interesting tiki reads

While we are waiting for Ben to post/photocopy/or typeset and print his book about his grandfather, here's something else to read.

I found this article from the Honolulu Weekly while looking for web content on our old buddy Donn Beach. If you've already seen this, ignore it. If not, enjoy.
KG

The Way We Were
His buildings set the tone for Waikïkï. Maybe we should take another look at what Peter Wimberly built.

by Curt Sanburn

December 20, 2000

In his salad days, Honolulu architect Pete Wimberly regularly wore a pair of Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeve shirt and sneakers without socks to his office. Once in the office, he would Scotch-tape cardboard over the air-conditioning vents, open the länai door and start sketching.
"Pete was an outdoor person," explains fellow architect Donald Goo, who worked with Wimberly for 27 years, until Wimberly’s death at age 80 in early 1996.
"He liked tropical breezes, and he hated air conditioning."
By the time he died, George J. "Pete" Wimberly had established himself as perhaps the most successful resort architect in the world. His Honolulu—based firm of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WATG) designed many of the Pacific Rim’s pace-setting hotels and is now the world’s largest "niche" architecture firm, specializing in the $4-trillion-dollar travel industry. WATG generates enough cash flow from its hotel projects in 35 countries (including the surreal Palace of the Lost City in South Africa and the gargantuan, just-completed Venetian in Las Vegas) to sustain branch offices in Newport Beach, London and Singapore. Upon his death, Wimberly was eulogized as "an architect’s architect";"the man who changed the face of the Pacific"; and "the epitome of the artistic architect."
"When people come to the Pacific," Wimberly once said, "they want to see something that looks Pacific, not some New York hotel." And no one did a better job of creating the stage set than Wimberly. He was responsible for Tahiti’s Hotel Bora Bora, with its thatched huts built on stilts at lagoon’s edge; American Samoa’s Pago Pago Inter-Continental Hotel, with its authentically constructed thatch fale; Tahiti’s Tahara‘a Hotel, no taller than three-quarters of a coconut palm, spilling down a lush hillside above Matavai Bay.
"Pete’s main purpose in life was to create a flow of people together," says his longtime draftsman, Tom David. "He introduced islanders to the world by bringing the world to them." Big picture-wise, David points out that Wimberly had to invent Pacific Island tourism in order to create the hotels he wanted to build. "And that’s what happened," he says.
With his friend Bill Mullahey, the regional chief of Pan American Airlines, Wimberly traveled the Pacific in the 1950s, looking for new destinations, new hotel opportunities: Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Jakarta, Singapore, Bali. The men were instrumental in founding the Pacific Area Travel Association in 1952.
But it was Hawai‘i that first captured the young architect’s imagination and Honolulu where he flexed his muscles. Here is the repository for some of his best surviving work – and the graveyard for many a Wimberly landmark. This was once Wimberly country, and the ghost shapes of his fervid imagination still haunt old-timers.
Late in life, Wimberly relocated to Southern California. When he became terminally ill with emphysema, he returned to Honolulu, the city he loved, and died shortly thereafter.
Wimberly came to Hawai‘i in 1940 as a 24-year-old journeyman architect doing naval work at Pearl Harbor. When the war ended, he set up shop with Howard Cook in the architectural firm of Wimberly and Cook. Cook’s job, Wimberly told a journalist in 1991, was to "make actual buildings of my airy-fairy sketches." Among the team’s first postwar jobs was the rehabilitation of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, after its wartime service as a rest-and-recreation facility for Navy submariners. The stuffy, formal Royal was an opportunity for Wimberly to develop a few notions, he said, about "requirements for buildings in the tropics." He rejected European/American architectural norms as unsuited to Hawai‘i’s climate and culture. He decided that "it was time we began to think and to act on ideas about development of a regional architecture for Hawai‘i."
What followed was 20 years of wonderful Wimberly buildings in Hawai‘i; buildings that, for many, defined contemporary, Hawaiian-style architecture. Typical elements in Wimberly’s early work included:

o local materials: coral stone, lava rock, wood beams, thatch, bamboo, etc. – and glass;
o local forms: flowing indoor/outdoor open spaces sheltered by big, dramatic roofs with big eaves;
o liberal use of figurations, patterns and motifs derived from the cultures of the Pacific.

