From anger to gratitude, 3 Lahaina-based musicians share perspectives

Lahaina’s musicians, like the rest of its community, are suffering the trauma of the fire that swept through the town four weeks ago.

The town was a focal point for the local music scene, with weekly slack key guitar concerts at the Napili Kai Beach Resort in Kapalua and other performance opportunities at Kaanapali resorts. For now, all of those opportunities are gone, said Karen Fischer of Pasifika Artists Network, who arranges tours for Hawaii musicians around the world.

In the aftermath of the fire, three Lahaina-based musicians shared a range of emotions on the fire, from anger to guilt to gratitude.

For slack key guitar master Keola Beamer, the fire leaves behind mixed feelings, all of them intensely felt.

“First of all, we’re so grateful to be alive,” he said. “The fire came within two houses of our house, and everything Wahikuli side (slightly north of central Lahaina) is completely destroyed. It’s like a devastating kind of horror-scape, like some kind of apocalyptic movie.”

“We’re missing so many of our loved ones,” he said, his voice breaking. “I think most of us survivors are oscillating between survivor guilt and some kind of PTSD.”

As the fire was sweeping through central Lahaina on the evening of Aug. 8, police came to tell Beamer and his wife, Moanalani, to evacuate. “It was terrifying to see those flames moving forward” with the powerful wind gusts, he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that where you hear people’s cars exploding, propane tanks, boats.”

The evacuation itself would become a long day’s journey into night. They were sent first to the Lahaina Civic Center, then to another site near the Kapalua Airport, then to Maui Preparatory Academy.

“We sat there for hours in the car, trying to sleep, watching the huge flow of the fire continuing on in Lahaina,” Beamer said.

The Beamers’ home miraculously survived the fire, though nearby homes were destroyed. “I think we both cried when we saw it,” he said. “That’s the neighborhood that I walk through in the mornings, and I had all my walking friends, and all their homes are gone.”

As an artist, Beamer, 72, expects someday to put his feelings into music, but right now “it’s like a hole in your chest.”

“Our cultural sites are gone,” he said. “Our churches, our places of worship, the Buddhist temples, the Catholic church, they’re all gone,” he said. “Lahaina was the capital of old Hawaii, and now it’s all ashes.

“It’s horrific and we’re struggling to cope with it. But here’s the amazing part of it: The aloha in our community is just amazing. It is so resilient and so strong. People caring about each other, helping one another, from the smallest thing to the biggest thing. Aloha is once again vibrantly alive in our community.”

Avi Ronen played lead guitar for the late Willie K for 20 years and, through his shop Lahaina Custom Guitars, had established himself as the go-to technician for guitarists in need of a repair, as well as a master builder of electric guitars.

In the fire’s aftermath, he was angry about the situation on Maui, pointing to some “common sense” procedures that he said should have been implemented after Hurricane Lane passed close to the state in August 2018. Like Hurricane Dora, which passed far south of the islands last month, Lane also brought winds that propelled wildfires across Maui.

“They never changed the electricity poles,” he said, criticizing decisionmakers at Hawaiian Electric. “They never put any money into the infrastructure. All they had to do was turn the electricity off. … That’s all common sense and critical thinking telling you, if you are unable to maintain your electricity cables with your rinky-dink poles, you should just turn it off.”

While praising rank-and-file firefighters, he criticized the Maui Fire Department commanders for not leaving an engine behind to control a contained morning brush fire on Aug. 8. The fire that destroyed Lahaina is believed to have started in the afternoon near the site of the morning fire.

“They went to Kula to save the rich people, because — who cares about Lahaina,” he said, admitting that he was speaking from “the blood of my heart.”

“This should have never happened,” he said. “It’s negligence and it’s people who should not be in charge of what they’re charge of.”

His escape from Lahaina on Aug. 8 occurred amid a series of circumstances both chaotic and controlled. He could smell the earlier fire, but he and his family ran a few errands before deciding to evacuate around 4 p.m. With traffic jammed, it took him almost 45 minutes crawling north through town before reaching safety, but he could still see the black smoke that “grew, and grew, and grew,” he said. The resort hotels turned his family away, but they eventually wound up in the apartment of his daughter’s friend about a mile north of Lahaina.

Ronen was friends with one of the first announced fire fatalities, 79-year-old musician Buddy Jantoc, triggering questions about the fate of older residents who were unable to get out of Lahaina.

“They’re stranded under rubble and everything, and nobody came to look for them,” he said.

Ronen, 55, moved to Hawaii in 1995 and had been living his best life in Lahaina, raising his family in a quaint neighborhood about three-quarters of a mile from Front Street. He had stashed the money for a home expansion project in a safe — $50,000 in cash that he had saved for “years and years.” All of his guitars and his music memorabilia, recordings with Willie K and others he made at his home studio, were there as well.

“All that stuff went up in flames,” and the cash in the safe turned to dust, he said. “People tell me, ‘Dude, don’t worry about it, it’s just material, you’ll have more guitars.’ No, no, no, no. These are my family members. This is like losing a family member. It’s not just a piece of wood with strings on it. … My personal guitars, they died before me, and that’s the most personal thing.”

His guitar shop, even closer to Front Street than his home, is still standing somehow. It doesn’t matter, because his keys are buried or possibly melted in the rubble of his home.

“You start asking questions: God, take the shop and leave the house! Why?” Ronen said. “And ever since that happened, I can’t even think about playing guitar. My buddy brought me one of his guitars immediately, but I couldn’t even touch it.”

Jason Jerome ran a music store, Lahaina Music, and taught guitar and ukulele on Maui.

“We lost the whole store and all the instruments. All my personal instruments were in the store, ‘safe’ behind the alarm system, we thought,” said Jerome, 54. “But people lost houses, and people lost lives, so we’ve just been doing food distribution, just trying to help.”

Jerome’s shop was just blocks mauka of the waterfront. He was unaware that fire was threatening Lahaina that day, but he decided to close shop because the electricity was down, like many other businesses.

“There was actually a last-minute customer who came in and was so happy that we were open,” he said. “I helped him (buy) an ukulele in the dark, and that was our last sale.

“I had no idea there was fire was coming. With a little knowledge, I probably could have gone and gotten some stuff, but I don’t know if stuff is the most important thing if you know a fire is coming.”

He visited the site a few days after the fire and has come to terms with the loss.

“Once I knew that it was burned to the ground, and it’s a twisted, melted structure, and there’s nothing to save, it was, ‘Well, OK. … There’s nothing being looted, and if anybody did loot it, God bless them, they got the stuff. Better than burning up,’” he said.

His shop carried mostly ukulele made by some of Hawaii’s finest luthiers, such as Kamaka, KoAloha and Keli‘i. He estimates his loss at about $60,000, not including his personal instruments. KoAloha has already offered him an instrument, which he called “an amazing gesture,” and he’s hoping to get together with a couple of his students who managed to save their ukes from their burning homes. “It’s like, ‘Alright, you have one, I have one, I’ll still teach you lessons,’” he said.

He was relying on his strong religious beliefs to see him through, and was pleased to see his community rallying together. Plenty have been coming by to his home in Napili, which survived the fire, to share meals and visit.

“I have a lot of faith in Jesus,” he said. “I know he’s been carrying me, and our community’s been amazing.”