From their boundary-pushing exploits with Jefferson Airplane in the '60s and the many lives of Hot Tuna in the intervening years, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady have been partners in music for the better part of seven decades and friends for even longer than that.
Jorma and Jack have been playing music together since they were in high school, and they're still doing select shows this year with the acoustic version of Hot Tuna.
They tell Q104.3 New York's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke they don't take it for granted.
"We're both really thankful we managed to live a life doing [this]," Jack says. "There's nothing else I desire to do but to play music. I mean, I have other interests, Jorma has other interests. But ... you just can't beat it.
"Every night you get that chance to enter into that world and it's a special world, it's always different."
Both Jack and Jorma come from families of professionals. When they dove into music, even as young men, they took their gigs as seriously as any other line of work. When their first opportunity came up, they were ready.
"Very few young musicians have been as lucky as we were," Jorma adds. "We had like a record deal almost from the very beginning [with Jefferson Airplane]. You know, we actually started making money. I mean, we scuffled around a lot because we could go into the crooked manager thing and stuff that a lot of people go through, but we really stepped in it. All of the sudden we went from really being nobody to starting to become somebody."
Check out the full conversation via the player above!
Get all of Hot Tuna's live dates here.