A prime example: The Waikikian Hotel (1956) was an unair-conditioned, two-story beachfront hotel on a very narrow lot with lush, tiki torch-lit gardens and a dramatic, hyperparabolic soaring lobby inspired by Melanesian men’s-house forms.
For the now-defunct Spencecliff chain of restaurants, Wimberly designed Top’s, Coco’s and Popo’s coffee shops with lots of lava rock and an almost cartoonish South-Seas flair that made them landmarks in Honolulu’s streetscape. The Kau Kau Jr. hamburger stand on Nimitz Highway (1956), with its little glass kitchen huddled beneath a fantastical, arrow-shaped, concrete-slab roof was certainly Honolulu’s most fanciful small building. On Kühiö Avenue in Waikïkï he designed the luscious, short-lived Royal Theater (1962) with its swooping walls, outdoor lobby and overscaled, googie-stylized bas-reliefs.
For his college friend Donn Beach, Wimberly designed Donn the Beachcomber bar/restaurant with its big, authentic thatched roofs, right on Kaläkaua Avenue, cheek-by-jowl with another Wimberly project, the original International Market Place and Duke Kahanamoku’s night club, where Don Ho sang and drank through his salad days.
Other Kaläkaua Avenue landmarks designed during Wimberly’s early years include the Bishop National Bank with its mural by Jean Charlot (1959); McInerny department store with an elegant, coconut tree-pierced awning (1959); the wooden crescent of the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Arcade (1960); the cooly modernist Rattan Art Gallery (1947); and, of course, Canlis’ Restaurant (1954), which seemed to be everyone’s sentimental favorite of Wimberly’s buildings. With its open-air dining room, bold Polynesian decorations, wall of orchid plants, koi pond, garden setting and legendary kitchen, Canlis’ Restaurant asserted Honolulu’s status as a uniquely stylish crossroads-of-the-world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, palm-lined Kaläkaua Avenue itself, with all of its Wimberly-designed buildings, was among the most gracious boulevards of any tropical city in the world.
Other familiar Wimberly designs from this period include the modernist Kapi‘olani Bowl building on Kapi‘olani Boulevard at Ward Avenue (1958), demolished in 1996; the striking Valley of the Temples Chapel in ‘Ähuimanu on the Windward Side (1965); and the domed Foodland supermarket at Windward Shopping Center (1953) in Käne‘ohe.
By 1960, Waikïkï’s days as a low-rise district were over. The remote and exotic queen of tropical resorts was about to meet the jet age. Its fate was sealed 10 years later with the arrival of jumbo jets and jumbo hotels. The construction boom that ensued led to the demolition of every Wimberly building mentioned above, with the exception of the Foodland and the Valley of the Temples Chapel. The last holdout, Canlis’, was razed in September 1998 to make way for a four-story shopping mall.
Remarkably, Wimberly and his firm adapted to the times while keeping his signature "gestures" intact in his newer, larger buildings. "Pete always like to make dramatic gestures," says Mazeppa Costa, WATG’s resident historian.
A Wimberly building that heralded Waikïkï’s transformation was the 15-story Bank of Hawai‘i building (1966), smack in the middle of Waikïkï on Kaläkaua Avenue. It is one of the architect’s most enduring gestures, and its penthouse floor housed the architect and his firm for many years. The ebullient tower, with its gleaming white, oversized sunscreen of interlocking arches resembling stylized palm fronds – or, depending on whom you talk to, the crisscross pattern on a pineapple or Polynesian geometrics or pure geometry – is instantly recognizable; and it instantly communicates Waikïkï’s traditional lightheartedness, high-rise office tower though it is. The gay building, unimaginably frivolous by today’s grim standards, still sets Waikïkï’s tone.
"This question has come up before, many times," prefaces Costa when asked about the numerous interpretations of the building’s lattice. "It could be any of those things. People are always wanting to make something out of it, but nobody ever gave me an answer that satisfied me."
Five years after the Bank of Hawai‘i building cheered up the skyline, Wimberly was contracted by Sheraton Hotels to design a big new hotel on Waikïkï Beach, next to the Royal Hawaiian. This commission came to the firm just after Wimberly himself had gone to state lawmakers and had urged them to halt any more hotel construction makai of Kaläkaua Avenue. The architect’s idea was to leave the Moana and the Royal Hawaiian alone on the beach, amid the splendor of old gardens, wide lawns and the ancient coconut groves. It is ironic that, as a result of his failure to convince anyone of his glorious vision, Wimberly was awarded the single biggest beach-hotel project Waikïkï has ever seen.
Sheraton ordered up an astounding 1,700 rooms to be shoe-horned onto the priceless beachfront site occupied by the Royal’s lü‘au grounds and parking lot. As plans for the humongous, 31-story hotel took shape, the Wimberly staff began calling the project the "monster." Wimberly and his partners got wind of the nickname and sent the staff a memo commanding that the project be called the "butterfly," inasmuch as the massive building’s two swooping wings resemble a butterfly – if you squint real hard. Mary Gaudet, Wimberly’s longtime secretary, remembers that until the Sheraton people named the hotel Sheraton Waikïkï, it was called The Butterfly by one and all.
To this day, people love to hate the Sheraton Waikïkï Hotel, but it is hard to deny that, like earlier Wimberly buildings, the grandly scaled hotel has dynamic movement built into it; it too has flair. To this day, it remains one of the world’s most efficient and most profitable large resort hotels.
Wimberly’s own favorite hotel creations from the 1960s were, according to Gaudet, the spectacular Sheraton Maui, clinging to the side of a prominent rock outcropping at Kä‘anapali Beach (1963); and the primitivist, bony, whitewashed Kona Hilton, built on a rocky point at Kailua Bay on the Big Island (1968). Both buildings are dramatic counterpoints to their volcanic sites, yet both are integrated into the landscape as actual land marks. Both sites would seem bereft without Wimberly’s buildings – in the same way that a Greek temple can enoble an unprepossessing hilltop or a heiau can animate a spit of land. Great architecture can actually do that.
"Some people called Pete’s work ‘stage sets,’" Don Goo says, "but later, the same qualities were said to evoke ‘a sense of place,’ and then they were called ‘environmentally sensitive.’ And now it’s all the rage."
Goo is a little rueful about the resurgent, revisionist interest in his late partner’s old work, as we think about the shape of the future, rooting around in the past for things we might have forgotten, for shapes we can call our own.
"[Wimberly] never wanted to talk about buildings or architecture," Goo says of the tall, droll man, who married twice and raced Lotus sports cars as a hobby. "He just liked to get his pencil out and scribble away. Once, I remember, he talked about architecture at a university lecture – sort of. He’d show slide after slide of great buildings, native buildings of all kinds with lots of texture and color and form and detail. Buildings that had real artistry and meaning to them. Then he’d show some square box with nothing on it and say, ‘This is what they teach in college today!’ He’d do this over and over."
There’s another lesson Wimberly taught, Goo says, that it might behoove us all to consider: "Another thing … Pete always insisted there is commercial value in good architecture. ‘You make places people really enjoy and you make money,’ Pete said."

