Maui resident Steve Grimes is a luthier — he makes guitars and other stringed instruments out of wood. He’s been doing that in his shop in Kula since 1982.
Also a musician, he has played with many well-known artists on The Valley Isle. When the island was hit by wildfires on Aug. 8, 2023, he was there to lend a hand to his neighbors. He also pitched in the best way he knows how, by writing a song titled “Lahaina Town.”
After the fires, he didn't know if he still had a house or shop to go back to.
"I came back three days later and we had a house, I had a shop. There was a lot of outside damage, but nothing non-repairable, and a lot of our friends had lost everything house, livelihood, instruments, etc.," he said.
He said that if the fire had taken out his shop, he might have had to hang up his chisels.
"I've been at it for 52 years. Some of the tools I've made myself, other tools I've modified to work for what I do. It's a very specialized craft, and if I had lost the shop, that's a very powerful hypothetical, but I don't know if I would have been able to start over after 50-plus years of doing it," he said.
Grimes shared that he recently teamed up with a nonprofit called Treecovery Hawaiʻi — which focuses on keeping trees in the fire zones alive and providing trees to residents who lost their trees in the wildfire. He will be making a series of ʻukuleles out of the wood from the burnt trees.
He said that Kula has become a tighter-knit community since the fires.
"There are functions every year where people come together, but as far as a community working together, I didn't see that. I've been in Kula for 40 years, and I didn't see a lot of it. And now that's starting to evolve and emerge," he said.
Grimes said he has been a songwriter for many years and said he's driven by emotion — which influenced him to write "Lahaina Town."
"I was so upset, as we all were, about the Lahaina fires that within a few days the song came together and I asked my recording engineer if he could record it, and I got together with him, and we laid down the initial tracks, and I recorded the vocal. I am not disparaging my own voice, but I just felt that it needed someone with a little bit more gravitas in their voice," he said.
He decided to bring together popular musicians like John Cruz, who he's known for years.
"He was touring in California and I sent him the song and he was pretty moved by it and he went into a studio in California and recorded a demo of the lead vocal. When he got back to on to Maui, we went into a studio and recorded what you hear," Grimes said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Dec. 18, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
