What originated as an acoustic offshoot from the Jefferson Airplane gradually shifted into the central project for its founders Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, who turned the band into a widely attended live act across the 1970s. The pair had been close since their youth in Washington, D.C., where they performed together in the Triumphs. Following graduation, guitarist Kaukonen moved with his parents, who worked in government service, to the Philippines, yet he came back to the United States just as psychedelia emerged, settling in San Francisco and helping launch the Airplane in 1965. Bassist Casady entered the lineup shortly afterward, and the two guided the group through its peak years in the late '60s.
Originally intended to be called Hot Sh*t before RCA objected, Hot Tuna began to coalesce in 1969 while Casady and Kaukonen remained active in the Jefferson Airplane; their earliest shows actually fit between standard Airplane bookings. Starting as a trio that featured harmonica player Will Scarlet and at times brought in Airplane colleagues Marty Balin and Spencer Dryden, the band issued its debut in 1970, a subdued self-titled album of traditional blues and ragtime captured live at the New Orleans House in Berkeley. The following year's more rock-oriented First Pull Up, Then Pull Down added violinist Papa John Creach, who was also a full-time Airplane member at the time, along with drummer Sammy Piazza. Without Scarlet, the third release, Burgers, arrived in 1972.
By the time The Phosphorescent Rat appeared in 1974, Casady and Kaukonen had formally left the Jefferson Airplane; Creach, who chose to stay with the Airplane, had already departed the Tuna lineup. America's Choice in 1975 marked the exit of Piazza as well, with Bob Steeler taking over drums, and Yellow Fever came out the same year, followed by Hoppkorv in 1976. Keyboardist Nick Buck joined for Double Dose in 1978, after which Hot Tuna declared a split and wrapped the initial chapter of its history with Final Vinyl in 1979.
After the breakup, Kaukonen issued the solo album Jorma and later entered the new wave outfit Vital Parts, while Casady formed his own new wave band, SVT. Both musicians revisited earlier influences in 1984: Casady teamed with fellow Airplane veterans Balin and Paul Kantner in the KBC Band, and Kaukonen returned to the acoustic folk and blues that had shaped his beginnings. Eventually the two played several club shows as Hot Tuna and established a firmer reunion in 1986; by 1990 the lineup included singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Falzarano, who had taken part in many early reunion performances.
That same year Hot Tuna delivered Pair a Dice Found, its first batch of fresh studio tracks in more than a decade, and a string of live albums followed, among them Live at Sweetwater in 1992, Splashdown Two in 1997, and And Furthurmore... in 1999. In subsequent years the group maintained a schedule of live appearances in shifting configurations. A single-disc compilation of RCA-era material, Keep on Truckin', surfaced in 2006. The band's first studio album in twenty years, Steady as She Goes, cut at Levon Helm's studio in Woodstock, New York, and produced by Larry Campbell, came out on Red House Records in 2011.