Here's another article. This is about Paul Page. It was written back in 1997. I
I don't have Pieces of Eight, but would love to hear it. Here's the link:

http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/18/ppage.html

Or, you can just read this..

Paul Page

by Domenic Priore

It's pretty easy to see how time and adulation could pass by an old salty sea dog like Paul Page.
Why, it's clear that a lot of New Orleans' greatest R&B pianists never bothered to make recordings; they made too good a living working in bordellos to bother with the budding recording industry and its pratfalls. We'll never hear “Sullivan Rock,” Frank Duston, Robert Bertrand, “Rocker,” “Drive “Em Down,” “Boogus” and “Kid Stormy Weather.” But hey, jazz, blues and R&B are at least well-documented genres. Who's ever bothered to write the history of that Hawaiian hybrid that's become known as Exotica? People are just becoming aware of Martin Denny, but what of his contemporaries? Very little is known about big shots like Lani McIntire and Arthur Lyman, let alone more obscure characters like Eden Ahbez.

Then there's the fringe musician who works for a living, playing at Polynesian-themed restaurants every night and maybe getting around to pressing up an album or so for their barroom clientele. One may even believe that nothing significant, relevant or “valid” could come from such recordings. After all, isn't the essence of a lounge repertoire nothing more than familiar covers, maybe given a perverse “entertainer” twist?

I would have stumbled upon Paul Page even if I never read the REsearch books Incredibly Strange Music Vol. I & II. He certainly wasn't featured in those books. As a surfer, I'd been collecting Hawaiian and Exotica records casually for years. Look in the puny record collection of even the most jock-like surfer asshole, and he'll be sure to have something Hawaiian to remind him of “the islands.” On a recent trip to Honolulu I got extremely lucky. Froggie's Records, who for years had been selling used books and vinyl to the underground market, was finally closing its doors, and I scooped up about 50 albums for a buck apiece. Knowing I couldn't take everything home, I only bought locally pressed items that never make it to the mainland, let alone thrift shops. I had to be selective. I picked out what seemed to be the purest or most ethnic stuff: LPs with Hula maidens swaying next to gourds and palm trees. LPs with the most predictable wacky Hawaiian settings on the cover that contained the raw deal inside.

