Hot Tuna 1970
(clockwise from top: Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Marty Balin, Joey Covington)

Jorma and Margareta, Jack and Melissa, Joey, Marty and Paul Ziegler and his wife arrived in shifts in early June, staying together in a rented house in Runaway Bay. Maurice secured the necessary work permits to record at a club in Ocho Rios and arranged for RCA to ship down the necessary recording equipment.
But by the time they left Jamaica, the future of Hot Tuna was in doubt. What exactly transpired on the island is another one of those Airplane-related sagas recalled differently by all involved, but something unpleasant definitely happened. It wasn't all fun in the tropical sun.

Jack Casady: We were kind of feeling our way around about how to do this Hot Tuna thing, because it was starting to get very tough with the Airplane. We went to Jamaica to rehearse, to play and put an album together. I think we saw it more as a respite from Jefferson Airplane, a chance for us to vacation and see what was going to happen, see if the personalities would gel.

Jorma Kaukonen: It was just a way to get a free vacation. We really didn't have anything to record. Everybody took their families down. It was classic rock and roll stuff. We had dinners together, and we pretty much did everything together.

But people were always bitching. I remember we were having breakfast one morning and I was busting Marty's balls about something, and whatever it was just sent him over the edge. I remember him throwing his plate on the floor and screaming, "Same jokes, year after year," and he walked out. And I remember thinking, hey, if you can't practice on your friends, who can you practice on? But he was very upset with me. I'm sure that every single one of us, myself included, was guilty of histrionics. I look back at this and I think, I really must have been an obnoxious prick. I thought I was hysterically funny.

Bill Thompson: Marty was getting more and more bitter about things. All he did was complain and bitch and moan and groan. He was putting people down. He was calling Grace a slut and insulting everybody. He was drinking. He started growing a beard and he kind of looked like Charlie Manson. Jorma didn't talk to him. Jorma and Jack I don't think really liked him that much at that time. And it was probably because of Jamaica. A lot of arguments there. There were a lot of problems with Joey too. Joey would just go along with what Marty said, but he should have kept his mouth shut. He's got a big mouth.

Joey Covington: Jorma brought in a guy named Paul Ziegler, who couldn't play for shit but was an old friend of Jorma's. Marty and I went, "Hey, it's time to talk to Jorma." We went in and told Jorma, "We don't want to play with this guy."

Actually, Marty said, "Let's go in and tell him, Joey." Then of course Marty didn't say a thing. So I went in and told Jorma, "Hey, I'm part of this band too. We should have some kind of say here as to who we're gonna play with."
His wife, Margareta, said, "Joey, don't make waves." I said, "This has nothing to do with you." Jorma goes, "This is my band. I'll do what I want. And I'll hire and fire who I please." So that's when I knew the shit had hit the fan.

Jorma Kaukonen: My ex-wife would not have said, "Don't make waves." She would have said, "Get the fuck out of here, you're nothing but a drummer." And he would never have had the balls to say, "This has nothing to do with you." Never!

Bill Thompson: Jorma had a great idea, which was to go to Jamaica and record with the Rastafarians. This was before Bob Marley or any of that.

Jorma Kaukonen: That might have been my idea but I don't remember it. I have a lot of great ideas. I'd like to be an astronaut too.

Bill Thompson: We were going to record with this guy called Count Ossie, who was a famous Rastafarian, up in the mountains.

Joey Covington: We were supposed to go to the Blue Mountains and smoke with this Count Ossie guy and hang out and maybe he was going to come and do something reggae with us.

Jorma Kaukonen: There was a trip in the mountains because that was a romantic thing to do. The stuff that was happening in the mountains was the stuff you'd expect to be happening in the mountains in those days. There was a trip but I didn't do it.

But all of this had so little to do with the music. And I don't remember Count Ossie. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but I don't remember that. You need to know somebody to play with those people and that really wasn't happening.

Joey Covington: We weren't there to record with any Jamaican guys, we were just there to make a Hot Tuna record.

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: I set the freaking thing up! The Rastafarians were coming down to the club, they were bringing all their steel drums and everything.

