after. I was getting such a brittle sound out of the solid body. Now, I liked that sound, but it wasn't all that I wanted. If I was going to change from my Fender, it was going to have to be something a lot bigger. And so I was talking with my good buddy Owsley Stanley, and he was a real genius. He really was. And I told him that I wanted to change the sound from the instrument, not just the amplifiers. And we were talking about it, and he said, "You know, they're using really cheap electronics in here. But we could find the highest end, space grade pots and put those in here, with better wiring, and that'll transform the sound " So we started working on the electronics for that first [Guild] bass, improving the electronics and wiring it for stereo, so you could separate two pickups and all that stuff. It got so ridiculous years later that I think Phil [Lesh] had a bass set up where each string had a different out. [Laughs] But anything goes, because you're trying to improve the quality of the sound of the instrument, instead of being at the mercy of whatever the manufacturer had put out.

BW: So what new things did the Starfire open up for you?

JC: The Guild had a block going down the center, like a lot of the semi-hollowbody guitars, and then it had the archtop on the sides, which gave it a more open sound. But it delivered more harmonics, particularly when we did the Owsley version, where he made a hand-carved module with all the electronics and wiring inside in order to feature more of the bandpass filters they were putting in there to sculpt the sound with more varieties of tone. And what we were really after was basically what was happening in the studio. And the bass became a somewhat of a lab with tonal variations that I could use to sculpt the sound a lot more. My purpose wasn't really to use all the varieties all the time, it was really to sculpt the tone, to find what I wanted for a specific purpose. Once I find that specific purpose, whatever it might be, I left it alone. And that was a game changer. Because I found out that that modified Guild Starfire, when I played the Versatone at 10:00, it was a pure, clean jazz sound. But I could turn it up to 11, and it got a little bit of distortion. If I put it up to 12 midnight, I could really hold that tone. And that's the tone that you hear in the song "Crown of Creation," that sustained sound. Now, it doesn't sound like that with a solid body instrument. What happens with a hollowbody instrument, particularly the f-hole and not a round hole acoustic guitar, is that it starts to bring out the overtone series, and I can pull those harmonics out. And as Jorma was doing things with feedback, I was able to do things with feedback on the bass guitar that didn't sound just like a grinding noise. I could actually do musical stuff on it without all the buzz by pulling those overtones out. So what I did was I used [the Versatone] as an effect. I put it through a volume pedal. I would preset the Versatone for the amount of distortion I wanted. And then I would mic that, send that out to the audience through the PA system, along with my stuff with the mic in front. And I would blend that sound in. So I could do some nuttier stuff during the breakdowns in the songs and hold out chord combinations that would just growl. 

BW: So thinking about the Versatone and the Guild Starfire, maybe this is obvious, but it strikes me how much of your father's "if it doesn't work right, you make it better" philosophy was a part of what you were doing.

JC: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BW: And after that, you had other Starfires built?

JC: That first Starfire got stolen up in Seattle, sometime after Woodstock. So I ordered two more Starfire basses, and they sent one out to me and the other one I sent off to California to give to Ron Wickersham. That's the one that's hanging in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right now. Ron was working on new circuitry. It was unbelievable, all kinds of stuff. He said, "We can make this active. Put a nine-volt battery in there and that'll power all these bandpass filters." I said, "Listen. Put it on a platform." Because I knew how long things took, and I wanted to get this thing running. I said, "I don't care what it looks like. Saw a hole in the bass and put it in there." This is '69 now. So he did that, and when I got back home off tour, I got the bass back and it literally was just a hunk of aluminum.

BW: Yeah. I've seen that bass in the Rock Hall.

JC: Yeah. And all the knobs and all of that. But the advancement here was that it was powered by an active, nine-volt battery.

BW: So, the first modified Starfire didn't have active electronics?

JC: No. Just higher quality electronics. But also, what we did with that first one, is we flipped the pickups up and looked at them. They had Alnico magnets, which was the industry standard, with windings around a flat piece of metal. So we took that and we almost doubled the size of the alnico magnet. And what that did was give the bass a really thick sound, almost like a lap steel. On the second bass, I wanted to keep those [original] Guild pickups, because I liked how I was developing a sound on those pickups. And so we were, like, doing add ons to the pickups, boosting them up a bit, which let me have more power to manipulate the tones and whatnot. And that was the second bass. On the third bass, we figured, let's just build a bass. So I talked to Rick Turner. We were good pals, and I loved his shop. He was winding his own pickups by hand and dropping them in epoxy, doing different sizes and configurations, experimenting with all this stuff. And he was carving solid-body instruments out of exotic woods. And I was in the electronic world really, not the instrument world. So I told him that I just want a bass that was a block of wood but with these pickups. And said, "Let's do this. Let's put in brass strips." And he had this cool machining, and the brass had these circle imprints on them. And these pickups and these potentiometers were the best on the market that you could possibly get at the time. And they were just gorgeous. So anyway, we started that and that led to Alembic number one, which was a little over a year later. And he and Wickersham formed Alembic, until those guys broke up like a band and stopped talking to each other.

BW: Earlier you were talking about how the sound you produced live, and I've been listening to those two live albums from 1968, Bless Its Pointed Little Head and Live at the Fillmore East. And I'm interested in your thoughts on how you feel about those albums. Do you feel like the live albums capture the sound of the Airplane better than the studio albums?

JC: Yeah, I think Bless Its Pointed Little Head is the quintessential Airplane sound. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, we were aggressive, all the tempos are nuts, of course. And sloppy though parts of it may be, you can say this is the way we sound live and and that was pretty much it. 

BW: Well and then also, on both of those albums, the first track features an electric bass solo. And so it seems that in around '68/'69, bass solos became a much bigger part of the Airplane sound.

 JC: I Never thought of it as a bass solo ever. We always came out with a song. I can't remember starting a set with a bass solo ever. 

BW: By solo, I guess I mean that you are playing extended lead lines.

JC: Well I think you want to be careful about how you phrase that because there was a period of time when bass players played solos, you know, where everybody stops the bass plays a solo. I hate that. I can't stand it. For me, it has always got to be interwoven in the music. Some of the music may get more sparse, and then you're hearing the bass in front. But I never wanted to be left out there high and dry, and there are a lot of bands that do that. I can't stand that. To me, those moments are just featuring part of the orchestra. And that's how I look at it always. Because I don't want Jorma to stop playing, and I don't want him to play rhythm. It's interplay. But I think the reason you hear the bass more in those moments is because maybe he's backed off his dynamics and somebody else has backed off the dynamics, and you're going to hear it up there as a solo. But that's not how I thought of it. I mean we're listening to each other, I'm taking the music somewhere, and they're playing off of that. So it's more or less like I'm just leading you through the forest here, and we're going to come back out into the clearing where everybody is. And that's always how I've thought of that kind of stuff.

BW: Jack, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.

JC: You bet. Thanks a lot, man.