Dirty Linen: Keola Beamer

by Sheila Daughtry

When most people think of Hawaii, they imagine sand and sun and palm trees. Mention Hawaiian music and they wince, remembering syrupy lounge tunes and strident aloha shirts on the Lawrence Welk Show. Waves of pedal steel make them queasy, restless native drums and grass skirts wear them out. That's the Hawaii tourists see, the image that's been created since the U.S. took over paradise.

The Hawaii Keola ("Kay-o-lah") Beamer knows is another world entirely: mountainous and green, with cool mist and rain, and grassy pastures rolling up the slopes of a snow-tipped volcano. There, working cowboys wear feather leis on their battered hats, and park muddy pickups loaded with cattle dogs and hay bales outside diners that serve chili on rice. The music and the dance are not what you've been led to expect. Grass skirts are from Tahiti. Hawaiian hula is the slow arc of hands, the soft sweep of homemade cloth. The music is the resonant clap of hand-held percussion — and the luminous chime of guitar.

Slack-key guitar, Ki ho'alu, has been practiced for a long time, though it's only recently being heard outside the Islands. Mexican vaqueros brought guitars when they came to Hawaii in the 1830s to instruct the brand-new beef industry in horsemanship and cattle ranching. The Hawaiian cowboys, newly christened paniolos, loved the guitar. But the Mexicans were there only to teach a crash course. When they went home, they left the instruments, but no instructions. The paniolos taught themselves and made up their own tunings — carefully leaving the guitar strings slack since broken ones were hard to replace.

"Music is rather like physics. The act of observing the event seems to change the outcome. If you observe or participate in some small way, you brings a bit of yourself into the picture. I simply cannot help but interject a tiny little piece of my DNA into the ether of the music."

Guitarist Beamer is one of the leading lights of modern slack key guitar. He and his brother Kapono helped modernize the ringing, resonant sound with several seminal albums in the 70s. They matched original singer/songwriter material with their own versions of traditional songs and chants — and intricate instrumentals that rival the best newgrass or new acoustic music for lovely melody and mind-bending technical prowess. Beamer continued a long solo career. Just in the last few years he has released three solo albums widely distributed in the mainland United States, each one better than the last.

You may have heard slack key before and not realized its origins. Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke and David Lindley have all borrowed freely from the style and its almost 40 open tunings. The intricate layers of melody and rolling bass are stirred by intertwining rhythms and magnificently ringing chords. It can pulsate recklessly; it can shimmer with exquisite tenderness. "The guitar does not yield its secrets easily," Beamer said with rueful humor. "It can be quite sullen. Solo guitar is the high wire act of our profession. A lot can go wrong very quickly. Sometimes after a particularly rough day, there is the tendency to throw it through a window."

At 46, Beamer is part of the latest generation of performers, guiding the music through its sometimes painful transition from ancient to modern. "It is sometimes awkward having one foot in the past and one in the future," he admitted. "While it's true that any art form must grow and change to stay alive, not everyone agrees with the direction or form the changes take. Over the years, I have had some monumental arguments with some of the older players. One of my dear friends, slack key great Ray Kane ("Kah-nay"), insists that he 'neva change nutin' ' from what he was originally taught."

Beamer remembers speaking with the greatest female slack key player, Alice Namakelua, when she was in her late 80s. She thought players like Ray Kane and Gabby Pahinui (who's now considered "The Father of Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar") were "radicals." Beamer was stuck with the same label a generation later.

"In a sense," he mused, "music is rather like physics. The act of observing the event seems to change the outcome. If you observe or participate in some small way, you brings a bit of yourself into the picture. I simply cannot help but interject a tiny little piece of my DNA into the ether of the music."

Any radicalism in his playing is tempered by his roots. Beamer's mother, Nona Beamer, is an authority on Hawaiian dance, chant, music and storytelling. His great grandmother Helen Desha Beamer is remembered as one of Hawaii's most cherished composers and songwriters. Uncle Mahi Beamer is Hawaii's premiere falsetto singer and pianist. His aunts and his grandmother, Louise Lei O Malama Beamer, are hula teachers. You cannot appreciate the grace and graciousness of hula until you have seen it performed by a gentle, white-haired grandmother whose hands have grown more eloquent than any young woman's.

"My grandfather started me on the road to guitar playing," remembered Beamer. "He was a paniolo. Returning home after a hard day of riding and roping, he'd kick off his boots and start strumming on the guitar. I marveled at the magic transformation of his hands. On the reins or the ropes they'd appear as rough, calloused and clumsy. On the neck of the guitar, his smooth, light finger movements would amaze me. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who held a red-hot branding iron a few hours ago."

Beamer studied classical guitar in high school and college. "I wanted a technique that would make my instrument as 'invisible' as possible," he explained. "I wanted to be able to get right through to the music."

Beamer's music is sometimes a quick, rollicking trip. Even more compelling are his achingly slow instrumentals, the sound and feel of his hands caressing the wood, his fingers coaxing the most delicate melodies from gentled strings.
Like other island players, Beamer is frustrated with the ignorance of tourists who request "Tiny Bubbles" when they come to drink big coconut drinks and view the quaint natives. Beamer tells the tale of how Don Ho, "Mr. Tiny Bubbles" himself, once commented, "You know... Elvis is dead, but his fans are still alive. I'm still alive, but my fans are dead!"