As soon as I pawed past the clearly unusual cover of Pieces of Eight (I was trying not to buy records by white guys - haoles if you will), something stopped me, and I had to go back. Here's some haole cat who looks like Gary Cooper wearing a Skipper hat on the cover of an album with a pirate-like title. What the hell is he doing here? I turn the cover over and ponder these sketches of docks, seagulls, ships, barnacles, islands, tikis...STOP RIGHT THERE - TIKIS? Noticing the name of the steel guitar player as Hawaiian, I figure what the hell, this must be worth a buck. I boxed my purchases and mailed `em back to the mainland, mystified and wondering what the hell that was all about?

Of course, in a stack of 50 LPs ( and 50 78's procured in the basement of an old lady's house it was my good fortune to raid), this was definitely the first thing I had to check out. I pretty much knew what the rest would sound like, the individual favorites would come later. Who the hell was this Polynesian Pirate guy? That had to be answered. On first spin, it became clear that this was a winner. A cheap-sounding Chinese gong blasted a tinny, echoless introduction to “China Nights,” which apparently had been a good place for Page's backing group, The Island-Aires to “live and love.” So it's the decadence of the wandering seaman we're dealing with already. Next up, it's as flipped as it's ever gonna get, as we are introduced to Paul Page...narrating “When Sam Comes Back to Samoa.” (Can this guy actually sing, or is this just a put on?):

Now Sam's been gone for a long, long time

while he's been away

Rock `n Roll has come & gone

and Jazz is here to stay!

When Sam goes back to Samoa

He'll have to change all his wicky-wacky-wu* (hardly actual Samoan language, friends)

for to Swing and Sway, the Island Way

means Rock-A-Hula baby, I love you

Rock-A-Hula honey, I love you

It's pretty clear from this statement that the album came out sometime after the release of the Elvis Presley film “Blue Hawaii” and before February 7, 1964.

Page comes off like a gracious host on the entire LP. The Island-Aires sing a few genius numbers (“Ports O' Call,” “Matey” and the peppy “Let's Have a Luau”), Bernie Kaii Lewis plays some splendid steel guitar solos on “Beyond the Reef” and “Sweet Someone,” and Page lays down some fine benedictions himself. Most of the tunes included are originals, and some lines, perhaps, only Page can sing in his own inimitable style:

It doesn't cost a cent for her upkeep

for there's nothing that she needs!

All she wears is a great big smile

and a little string of beads

(“My Fiji Island Queen”)

Then there's the big emotional number, “Castaway.” Backed by Bernie Kaii Lewis' sad steel guitar, a despondent Page slowly repeats “Castaway. Castaway. Castaway. Castaway..” in such a reflective tone that it's obvious he's adrift, and a dreamlike states takes hold:

Once I had my love beside me

in a harbor called home

and now without my love to guide me

I'm just a derelict on the foam

The album ends with the “Pacific Farewell Medley” representing New Zealand's Maori (“Now Is The Hour”), The Philippines (“Philippine Farewell”), Japan (“Sayanara”), Tahiti (“E Maururu A Vaai) and Hawaii (“Aloha Oe”). Over Bernie's steel guitar, Page recites a descriptive Don Blanding poem called “Aloha Oe” that echoes this most famous melody of the islands. You're swept away, the masterpiece is in the bag, and you wonder “where is this guy, and what the hell is he doing now?”

I caught up with Paul Page through ASCAP, whose logo is proudly emblazoned on the back cover of every Paul Page album I've seen. In fact, one of the oddball things about Page's liner notes is the way he boasts about his membership in the song publishing organization. He's 85 years old now, and the rough life of a seafaring beachcomber has caught up with him. His hearing is almost gone, and in the past two years it's been getting tough for him to remember all the details of his illustrious, exotic career. Once a male model who auditioned for a part against a young John Wayne, Page now fittingly wears an eye patch. The ravages of hard drinking and wild women in various ports have taken their toll. The guy in Old Spice commercial plays a role; Paul Page lived it and wrote songs to tell the tale.

