Warm and Fuzzy, 'Fur Peace

A class-only feature article on the music camp run by former Jefferson Airplane member Jorma Kaukonen.

As I drive down the paved highway to slightly more chunky asphalt, I start to fear for the weak breaks in the creaky Buick I’m driving. As if anticipating my anxiety, the road then becomes a mere gravel path, even more hellish on the axels as I twist and turn through endless trees, bushes and low-lying ditches. Bare and flat as a baby’s bottom, I pull into the long, winding driveway that begins with a peeling orange sign reading, “Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch: Guitar Camp”. I eventually come to a clearing and see a small grouping of log cabins, all quaintly designed with Lincoln logs in mind: warm cedar wood with thick white caulking between the slats seals in the cozy feeling.

            This is where Jorma Kaukonen, the former guitarist of Jefferson Airplane and current guitarist of Hot Tuna, has come to settle down after his trippy and drippy life as a psychedelic globetrotting rocker. Of all the places that Jorma would choose to be settling down, the fact that he chose a small town in Ohio proves that whether in a high profile glam-rock club or a small back porch banjo strum, music can foster, grow and bring people together in the most unexpected of places.

            Born in 1940 in Washington D.C. Jorma learned to play guitar as a teenager, playing in local bands with future fellow Jefferson Airplane member Jack Casady. Jorma then moved to San Francisco to attend Santa Clara University and met Paul Kantner, founding member of the Airplane. While in school Jorma also began to teach guitar lessons and play small shows in dive bars and coffee houses. At first an acoustic guitar traditionalist, Jorma’s guitar work became that much more intricate

 and creatively distinct when he began playing electric, making him a widely emulated Bay Area guitarist. Jefferson Airplane (a name the group lifted from slang term for a slit piece of paper that works as an improvised roach clip) was a band Jorma was hesitant to join upon Kantner’s initial offer, but Jorma soon joined up with the rest of the group in the summer of 1965. In the summer of 1967 the band released Surrealistic Pillow, their second release and first big whiff of success as the album that contained two of the Airplane’s biggest singles, “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit”.  While still playing with the Airplane, Kaukonen and Casady formed the blues side project Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane continued to perform solidly until 1972, when drugs and creative divisions finally separated the group. Jorma then completely focused his attention to Hot Tuna, meeting his wife Vanessa at one of their shows in Key West, Florida. They were married twenty-eight days later.  Three years ago they adopted their first child, a daughter, Isreal. With his love of music and love of his family at his side, Jorma currently performs in Hot Tuna on tours around the country and at his ranch in Pomeroy.

"If it weren't for Vanessa, I'd have set a few bales of straw by the fire circle and that would have been 'Jorma's Guitar Camp,' " laughed Jorma in “Six-String Paradise”, a 2007 article by the Columbus Dispatch.

Vanessa and her sister Ginger, the ranch’s manager for its first ten years, were the pioneering entrepreneurs of its business development and construction since its 1998 inception, with Jorma the creative brainchild of the operation.

“We really wanted to give back and teaching seemed like the obvious tool to do that, Vanessa said. “It has taken on a life of its own. Even with this economic down turn that seems to be affecting everyone, we have stayed above it all. I think is because we have such a unique facility offering what no one else can offer in this business. It seems to be a necessary destination for about 3,000 students who have graced us with their talents.”

It is the nurturing of these talents and the embracement of music that keeps Vanessa doing all that she does.

“I have a certain amount of things on my plate. If all I had to do was be a great mother to our daughter Israel...my life would be full beyond capacity,” Vanessa said. “The fact is that I am one of many that run the ranch, I run the management company by myself which is a full time job in itself, I sit on two advisory boards for great companies in Athens, and a handful of other things I am involved in. I think I am doing a bit too much to be honest. I am trying to prioritize right now and keep active the things I love. The hard thing is ...I love it all. Let’s say I am working on it.”