"A few years ago," Beamer elaborated, "I was playing at the Kapalua Bay Hotel, playing some beautiful, evocative slack key. A woman got very upset, came up to me and said, 'I have been listening to you play for the last hour, and you haven't played a single Hawaiian song! We are spending our money here and want to hear some real Hawaiian music! Play "Sweet Leilani!" ' "

"Sweet Leilani," he pointed out, was written by a haole (the island version of "gringo"). Real Hawaiian music is complex, and so are the emotions and history behind it. When American missionaries arrived in the 1800s, they tried to recreate the Hawaiians in a Puritan image, stuffing women into corsets and floor-length skirts, men into Victorian suits and ties. Along with wool clothes and Bibles, missionaries brought new diseases like smallpox. In less than a hundred years, the population sank from one million to 55,000.

"They saw Hawaiians as idol worshiping pagans," explained Beamer. "Semi-naked brown people frolicking in the sun." Americans banned the speaking of Hawaiian in public schools. Islanders were prohibited from dancing and chanting. Just as the values and culture of American Indian tribes were trampled on the mainland, the Hawaiians' spirituality and heritage were brutally suppressed.

"In a strange and unfair irony," observed Beamer, "Hawaiians now work at menial jobs in large corporate hotels serving mai tais to tourists — who suspiciously resemble semi-naked white people frolicking in the sun."

A long dark age followed the missionary takeover, when beleaguered people struggled to keep the community's knowledge from eroding. "Hawaiians had seen the death of their religious system," explained Beamer, "the possession of their lands, the displacement of their people. They began to understand that they were losing almost everything. They were so afraid that they would lose the music, too. So it went underground. Way underground. No one outside of the family would know the tunings. No one would play in public. No recordings would be made. No students would be taught. Zip, nada, nothing. The music was being carefully hidden away, protected, unreachable."

Beamer remembered wandering away from a luau as a child and finding an old Hawaiian man sitting on a Wesson Oil can under a mango tree. "He was playing the most beautiful, soulful music with his eyes tightly shut in concentration. I sat at his feet, making a small noise in the dirt. He looked down and realized that I was not a member of his family, and suddenly an angry expression came over his face. He stopped playing mid-phrase and roughly turned his back to me.

"It seems to me that I have been chasing that same sweet sound for my entire life."

So deeply hidden that it could not be shared, the music began dying. For a time, Beamer thought he might be the last to play it. "As a culture, we began to understand that you have to hold the things you love with an open hand. Soon the attitude of our people began to change, as somebody took a student, somebody else made a recording. So and so played (God forbid!) in a nightclub. People started talking about slack key again."

The music has come alive again on the islands — and off. Dancing Cat Records has released an array of CDs by the 10 artists now considered "Masters of the Slack Key Guitar." The record label, a branch of Windham Hill, is the project of pianist George Winston, a huge slack key fan. He even steps away from the piano in his concerts now to pull out a guitar and render his version of a complicated slack key instrumental.

Beamer is confident the music will continue. His website, www.kbeamer.com, has evolved into a teaching resource. The liner notes of every Dancing Cat CD explain tunings and techniques. Beamer is finding equal numbers of young Hawaiians and mainlanders wanting to learn. "We're getting blues players, rock guys mellowing out. Brand new players from all over the world."

In another effort to preserve traditional arts, Beamer produced a CD of his mother's storytelling. The Golden Lehua Tree: Stories and Music from the Heart of Hawaii's Beamer Family [Starscape Music SM96112] is a lovely blend of Nona Beamer's gentle chanting and lively storytelling, with Keola's melodies behind her.

"I realized that today's working parents are extremely busy, sometimes each parent working two jobs," said Beamer. "The baby sitter is often the TV or the 16-year-old next door neighbor. So what the hell is happening to the art of storytelling? Is it like the Hawaiian slack key guitar was, fading into obscurity? These were the stories that breathed wonder into my imagination as a young boy. I visualized the tree shells and the great rocks and heard the menehune laughing as they worked tirelessly into the dawn. Maybe these stories deserve to be around a little longer, fueling yet another child's imagination."

Even employees of the CD distributor and manufacturer were charmed — they all wanted copies. "It was beginning to feel like maybe this was for us grown up people, too," Beamer noted. "The conflicts of good and evil, of light and darkness. It's the universality of mythology."

Beamer tours frequently on the West Coast of the U.S. and has been branching out to Europe. "I work very hard to keep my music 'real.' I don't use any effects or electronic gizmos. I was unplugged before unplugged was a good thing. In fact, I didn't even know there was a plug," he joked.

"My music in concert is a unique experience, an 'off the main road' type of adventure. There is an intimacy to it. You may find yourself in some interesting inner places."

Unfortunately, it's rough for performers in Hawaii itself. Most musicians can find work only in hotels, where they have little or no union representation. Hotels pay low wages and insist that they play songs tourists can sing along to. "The older I get," Beamer declared, "the more I realize that it is not the truth that shapes the world — it is the 'perception' of the truth. The hotels think the tourists want to hear the crappy tourist stuff. We play it for them, 'cuz we need to feed our families. They like it 'cuz that's the only stuff they hear. We play it again next year.

"If you are interested in the music and have the opportunity to visit Hawaii," he advised passionately, "speak to the general manager. Ask about slack key. There are festivals several times during the year, usually for free in public parks. Write on your guest comment card, 'I would like to hear some real Hawaiian slack key guitar at this hotel.' Say no to tourist pablum. If someone plays 'Sweet Leilani' at the restaurant, blow chunks and exit the premises. Change the world."

For more information on slack key: Keola Beamer's website, www.kbeamer.com, is elaborate, with detailed diagrams and instructions on slack key technique. It's packed with tablature, history, video clips of performances and links to other players.