“I was quite a rounder in my day...there's too much to tell. I was busy modeling for photographers and working on radio. I knew so many women in my modeling days, I must've gone to bed with over 400 women. Isn't that awful? Terrible...and I never once every had any kind of disease. I'm clean.”

Page was reared in Indiana, and by the time he was in high school became “the youngest commercial newspaper editor in the United States” he brags. “Walter Winchell once called me the multiple man, because I had so many amazing talents...at least a dozen of em that I made money on.” Shortly after graduation he relocated to Juneau, Alaska and got a job with a small newspaper. He also kick started his music career, playing live on the local airwaves. “I had a radio program up in Alaska for the O.C. Smith Typewriter Company, and one day I looked over in the control room and there sat Will Rogers. He comes out and says, You're good, kid. You ain't gonna stay up here in Alaska, are ya?' I says I ain't?' Well, he says Maybe ain't ain't right, but I know a lot of people who ain't sayin' ain't, they ain't ain'tin.' Think about it...”

With this wisdom and encouragement from an American folk hero of such magnitude, Page took his Alaskan experience and brought it back home to nearby Chicago. “I always liked Hawaiian music. Pages of Memory' was the name of my radio show on the NBC network, and I had fan clubs all over North America. We did a program every morning at the head of The Breakfast Club.' I just played and sang on piano and organ, all by myself, and I wrote the script. I did `My Isle of Golden Dream,' which was written by the composer of the Breakfast Club theme, Walter Blaufuss. So I got this Hawaiian band together and Art Reams became my manager. We toured the country, and an NBC producer came into the nightclub to hear me sing and play. That night they hired me, offering me a 10-year contract on NBC. This all happened around Pearl Harbor Day, December 7th, 1942.”

It was during these radio broadcasts that Page began to incorporate the element of Polynesian poetry. He was especially inspired by Don Blanding, the “Poet Laureate” of Hawaii whose 1928 book “Vagabond's House” featured the verse of a drifting beachcomber and cameo-styled illustrations of island scenery. Paul Page would soon adapt Blanding's art style to the exotica environment, but initially Page concentrated on Blanding's poetic dream world to conjure up a floor show atmosphere unique in its time (and non-existent today).

When Page came in off the road, he developed modeling as a sideline income. “I was a very popular photographers model for magazines. About that time I auditioned for apart in a movie with John Wayne. He was the same size I was.” On the West Coast trip Page made contact with Sol Hoopi, the legendary lap steel guitarist reputed to have inspired both bottleneck/slide blues musicians and country artists in the development of the pedal steel guitar. Hoopi also headed up a booking agency in Hollywood - the industry relied on him to provide dark-skinned Hawaiians as extras in both the popular Polynesian films of the era, such as Bing Crosby's Waikiki Wedding, and in Westerns, where the kanakas and wahines came in handy as Native Americans. Hoopi's connections eventually lured Paul Page to Los Angeles.

“I worked at The Seven Seas in Hollywood with Sol Hoopi, the nightclub across from Grauman's Chinese Theater. I played Hammond organ and MC'd the floor shows with Lulu Mansfield.” The Seven Seas was indeed a glamorous night spot during the glory days of Hollywood's Dream Factory era. L.A.'s proximity to the Hawaiian Islands made the city a Mecca for the Hawaiian music craze of the 1920's, and clubs like The Hula Hutt, The Singapore Spa, Hawaiian Village and Hawaiian Paradise sprang up to accommodate the action. Even Clifton's Cafeteria downtown became a neon-tropic-art-deco paradise. Paul Page eased into this scenario in the early 1940s: “I moved my radio program to the NBC studios at Sunset and Vine, and then I'd go over and do The Seven Seas. I had my fun at the nightclub...that was my job as an entertainer.” When asked what he did on his day off, his answer was simple enough: “Slept.”

At the advent of the television era in 1949, Page hosted the very first Polynesian T.V. show, which was an extension of his radio show and his floor show at The Seven Seas. “I had the Starr sisters in my band, a vocal trio. Kay Starr was one of `em. She became famous on her own, and I had five hula gals in my big band. Five Hula gals and three caucasian sisters. They were all good.” However, an accident soon forced Page off the air for a while, and he had to start all over when he got well.

