The Disco Ball Spins Again

Once upon a time, they played places like the Magic Mushroom and Beef & Grog. On Saturday, Hawaii’s hottest nightclub bands will come together again

Friday - January 27, 2006
By Chad Pata
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long-separated musicians together on the urging of Au. “We are doing this because we love the music and it’s our chance to give back to our fans.”

Kimura’s band Greenwood now sports 10 members, with five of them blowing the brass. Their sound is a blend of Chicago and Latin rock, so it is appropriate that their biggest gig was opening for El Chicano in 1972.

Singing the songs of his youth is easy enough for Kimura, but for the guys on trombones, it’s taken a lot of work.

“These guys’ instruments were tarnished black and their valves were all stuck from a lack of use,” says Kimura, recalling his phone calls to his former bandmates. “They’ve made a conscious effort over the past four months to get ready.”

One performer who did not need to get the rust out is Phase 7 frontman Van de Guzman. Though the band broke up more than a quarter century ago, de Guzman moved to Las Vegas in 1989 and has been performing there ever since.

He works the rooms for Station Casinos doing a one-man show featuring music from the ‘50s to the ‘90s. His best cover is that of Reasons by Earth, Wind and Fire, but he won’t say if he will play it for the show.

“When we used to play that at the club, the bartenders, waitresses, everybody would stop what they were doing and listen,” remembers Guzman, who will have Hemingway Jasmin accompanying him on the keyboards. “It would be so quiet you could hear a pin drop.”

While Vegas has kept him busy - he claims to work 52 weeks a year - when he heard about the reunion show he was eager to be a part of it, as has everyone Kimura could locate.

“The bands that are participating really want to be involved, they really want to be here,” says Kimura, who used everything from tax consultants to the Perry & Price Posse to locate the disco diaspora. “That is why it works, because all the bands are so driven.”

Passion for the past is not the only motivation, however, as at least one band is looking toward the future.

The New Experience will be enjoying the reunion with the contemporaries this Saturday, but the following weekend they will be kicking off a new gig at the Sheraton Esprit Club as The Krush. While the name is changing, frontman Edwin Ramones maintains that the style has not.

“We were always known as the funkiest band in town,” says Ramones. “We were the first ones to cover the Commodores and the first ones to use a clavinet, which gave us a real percussive sound.”

While much of the focus will be on the music for the reunion, Ramones also sees this as something more.

Flyer

“The first one brought back a lot of memories, not just the music but old friends,” says Ramones. “The reunion is good musically, but socially it is really good. Of course we were competitive, but a lot of us helped each other out.”

He speaks of the bands sharing the stage at the Magic Mushroom in the Gold Bond Building. This was the breeding ground for the fledgling disco scene in Honolulu.

“It used to be $10 all you could

drink and they would let us play in front of a live audience,” says Ramones. “All the owners from Tiki and the Hula Hut would come by and check us out, and that is how you got gigs.”

Now the days of all-you-can-drink for a sawbuck have gone the way of smoking in libraries, but at $30 for five bands and a night of nostalgia, baby boomers can boogie the night away and talk about those long-gone days.

“When it is time for us to get our ya-yas out, there is nowhere

to go,” says Kimura, who hopes to make this a yearly tradition. “We have nowhere to go for the entertainment we like. By providing this we reach out to a lot of people who can’t go anywhere and hear ‘70s music.”

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