Guitarist’s memoir a bumpy ride

Jorma Kaukonen Jr. played guitar with the original incarnation of Jefferson Airplane, founded and continues to play with Hot Tuna and, for the past 27 years, has lived in Pomeroy, Ohio, where he runs the Fur Peace Ranch music school and concert venue.

Not strictly sequential, his memoir frequently darts off on stream-of-consciousness tangents.

“Sometimes my memories are like jagged pieces of shrapnel and sometimes they are seen through a gentle veil,” he says.

Kaukonen’s father worked for the U.S. Department of State, and his family spent long stretches outside the U.S. as well as in Washington, D.C.

During his time at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, about which he notes wryly, “I wasn’t kicked out of Antioch, but I wasn’t encouraged to return,” he paid less attention to classes than to learning the finger-picking style of blues guitar that “Been So Long: My Life and Music” (St. Martin’s, 368 pages, $29.99) by Jorma Kaukonen

would become his trademark.

When Kaukonen started touring with Jefferson Airplane in the mid-1960s, he became addicted to amphetamines, a dependence he finally kicked in the late ‘90s after the birth of his first child.

Kaukonen is at his most precise and dynamic when writing about his twin passions, music and motorcycles.

Music, he says, is “the reward for being alive,” and he loves the details of its production, recalling how on one At a glance Jefferson Airplane song, “the high-singing electric guitar lines are my Gibson ES-345 Stereo with the neck pickup through an Ampeg Scrambler into two Fender Twins.”

He devotes equally loving attention to the motorcycles he has owned and ridden since high school.

By comparison, he is far less introspective about the people in his life, including his two wives — the first was a “bipolar heroin addict” who once, he notes, “tried to stab me in the back with a broken bottle while I was putting up the Christmas tree”; and the second, who apparently was much easier to live with. He also recounts his relationships with his two children as well as musical companions that included Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.

And rather than get into details about his experience at Woodstock, he simply says, “In a way, in those three days we were all accidental tourists in a parallel universe whose portal opened unbidden and closed just as mysteriously, leaving a vivid, almost racial memory.”

A gallery of black-andwhite photos follows the musician, now 77, from childhood to the present, and a 64-page appendix features his song lyrics.

Also included is a CD highlighting five of the songs that reflect why he is considered a master of the guitar.

Journal entries inserted into the text give a sense of the way his mind works.

What the memoir lacks in psychological depth it makes up for in refreshing modesty.

“Life is, quite simply, just life. Mine is probably not much more interesting than one of my peasant ancestors in northern Finland.”

Those willing to go with the flow will find him a comfortable literary companion.