Jorma Kaukonen: There was a black band playing top 40 cover songs at the club and we went and played a set, but we were there to do our thing.

But did they, or didn't they, do their thing?

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: We went down to the club to do a P.A. check, make sure the board is right, do everything. The last goddamn minute, Jorma ODs or he got laid with some girl or something.

Jorma Kaukonen: I wasn't doing drugs in those days that you could OD on, and I was with my wife so I didn't get laid with some girl. The guy that went away with some girl and didn't show up was Joey. I remember Joey coming to the wives and saying, "This is what a real woman is like, you dumb white bitches," or something like that.

Joey Covington: I met this beautiful Jamaican girl who was 16 and was about to be married to some lord from England, an arranged marriage. She didn't want to marry the guy. She came to my hotel room. I had caught some bats in a cave and brought them back to my room and I was watching them when she came over. I was smoking a big spliff at the time. She asked me, "Is that the stuff the Jamaicans smoke?" I told her it was and she tried some and stayed with me. She said she didn't want to go back and marry this guy without knowing what it was like to be with another man.

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: I would ring Jorma's hotel room, but he would never answer. Then he says, "Maurice, I don't feel like going on tonight. I don't want to record tonight."
"What?! ‘I don't feel good, Maurice?' What are you talking about?!"
"Ah, Maurice, I don't wanna. Just tell 'em no."

"What do you mean, tell 'em no?!"

Jorma Kaukonen: First of all, we were living in a house, not a hotel. And there were no phones in the rooms, so he couldn't "ring Jorma's room." Maurice might have stayed in a hotel, but we didn't.

Marty Balin: I couldn't get anybody to rehearse. I said, "Look, don't bring me to that island to sit around on my ass. I'm not interested."

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: I was hanging, and Marty and Joey kept hanging around; they were going to the beach, waiting for Jorma and Jack. I don't know what they were doing.

Joey Covington: Jorma and Jack never showed. Maurice is going crazy. Marty is pissed off: "Eh, Jorma and Jack, same shit again. They've got us all the way down in Kingston here." While we were in Kingston, Maurice, Marty and I went down to the Playboy Club. But they wouldn't let us in because we had long hair. We yelled a little and they finally sat us in a back corner. Flip Wilson, the black comedian, was playing there that night and heard about the problem and he came over and told them to take care of us.

Jorma Kaukonen: We didn't even stay in Kingston, we stayed in Runaway Bay. Kingston was hours away. We only went to Kingston later when someone we knew got caught with something and the authorities called us down there.

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: I called up RCA and I said, "They don't wanna record." This is RCA's gear that they shipped to Jamaica from New York. There's nothing I can say to talk them into it. I said, "Jorma, that's the lowest thing you can do to me, man." We never actually played any gigs, just rehearsals.

Jorma Kaukonen: I'm sure as the guy who was responsible to RCA, Pat had plenty to be pissed about, but we actually did play one gig and it was recorded.

Toward the end of their stay in Jamaica, the band finally did manage to assemble at the club long enough to tape a set. They cut most of the songs in the electric band's repertoire at the time: They played cover songs like Lightnin' Hopkins' "Come Back Baby," Jimmy Reed's "Baby, What You Want Me To Do," "I Can Tell," which John Hammond had recorded, and another old one, "Fool's Blues." Marty contributed "Emergency," "Drifting," "You Wear Your Dresses Too Short" and a workout on Peter Kaukonen's "Up Or Down." Jorma had his "New Song (For The Morning)," and Joey brought in "Whatever The Old Man Does Is Always Right" and a new one he'd written, "Bludgeon Of A Bluecoat (The Man)." In any event, just as they'd gotten it together to actually play music, the Tuna party found itself in real trouble, with a capital T. Once again, the memories are hazy on the details but, they all seem to agree, the long-haired Americans were forced to beat a hasty retreat from the country.

Bill Thompson: Jorma had a friend who was driving this truck, 90 miles an hour over some road, and he gets stopped by the police. They find 27 pounds of marijuana in the truck and they go, "What's this for?"

And he says, "Hey, man, I'm working with Hot Tuna over here."

