Hot Tuna
Final Vinyl

Listening notes

Hot Tuna's Final Vinyl, released in 1979 on Grunt Records (catalog number FL-13357), arrived at a particular moment in the band's trajectory, as its title openly acknowledges. The word "final" was not incidental — it signaled a deliberate endpoint, at least as the group understood things at the time of release.

The record spans ten tracks across two sides, catalogued under the genres of blues, blues rock, and rock. Side A opens with "Hesitation Blues," running just over five minutes, and moves through "Candy Man," "Keep On Truckin'," and "Water Song" before closing with the plainly titled "Day To Day Out The Window Blues." Side B carries its own range of material, from "Easy Now" and the nearly six-minute "Funky # 7" to "Hot Jelly Roll Blues," "Song From The Stainless Symbal," and the closing track, "I Wish You Would," at four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. The total runtime across both sides suggests a substantive single LP, with no track falling under three minutes.

The genre tags — blues, blues rock, and rock — reflect the broad vocabulary Hot Tuna had worked within since their earliest recordings, and the tracklist here pulls from that same general territory. Titles like "Hesitation Blues" and "Hot Jelly Roll Blues" point explicitly toward traditional blues source material, while others suggest original compositions.

Grunt Records, the label that released this record, was the imprint associated with the Jefferson Airplane circle, and Hot Tuna's presence on that roster was consistent with the group's origins in that milieu.

This draft is unreviewed and intended for fact-checker verification before publication.