In the meantime, the exotica craze began to kick in hard in the Los Angeles area. Don the Beachcomber's became the hip Hollywood haunt where Clark Gable and his pals hung out. Martin Denny was playing in the bar while proprietor Donn Beach was busy inventing the Mai Tai and a slew of now-famous tropical drinks. Trader Vic's became San Francisco's answer to the reverie, and The Luau in Beverly Hills became a swanky alternative for the posh set. Tiki became the God of Recreation as soldiers continued to return to the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro. James Michener's South Pacific was a Broadway smash, and Thor Heyerdah's adventure book Kon Tiki set the tone of Los Angeles during the Truman era. Soon the area was overwhelmed with tiki apartment complexes, a surfing craze and knock-off tiki restaurants by the dozens. Paul Page had little trouble finding work.

“I played at a restaurant called `Pago Pago' off and on for 10 years. A columnist in Van Nuys said I was the most popular entertainer in the San Fernando Valley...that's a big valley, you know.” Coincidentally, one of Page's best tunes was titled “Pago Pago,” kicking off a personal trend wherein Paul Page songs (and LP's) would be named after tiki restaurants in the Greater Los Angeles area. Page worked at the “Pieces of Eight” in Marina Del Rey and sure enough, a great tune and an entire LP bore that name. Then there was the “Castaway” in Glendale, which was another great song and LP title. Finally, there was the “Ports of Call” in San Pedro, and of course Page did not miss the opportunity to name a cool song after this establishment, and follow it up with an LP bearing the moniker. “Down there, south of Los Angeles, I used to have an office right near the Port of Los Angeles. That album sold well in San Pedro...” Sheesh! Page went so far as to use the actual logos of these restaurants on the album covers. Exploitation of the best kind, indeed.

While all this was happening, Page began to pursue his art career as well. “I sold some paintings for $4,000 to $5,000 and had a couple of art exhibits. One was at the Hollywood Musicians Union and another one was at Barker Brothers department store in Los Angeles. Don Blanding introduced me to the public...I loved him, and he loved me. He used to come in and see me all the time when I played at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. I did an album of his poetry after he passed away called `I Remember Blanding.'” Blanding provided Page with inspiration on the canvas and in verse, and this album was really over the top. Bernie Kaii Lewis provided ethereal steel guitar backdrop to Page's loving narration of Blanding's best work, and in turn the LP holds up as an intense artistic departure for Page as well; it's his Pet Sounds, his “Gates of Eden,” it's the Forever Changes of the Paul Page catalog.

Keep in mind that Paul Page was pretty much making a living off a Los Angeles trend in the restaurant business. He'd make a nightly wage as a performer, a few dollars off of the D.I.Y. albums he was producing, and some dough perhaps from a modeling gig here and there. To bring in extra cash, Page indulged in two areas that can now be seen as extremely hip and ahead of their time. “I wrote songs for amateur songwriters in Hollywood for a song shark company. They'd send in their lyrics, and I'd write the music and record `e (the songs). Magazine ads, you know, for songwriters.” Hmmmnnnn...Paul Page also shared two vocations with recent phenomenon Harvey Sid Fisher: modeling and astrology songs. Some three decades before the unintentional novelty success of the bewildered Harvey Sid, Paul Page released 12 45RPM singles, years before any hippie astrology trend. One side featured an astrological analysis, and the flip had a song representing the month. He set up a separate record label for these ditties called, you guessed it, Astrology Records.

Page was beginning to turn out albums at a consistent rate too, and the quality never suffered. He used the best talent around, which is odd for such independent releases, but Page certainly had the respect of the Hawaiian music community. “I worked with Jerry Byrd. He's the greatest steel guitarist in the business. Bernie Kaii Lewis was actually the greatest of them all, but he died too soon. He was good, I recorded with him a lot. He could play anything...he did 'Nova' on solo steel guitar - imagine that? You could play it on piano, but nobody could play it on steel guitar - it's too difficult. He could, though. I know all those Hawaiians; used to speak the language. Dick McIntire, Lani McIntire, Ray Kinney Alfred Apaka...all of `em. Even Harry Owens.”

