What he did realize was that he was a guitar player.

He calls himself a late bloomer because he didn’t actually pick up a guitar until he was 15, when a friend taught him some old-timey bluegrass songs and some Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry tunes.

"I wasn’t interested in being a guitar player," he told The Jewish Standard. "I just liked singing the songs."

But he fell in love with the instrument. To get his father to pay for his first guitar — a Gibson J-45 that he bought at a music store on M Street in D.C. — he had to learn how to play two songs perfectly.

He learned two by Jimmi "The Newsboy" Brown.

"My father wasn’t completely thrilled by the choice of music, but he took me to the guitar shop," he said.

That trip to the guitar shop eventually landed Jorma a gig with the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, joining a lineup that included at its peak vocalists Marty Balin, Grace Slick, and Paul Kantner, along with bassist Jack Casady and drummer Spencer Dryden. The band would help write history.

"They were the personification of the whole late ’60s revolution. What the Beatles were doing in England, they were the American counterpart," said Jeff Tamarkin. Tamarkin, who literally wrote the book on Jefferson Airplane, "Got a Revolution," has covered the Airplane for more than 30 years, and since 1992 has written liner notes for the band’s box sets and re-mastered albums. "They were six white people from middle-class backgrounds who were diverse musically and personally. And whatever happened to the baby boomers during the counter culture revolution, happened to them at the same time."

The Airplane was also ahead of whatever was happening. When hippie culture started to form in San Francisco in the mid ’60s, it was the Airplane that was the house band at the famed Matrix folk music club, which, before the Fillmore West, was the musical epicenter of psychedelic Haight Ashbury. And when the Fillmore took over, it became a regular headlining act there. It would go on to play Woodstock, Altamont, the Monterey Music Festival, and virtually every other festival of significance between 1967 and 1973.

It also became the first psychedelic band to sign a contract with a major label, when it inked a deal with RCA in 1966.

The group’s 1967 album "Surrealistic Pillow" — which hit number three on the Billboard music charts and featured such psychedelic anthems as "White Rabbit," using the "Alice in Wonderland" story to talk about turning on to drugs and freeing your mind, and "Somebody to Love," which preaches free love — is widely credited with touching off the Summer of Love.

"They spearheaded that whole scene for everyone outside of San Francisco," said Tamarkin, who lives in Hoboken. "They were the first band from that scene to tour outside of San Francisco, and when people wrote articles about hippies, where they looked was Jefferson Airplane…. Jorma was there from day one. He was the original guitarist, and he stayed with them until the bitter end. I don’t think there would been a Jefferson Airplane without him. He had just such a unique sound."