Vanessa and the rest of the ranch employees run sessions at the camp from March through November each year. These workshops run every in season weekend as a four day crash course from noon Friday till noon Monday, with a cost of $1,200 per student. In that cost comes a three-night stay in one of their log cabin mini-lodges (every cabin holds two, so be prepared to get acquainted with a roommate) as well as four days of lessons with an instructor complimentary meals in the kitchen every day, as well as a concert in the performance hall every Saturday night. The concert will either be a performance by a student, a teacher of the camp, or maybe even Hot Tuna. Either way, it becomes an action packed weekend for both the student as well as the employees.

 As I sit in the mess hall cabin, wood makes up every surface: wood tables, chairs and floor…even the picture frames, surrounding pictures of the grinning Jorma, are made of wood. Gleaming white plates are stacked on the shelves, waiting to be served with the camp’s next heaping hot meal, and a sign above the door reads, “Frog legs, very fresh”.

Sitting across from me is long-time friend of Jorma and ranch manager, John Hurlbut.

“I always like a place where there is an overload of projects, I like that better than the other way around, when there is nothing or only one thing to do,” John said. With his silvering hair pulled back in a ponytail and a cotton button-up shirt tattered from multiple rinses in the washing machine, John linked his large, rough hands on top of the table as he slouches forward and gives me a friendly smile.

“I also like being around the music, Fur Peace Ranch is a very magical place. Some of our students have been coming for all ten seasons. So in some ways you see the same faces and it is really nice that you have the history that comes from being with the same people. And also there is a lot of the great music that happens here, impromptu jam sessions are golden, that just happen in the moment.”

Having been friends with Jorma for roughly twenty-five years, John became ranch manager when it opened in 1998. Because of that he is often given many different hats to wear around the ranch.

“My duties are all encompassing, a lot of student liaison work, a lot for concert promotions and teacher booking,” John said. “I’m also getting projects done that need to be done around here, plumbing problems, landscaping, I stock the school store and work on all the merchandise, design and production and PR to the music community. My work day changes in regard to what the most pressing thing is on a given day.”

Being so involved does mean that John gets to make some integral decisions about the camp, such as which teachers to bring in for the sessions.

“Some of the teachers have been coming here for the duration of the ranch and do so well as far as the way they teach, and the feedback we get from students that they are always so great,” John said. “G.E. Smith for example, the electric guitar teacher. His classes fill up right away every year. Now in some other cases we like to mix it up so we have new teachers to offer every year. We take the cream of the crop and then add new teachers. To find the new teachers, we take recommendations from students and from other teachers as well. For example, someone will notice a player has a lot of DVD instructional playing CD’s out and so we know they would enjoy teaching and coming here. In some cases we base it on that they are great players and hoping that they would then want to teach some of their expertise to new students.”

Most people would probably be too aggravated and stressed to do such a highly committed job with so much multi-tasking, but John wearily smiles through it all; this is what he, and every Fur Peace employee, loves to do.

“On the weekends when we are in session I help with breakfast in the morning at seven am and stay to help with the concert on Saturday till midnight. When we do the workshops it is an intensive four-day period, so usually I just hope the next weekend I’m scheduled off and have a break time.”

When John does get a bit of a break from the work of the ranch, he has his own musical passions to fuel with his band The Cowboy Angels.  Started in 1995, this Americana band plays a variety of songs that also touch on roots music, blues, bluegrass, country and folk.

“We have been around since 1995, and we were playing shows more regularly at first,” John said. “But now we can all only handle playing a handful of dates a year.”

 Just like Vanessa, all of the work John does is very important for the ranch, but Hurlbut’s biggest challenge is simply trying to find all the time he needs in a day.

“When you have a lot of things that require your attention at the same time, juggling the priorities of what must be done first is crucial,” Hurlbut said. “I just do a lot of working on a lot of things at the same time, but I like the busyness.”

Through all of the hard work and arduous planning and coordinating, Fur Peace Ranch continues to hold camps weekend after weekend all for that awesome impromptu jam session on a cabin front porch; so that a new player of music can be made or an old one can be reborn.

“To watch the students work progress over the course of the weekend is emotional. It is why we do this, and I can tell you we have a 97% return rate,” Vanessa said. “So. There are 3,000 students that have come through our doors. 97% of them return time and time again. Classes can be hard to get into some times, but the experience is like none other.”