Jorma Kaukonen at Home on the Fur Peace Ranch

Pretty much anyone who was around in the 1960s remembers Jefferson Airplane. The West Coast rock band was created in 1965 by Paul Kantner and Marty Balin, and, before the decade was out, ended up headlining at the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock and the Altamont Speedway concert.

In October, the band’s legendary lead guitarist, Jorma Kaukonen, joined his surviving bandmates, singer Grace Slick and bassist Jack Casady, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where the group was honored with the 2,737th star on the boulevard.

And come next week, Kaukonen will be right here in Sag Harbor where, on December 15, he will join his longtime friend and musical compatriot G.E. Smith at The Church to present a “Portraits” concert. Since 2015, “Portraits,” the musical series produced by Smith’s wife, singer-songwriter Taylor Barton, has been presenting rare musical couplings at theaters across the East End, with Smith hosting fellow artists as they share conversations, collaborations, and, of course, music.

But when Kaukonen’s not being honored by the Hollywood elite on the West Coast, or performing with Smith on the East Coast, he can be found at home in southern Ohio, where he makes music with his famous friends and teaches guitar to students at the Fur Peace Ranch, which he and wife Vanessa first envisioned in 1989 and opened to the public in 1998.

Located in rural Meigs County, which was once renowned for its illicit cannabis cultivation, today, the 126-acre property is a bucolic retreat for the musically inclined. The Fur Peace Ranch has a workshop, library and cabins to house students. There’s also a 200-seat concert hall and the Psychedelic Gallery, a metal grain silo turned museum housing Kaukonen’s collection of artifacts, photographs and posters from his time with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna — the band he formed with Casady, his childhood friend — as well as revolving art shows related to the Summer of Love era.

“We opened Fur Peace in ’98,” explained Kaukonen during a recent interview at the property. “Vanessa and I were living in Woodstock when the friend of mine who owned this piece of property, who I hadn’t talked to in 15 or 20 years, just called me up out of the blue. He said, ‘Do you want to buy 126 acres in southeast Ohio?’

“None of this stuff was here. It was all multiflora rose and poison ivy,” he added. “This was a pot farm. When we first moved here, we didn’t live here — we had a farm about 10 miles away — and we had to clean up the irrigation and camouflage netting and all that stuff that goes along with the deal.

“It just seemed to make sense. We bought 126 acres for $32,000, which is ridiculous. It’s still cheap down here, but not that cheap.”

And it turns out that creating the ranch was definitely right in Kaukonen’s wheelhouse. He had been teaching guitar since he was in college and always enjoyed working with students. Once they had purchased the property, he says it was Vanessa who envisioned the creation of the musical Mecca that the Fur Peace Ranch has since become.

“Vanessa is good at figuring out the kind of stuff that we ought to do,” Kaukonen explained. “If it had been up to me, it would have been a hay bale by a campfire, and we would’ve been singing ‘Kumbaya.’”

Like Barton’s “Portraits” series, at the Fur Peace Ranch Kaukonen invites famous musicians to come in for a spell and make music with him in the confines of the concert hall. His guests also teach guitar workshops, and among the musicians who have frequented the ranch is Smith, who first came to Fur Peace in its second year of operation, not long after he, Kaukonen and Barton met in the mid-1990s at a gig at The Bottom Line music club in New York City.

“G.E. and Taylor were both on that bill,” Kaukonen recalled. “And I was aware of G.E., needless to say, because he’s kind of a famous guy. We both, of course, love the same sort of music and bonded immediately.

“But one of the things I found interesting was that there was so much more to him than being band leader of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ which is certainly awesome cred, no doubt about it,” Kaukonen said. “But he’s a multidimensional cat, and as we started talking about the music, I realized there’s so much more depth to his knowledge on so many levels than most people will ever know — unless they come to see one of his shows, of course.”

In terms of the two performing together, Kaukonen credits his wife, Vanessa, and Barton with being the impetus to making it happen. And once they started, he and Smith realized they really enjoyed playing music together.

“It was a totally no pressure situation for a guy like me, who doesn’t move in the studio world really,” he said.

Though he is known for his skill on electric guitar, the “Portraits” concert at The Church will be all acoustic, which is where Kaukonen began his musical career and is his go-to choice these days.

“I started in the acoustic world. G.E., of course, his first guitar I believe was a ’52 Tele. He started right out in the electric world,” Kaukonen said. “When I was in high school, I had an electric guitar, but for us back in those days an electric guitar was simply an amplified guitar. We didn’t do all the stuff that all of us take for granted with electric guitars today. So I really just played acoustic guitar until I got in Jefferson Airplane and I had to learn how to play electric guitar because it was an electric band.

“The acoustic guitar is really a different animal, in my opinion,” he added. “A lot of the stuff that I do is this finger-style blues. When I started doing this, I realized immediately that to go to a gig, I didn’t have to have five friends, one of whom owned a van. I’d just throw my guitar in the car and go. We used to joke that more than two trips to the car, then it’s not folk music.

“It’s a funny thing because I play acoustic guitar every day, but I almost never pick up the electric guitar unless I’m going out,” he said. “Not to say that I don’t love it, I do, but it requires a bunch of friends.

“The acoustic guitar is pretty much a concert in and of itself.”

In recent years, Kaukonen has had the opportunity to bring Smith onboard for electric gigs. Back in 2015, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jefferson Airplane, Kaukonen assembled a band for the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia, with Smith in the lineup.

