One more in the can: Hot Tuna returns to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Over 60 years after Jorma Kaukonen first arrived in the Bay Area, San Francisco still tugs at the guitarist’s heartstrings.

This fall, he and longtime musical partner Jack Casady return as Hot Tuna for two performances rooted in the city’s musical history: An Evening Honoring Steve Earle (The Masonic; Thu/1), followed by an acoustic Hot Tuna set at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass (Golden Gate Park; Sun/3).

The Earle tribute event, benefiting Sweetwater Spectrum, launches Hardly Strictly’s festival week and celebrates the singer-songwriter’s enduring relationship with the annual jamboree, where he has performed every year since 2002. 

Buddy Miller will serve as musical director, leading a lineup that includes Hot Tuna, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, Molly Tuttle, and more.

For Kaukonen, 85, the appearances reconnect him with the city where his musical life took shape and a tradition of communal outdoor performance that preceded Hardly Strictly.

“Back in the mid-to-late ’60s and into the ’70s, we all got together and did all sorts of free shows in the park,” he says. “Sometimes it would be a stealth show. The Dead guys were always great about getting a flatbed truck with a PA, and we’d pop up. That would horrify people today because there was no insurance.”

The Washington, DC native enrolled at Santa Clara University and made the Bay Area home from 1962 to 1988 (when he relocated to Ohio), with San Francisco at the center of his creative education.

“The Bay Area welcomed me as an East Coast stranger and complete nonentity,” says Kaukonen. “We all hung out, went to coffeehouses, and played. Everything was incredibly sociable. All of that coalesces in an event like Hardly Strictly.”

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In 1965, Kaukonen moved to San Francisco proper and became an original member of future Rock & Roll Hall of Famers and Grammy winners Jefferson Airplane. 

Four years later, he formed Hot Tuna with Casady, his childhood friend and bandmate. Their acoustic and electric explorations of blues, folk, and rock on fan-favorite tracks including “Water Song,” “Hesitation Blues,” and “Funky #7” created another enduring body of work.

Before Casady became a bassist, he played lead guitar while Kaukonen sang and played rhythm guitar in their teenage band.

“Jack and I have been good friends for a long time,” he says. “We’ve always respected each other as human beings and artists. We’ve never had a band meeting. We don’t argue about the music. We’re very different people, but we’re fortunate.”

That bond will be at the center of Hot Tuna’s appearance at Hardly Strictly as an acoustic quartet. The foursome will be rounded out by harmonica player Ross Garren and drummer Justin Guip.

Kaukonen has come to describe the band’s approach with a term he once resisted.

“When I was much younger, I disliked the expression ‘good-time music,’” says the guitarist. “Looking at what Hot Tuna has done all its life, I now consider it good-time music. People are going to be entertained. I like to think the music is endearing to listen to.”

The description suits Hardly Strictly, the free festival founded by Warren Hellman in 2001. Its identity has expanded far beyond bluegrass to encompass folk, country, rock, soul, Americana, and world music, but it retains the informality of a vast gathering in the park. 

The 2026 edition includes My Morning Jacket, Mavis Staples, Los Lobos, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Emmylou Harris, and Steve Earle & the Hardly Strictly Dukes.

Kaukonen has played Hardly Strictly many times, yet the return still feels personal. “It’s like a homecoming on some levels,” he says. “The vibe there has always been fantastic—not just for the performers hanging out in such a cool area, but with the crowds as well.”

His memories reach back to a San Francisco that offered young artists cheap apartments, plentiful coffeehouses, and primitive sound systems that were nevertheless enough. 

His third-floor walk-up on Divisadero Street, a few blocks from the Fillmore, cost $90 a month with a garage. He later lived in Pacific Heights next door to promoter Bill Graham, moved to Kensington Way in West Portal, and eventually bought a home in St. Francis Wood. None proved as interesting to him as the Divisadero apartment.

The affordability has vanished, but Kaukonen believes something less tangible survives. “Despite the rising cost of living everywhere—and California is pretty bad in that regard—there’s still magic in San Francisco,” says the guitarist. “Maybe it’s the fog.”

That fog, in his telling, carries the mystery of the city he knew—the place where Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, and their peers started as young musicians discovering what they could make together. 

“Back then, every day was exciting,” he says. “Everything was new: a new place to play or a new person to meet and play with. That was happening at an incredible level in the Bay Area.”

Kaukonen understands why that era continues to fascinate listeners, though he resists romanticizing it as effortless liberation. 

The city’s political establishment and police were conservative, and the emerging counterculture had to struggle for room. “It wasn’t a gift,” says the guitarist. “We had to work for it, but ultimately they let it happen.”

Much of that history happened at Golden Gate Park. The Dead’s flatbed-truck appearances and other impromptu concerts helped establish a local ideal: music as a public experience rather than a luxury product. Hardly Strictly carries that idea forward on a scale the young Kaukonen could hardly have imagined.

Hot Tuna’s set will translate the expansive festival setting back into the elemental pleasure of musicians listening closely to one another. “They’re going to hear four guys who have a good time playing music,” says Kaukonen. “The music is easy to listen to. The music speaks for itself.”

Kaukonen continues touring and teaching. Although he and his wife sold their Fur Peace Ranch music hub in Athens, OH, the guitar workshops continue, and a Hot Tuna cruise on Europe’s Danube River is planned for next year. 

Hot Tuna’s return to San Francisco is another stop in a partnership that remains alive because Kaukonen and Casady still find joy in playing together.

“It’s a pleasure and an honor to play it,” Kaukonen says of Hardly Strictly. “Jack and I joke about it because we lived in the Bay Area for so many years. We always say that if anybody should be booked for Hardly Strictly, it should be us.”

AN EVENING HONORING STEVE EARLE Thu/1, The Masonic, SF. More info here.

HARDLY STRICTLY BLUEGRASS Fri/2-Sun/4, Golden Gate Park, SF. More info here.

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