Paul Page sounded like none of them. What he accomplished in these individualistic recordings was unique. Completely based in a Hawaiian sound, his songs end up sounding like Polynesian sea shanties, with spoken word dramatics coloring the dynamic mix. By the time Page was making records, Martin Denny had become popular with “Quiet Village,” so in turn, Paul Page included an insane, diffused combination of tropical sound effects. He didn't bother to have his musicians shout out bird calls in time with the music, however. On his masterful Hawaiian Honeymoon album, the sound effects are somewhat arbitrarily laid on. They don't match the rhythm of the songs, but after repeated listening you get accustomed to what is initially scary stuff. One especially chilling moment, is the chant tune “Au-we Wahine,” where the jungle drums clash with the teeth of some god-forsaken jungle animal that I won't attempt to identify. Then there's his “Big Island concept album” called The Big Island Says Aloha, where Page has deftly chosen all tunes featuring references to Big Island locales. It's true genius to sit back and revel in tunes like “Akaka Falls,” “Hilo March,” “Chicken Kona Kaii” and “Little Grass Shack in Kealakelua, Hawaii.”

By this time, Page had made his exit from Los Angeles to the island of Hawaii. “I played the Kona Coast, and was the best known entertainer on the Big Island. I worked for the Kona Steak House and I wrote for the Kona Hilton Hotel. I played all over the islands, and knew Martin Denny well. I'd been out to his house many times in Honolulu, and he used to come and see me when I played.” Paul Page became so firmly entrenched in the culture that he became the president of the Hawaiian Professional Songwriters Society. For their newspaper, he penned a cartoon column as “Chief Wahanui.” His love for the music had consumed his being. On his first LP recorded in Hawaii (Passport to Paradise) Page even showed a social consciousness in his lyrics:

Across the water see how they rise

concrete to the skies

Tall tiki towers reminding me, Hawaii's on the go

and this I know

Au E Mau Ke Ea O Kaina I Kapono

just as true as in kamehameha's day

and the blue island sky will reflect in the water

if we all try to keep it that way

(“Ala Wai Blues”)

He'd definitely flipped - big time. So firmly entrenched in the home of his first love, Passport to Paradise includes perhaps the greatest tribute to Hawaiian music ever recorded, “The Big Luau in the Sky.” When I brought this song up, it didn't take long for the withered memory of Paul Page to strike up the words off the top of this head. “Oh yeah, that was one of my favorites. There's a narrated verse where I mention practically every important Hawaiian musician of this century - you name em, I mention em all.”

---

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Great reads Kailuageoff. I love this kind of literature and history. Thanks for posting!

Kanaka

Thank you so much, kailuageoff! that Pete Wimberly article is great! i'm a big fan of his style but i didn't know he was so prolific!

take care,
tc

I have this box of four books, unfortunately for most TCers it’s printed in german, and I have no idea if there’s an english edition somewhere on the planet.

Miroslav Stingl
“In der Südsee” (In the southseas)
Brockhaus (publisher)

Book 1
Die schwarzen Inseln (The black islands)
An ethnograph (Stingl) talks about Melanesia

Book 2
Atolle im Taifun (atolls in the taifun)
Journey through the micronesian islands

Book 3
Wikinger der Südsee (Vikings of the Southseas)
Researches in Polynesia

Book 4
Hawaii
On the traces of an ancient culture

Stingl wrote this in the mid eighties. He is a czech ethnograph who’s travelled the world a lot, apparently focusing on the americas and the south pacific. In all books he refers to travels as far back as the late sixties, but the main travel writing is about his latest mid eighties travel through all of polynesia, micronesia and melanesia.
He reports old legends, as well as all kinds of views and perspectives of the south pacific’s peoples’ lifes.
The Hawaii book has got lots of drawings of holy figurines. These are found also to a smaller count in the polynesian (French Polynesia, Samoa etc.) book.
The micronesian book has got what looks like native illustrations to their legends and the melanesian book has got lots of masks.
Each of the books has got about 70 photographs taken by Stingl, most of them seemingly made during his later travels.

It was really an entertaining read, even though I didn’t choose the order the author planned for the reader. I left the melanesian and micronesian books for last, but they were just as fascinating as the Easter Island/Tahiti/Newzealand and Hawaii chapters I enjoyed first.

KK

Thanks Kailuageoff! Lotsa good info. Would still like to know what movie he was in with Lon Chaney Jr.

My Spanish edition.

Mexican edition from public library
Miloslav Stingl
El ultimo paraiso "The last paradise" Lure and mystery of the Polynesia.
Original title: Mein Polynesisches abenteuer 1973

[ Edited by: Zeta 2009-02-23 10:28 ]

"I have this box of four books, unfortunately for most TCers it’s printed in german, and I have no idea if there’s an english edition somewhere on the planet. "
Hey Sven, are you done translating this yet?