Jorma Kaukonen: That's basically right. The Jamaican government summoned us to come to Kingston and we went through this process at the foreign office:

"How do you like Jamaica?"

"We like it."

"Great, because you're gonna spend 20 years here."

The next thing I knew they said if you leave Jamaica everything will be fine. Nothing much ended up happening. Today it's a funny story, but I remember being scared shitless.

Bill Thompson: I said, "Let's get out of here!" We got out on the next flight.

Bill Thompson in 1999
(photo by Jeff Tamarkin)

That's one story, or two, actually. Maurice recalls another completely, and he's still not laughing. His version is that the arrangements for the band to record weren't quite as casual as Jorma described, that impatient Rastafarians were left high and dry at the club where they were indeed supposed to play together with Tuna, and that those Rastas didn't appreciate the rockers not showing up, or simply deciding they didn't feel like playing.

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: I had to leave town early. I left before the group. The Rastafarians were after my ass because no one was showing up at the club. I begged Jorma to go to the club, but Jorma and Jack didn't want to do it. They absolutely refused to do it. I said, "Hey, guys, I'm the one who negotiated this thing."

I tried to reason with the leader of the Rastafarian group, because he had all these men come down there. I tried to be very apologetic. I said, "I'll pay you."
He said, "Mon, you better leave, I'm gonna get you." They were after me. They weren't after Jack and Jorma.

So I took off on the next goddamn flight. I said, "That's it, man, because I ain't gonna die in Jamaica."

Jorma Kaukonen: Maurice could have caught some flak but the only thing the Rastas cared about in those days was making money. It wasn't about music. It probably was a nightmare for Maurice, but none of this Jamaican stuff was as traumatic to me as I guess it should have been, considering how it affected everybody else.

Marty doesn't recall even sticking around long enough to witness any of that action-movie stuff. He remembers simply leaving out of disgust.

Apparently, the first jab was an argument between Marty and Thompson on the beach. According to an interview Marty gave to Crawdaddy magazine in 1972, RCA had allocated $40,000 to Marty personally for what was to be his involvement in Hot Tuna's first album. Once they were already in Jamaica, swimming in the tropical water, Marty told the magazine, Thompson admitted to him that the others had taken Marty's share to pay for the Jamaica trip. "I was shocked," he told Crawdaddy. "I just looked at my manager and walked out of the water, got my clothes together and I left."

Marty also backed up the version of the story that has the initial plan for the Jamaica trip being to go into the mountains and make a recording with the Rastas. He also told writer Eric Rudolph that Jorma didn't want to do it once they were there. "Joey and I sat around mostly every day," he said in 1972, "waitin' to get together. And there wasn't much gettin' together. And then we never got to the album." Marty Balin: I went to the engineer and said, "Look, man, I can't get these guys together to work." So the engineer calls up Jorma at the house. I'm in the room, listening in on the other phone. He's talking to Jorma, "Hey, man, you gotta start getting to work on this record, getting it ready."

And Jorma says, "We can't get Marty. He's out there, we can't get him to do anything." He blames the whole thing on me.

So I said through the phone, "Fuck you, asshole. I'll see you at the next gig." And I left.

Jorma Kaukonen: I have no recollection that he ever said, "Fuck you, asshole." That doesn't mean it's not true, but Marty never had the balls to ever say anything like that to my face.

In any case, dramatic as it is, the veracity of Marty's yarn would appear to be negated by his vocal presence on the Jamaica tape. But those tapes, in the end, never were released, and although copies survive, if Jorma has his say, they never will be.

Jorma Kaukonen: Because of the somewhat adversarial relationship that Marty and I seem to have, I will probably never do anything with those tapes because I don't want to give myself the headache. Looking back on it today, the first Hot Tuna band was a joke. And even though I don't think I had that kind of intellectual awakening to the fact that the band wasn't gelling, some part of me knew that, so I didn't pursue it.

The truth of the matter is we had no material for the record when we went to Jamaica. I'm sure our intentions were honorable, but I was unprepared. If we were more prepared we would have had something to record.

Pat "Maurice" Ieraci: There's really nothing there on those tapes to speak of.