Jorma Kaukonen, the renowned guitarist for Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, is closely associated with San Francisco’s music scene. But Kaukonen actually grew up in Chevy Chase DC, across the street from Lafayette Elementary. Both he and fellow Airplane and Hot Tuna member Jack Casady—who lived nearby—attended Alice Deal and Woodrow Wilson (now Jackson-Reed), and the duo got their professional start here, playing covers in local nightclubs. Kaukonen was recently back in town for a concert at the Warner Theatre, a big celebration of his 85th birthday that included Casady. It seemed like a good moment to learn more about his somewhat surprising roots in upper Northwest DC, so we called him up to do a bit of reminiscing. Kaukonen’s dad was an Army linguist on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff, and in the late 1940s, the family bought a home in the District. Kaukonen would hang out at the Broad Branch Market and Fort Reno. “In sixth grade, I was a crossing guard at the corner of Northampton Street and 33rd,” he recalls. “Once a week, we had to wash our guard belts and iron them.” In the late 1950s, Kaukonen began playing guitar, initially drawn to popular music of the time like the Everly Brothers. He frequented the Guitar Shop on Connecticut Avenue, where he got his first Gibson J-45. He took lessons from the owner, Sophocles Papas, a classical guitarist who counted Andrés Segovia as a pal. “I think my taste in music repulsed him,” Kaukonen says with a laugh. Kaukonen and Casady became friends when they were still in school. They met because a girl he was friends with starting dating Casady’s brother, Kaukonen says, “but it became apparent early on that Jack and I had a more profound common interest than dating the girl down the street. And that interest was music.” They formed a high-school band called the Triumphs, which began scoring professional gigs. “Washington has always been a musical town,” Kaukonen says. The high point of the Triumphs’ career was backing up rockabilly star Jimmy Clanton at a gig in West Virginia, Kaukonen remembers. Casady’s family lived in a house on Reno Road, not far from Deal, and the two of them had their first-ever recording sessions in the basement rec room. In the summer of 1960, when Kaukonen was back in town from college, they recorded a bunch of blues tracks that are essentially proto–Hot Tuna. “Jack had a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder before anybody else I knew had a tape recorder,” the guitarist says. “He was just waiting to push the ‘record’ button.” Kaukonen recently dipped deep into his archives and came up with an album’s worth of those earliest recordings, which he released for the first time last year. The record’s title: Reno Road. Though Kaukonen and Casady soon found fame on the West Coast, they’ve performed regularly in the DC area for their entire careers. It always feels meaningful to come back, Kaukonen says: “I consider it my hometown.” Related The “DC Rock History” Podcast Explores Key Local Albums This article appears in the December 2025 issue of Washingtonian.The post Jorma Kaukonen Talks About His DC Roots first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less