“It was myself, Jack [Casady], Justin Guip, our Hot Tuna drummer, Larry Campbell, his wife, Teresa [Williams], G.E., Rachel Price from Lake Street Drive and Jeff Pehrson, who’d sing some of Marty’s parts,” Kaukonen recalled. “G.E. was my Paul Kantner, because Paul was a 12-string guitar player, but not a schooled player, and it was his thing and it’s one of the secrets of the Jefferson Airplane sound.

“But G.E. is so good, he learned how to do that. It’s totally not like anything he would’ve done in a million years otherwise,” Kaukonen added. “He was definitely my hall card in that little group of people because it defined the sound.”

Though Kaukonen isn’t yet sure what the set list will be for the “Portraits” show in Sag Harbor, he’s fairly certain it will be memorable.

“It’s G.E.’s show, so it’ll be whatever he’s up to. I’m up for that. He’s a very inviting host when you sit in with him, and I like to think I am also,” Kaukonen said. “I really don’t know what he has in mind. Whatever it is, it will be a lot of fun.”

Sharing the music is ultimately more than just about performing it live, and for Kaukonen, a big focus at the Fur Peace Ranch is teaching the next generation of musicians how it’s done. Something both he and Smith do at the ranch.

“We have a lot of knowledge from our period. G.E., he’s encyclopedic. If you talk to him you can bring up anything and he’s going to have a pretty well-defined opinion on it,” Kaukonen said. “So yeah, to be able to pass this stuff on, from guys like us that are still a bridge to the ancients. That’s not always going to be there. So that’s a good thing.

“My teenage daughter is fond of saying things like, ‘Dad, you know it’s not my kind of music, but you’re very good at it,’ which she has said on more than one occasion, but I get that,” he said. “A lot of the kids are not going to be interested in what we do, but some will be. All the music that surrounds George and myself is guitar-centric, and a lot of the modern music is not as guitar-centric as it once was, and that’s just how it is. So, in a way, it’s up to guys like us who are still alive to be able to pass on that kind of knowledge to people who are going to enjoy guitar-centric music.”

In terms of the students that gravitate toward the Fur Peace Ranch guitar workshops, Kaukonen explains that it is generally older adults, probably most of whom grew up listening to Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.

“The demography tends to be people not as old as me — because almost nobody is as old as me these days, but older guys,” said Kaukonen, who turns 82 on December 23. “However, we do have young artists that come in. That’s exciting stuff, too, because we’re talking about whatever the music du jour is, the stuff going on at the time. But there are people who just get set on fire by the stuff that set me and George on fire back then. And every now and then, there are a bunch of younger folks that love it and are really good at it, and that’s exciting.”

Speaking of the next generation, the Kaukonens’ teenage daughter, Izze, who was adopted from China (as was G.E. Smith and Taylor Barton’s daughter, Josie) is in the process of applying to college, though if it were up to her father, he might encourage another path.

“Izze is an accomplished artist in her own right. She has a woman’s voice and has for a long time,” he said. “I want to say, ‘Why do you want to go to college, why don’t you just sing?’”

Which brings up an interesting question: What did Kaukonen’s own parents think of his choice of profession as rock guitarist back in the 1960s? After all, as the son of a foreign service officer based in Washington, D.C., he came from a fairly conservative background.

“I took piano lessons like all the kids in our neighborhood. I played guitar, sang songs. I think my parents thought it was cute,” Kaukonen said. “But then when I got in the Airplane, which started right after I graduated from the University of Santa Clara, my dad said, ‘What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?’ and all that stuff that more conservative parents say.

“But when we got on the cover of Life magazine, he realized I had a real job on some level,” he laughed. “In 1972, when I quit the Airplane, he goes, ‘Well son, I hope you thought this through because’ — and I’ll never forget this — ‘because you have a good career and a responsibility to your family.’

“I remember thinking, ‘Am I related to this guy?’”

By the way, that Life magazine cover is just one of the many pieces of framed memorabilia that can be found on the walls at the Fur Peace Ranch, along with vintage West Coast music posters from the era. Speaking of art, the December 15 “Portraits” concert is offered in conjunction with an exhibition at The Church featuring 16 rare and classic guitars from G.E. Smith’s personal collection. The show, “Hand Made: Guitars According to G.E. Smith and the American Artists’ Hands Archive,” runs through December 22 and also includes 31 bronze cast sculptures depicting the hands of visual artists.

When asked who has the better guitar collection, Kaukonen said, without hesitation, “G.E. He’s got it better than everybody. I’m not really a collector, I probably have more than I need, but G.E. has been collecting stuff since it was just old, not vintage. He has a huge collection of quality stuff.”

That’s not to say Kaukonen doesn’t have his own instrumental claim to fame. A decade or so ago, Martin Guitars came out with the M-30 Jorma Kaukonen Custom Artist Edition, an acoustic model named just for him.

“I think it’s out of production now. I had the first three,” he said. “Number one and two I’m going to keep and at some point sell as a set. I gave the third one to my 25-year-old son who lives in the D.C. area and plays guitar.”

“Portraits,” hosted by G.E. Smith and featuring guitarist and vocalist Jorma Kaukonen is Thursday, December 15, at 7 p.m. at The Church. The show is produced by Taylor Barton. Still available are tickets at the $300 and $1,000 level (which includes a one-hour guitar lesson with G.E. Smith). The Church is at 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor. For information, visit thechurch.org.