Aloha, Travis Harrelson

by Jim Washburn

But First, My Teeth

I’m feeling old this week. As a buildup, I pinched a nerve in my back that had me shuffling around hunched over for two weeks, in so much pain that even anticipating getting out of bed had my spine knotting up in fear. So much for me telling other people to tough it up and use their will to override the pain.

Then I was sitting at the breakfast table one morning, chasing a boysenberry seed around my mouth with my tongue, when I was stopped by the realization that half my left upper rear molar was missing, leaving a jagged crater where once there had been a lovely gold crown. It had evidently popped out while chewing the otherwise quite chewable dinner at the Orange County Press Club Awards the night previous, and I most likely swallowed it. Join the Orange County Press Club, folks. You’ll be crapping gold!

Then last Monday, I went in to have the new crown embedded in my head. It’s a procedure that only takes a few minutes, no numbing needed. Except in my case. I’m not human or something. My bite is all off, my teeth being so askew due to DNA and misguided orthodontics that they make Stonehenge look like a marvel of symmetry.

So some doubtlessly well-intentioned person at the lab, my dentist speculates, looked at the mold of my tooth and thought, “Good Christ, this can’t be right!” and instead made the crown to conform more to what might be expected of anyone who lives in the vicinity of Newport Beach.

Which necessitated my dentist spending over an hour in my mouth fighting with the thing, I mean excavating and drilling and spritzing and grinding and polishing and using every Dremel attachment in the box; my little cache of gold growing smaller by the minute. For much of this time there was something that felt like a credit card stuck between my cheek and gums to keep my mouth open. And we hadn’t bothered with any numbing, had we?

A few words on my dentist here: He’s my favorite one ever; skilled, thorough, conscientious, personable, etc. He’s got a great sense of humor and runs a happy office. I’ve gone in with tooth-rot problems I was sure were going to cause screams from both my throat and wallet, and have instead walked out smiling. (If you need a good dentist, email me and I’d be delighted to refer you to him.)

This just happened to be one of those days when my ruinous mouth and the rational world were not in accord. It can’t have been easy for my dentist, either. After an hour, even a dentist with the patience of Job would have to be thinking, “Enough already! Get me out of this damned mouth!”

So it was something to be endured, and it too made me feel older, but even so it scarcely distracted from the overwhelming thing that’s making me feel old: the death on August 1 of one of my longest and most beloved friends, Travis Harrelson.

He seemed remarkably old when I first met him, well over 30 years ago. I tend to regard myself as the same little scamp that I was then, though I’ve recently realized I’m a good tot older now than Travis was then.

He was selling old guitars and cameras every weekend at the Orange Coast College swap meet, with an impressive handlebar mustache and a quip for everyone he met, and strumming a ukulele that seemed capable of producing more joy per ounce than any other device on the planet.

I’d buy old Weissenborn lap steel guitars from him for $35; would realize anew that, aside from making “coyote plummets off the cliff” noises, I was useless on steel guitar, and would sell them to David Lindley for $100, pleased as punch. They go for about $2,500 now. We’ve had some fine laughs over that. Travis would get similar deals on old Martin ukes from me. Though we could both be pretty obstinate horse-traders, he never let it be anything but fun.

Travis always reminded me of Woody Guthrie’s old maxim, “Take it easy, but take it.” He’d persevered through some awfully tough times, starting with the Great Depression, and had been done wrong a number of times, but he never gave in to bitterness or enmity. Quite the opposite, his humor and ukulele could transform practically any situation into a luau, and he was never stingy with either. If you look up “Aloha” in the dictionary, there should be a photo of Travis next to it.

He was born in Long Beach, the same year the Depression started, and it may have never quite ended for him. Late in life, when he married his lovely wife Celeste, she said it took a while to convince Travis he didn’t have to buy the discounted, dented cans at the market anymore. He’d had to scrimp for much of his life.

Growing up, he was the oldest of seven siblings. His father wasn’t around, and he took on the role of parent. There was never much money around, but his mother was in love with all things Hawaiian, and their house became a favorite place for islanders to hang out and play music. That’s when he first took up the uke, which he re-engaged with after his own kids were grown.

He was a Navy aerial recon photographer during the Korean war, stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Princeton, “That was a second Princeton,” he once clarified for me. “It was hard to use the first one after it sank.” Even from the air, he saw some horrible things he didn’t like to talk about.

He worked various jobs after that, mostly in photography. By the time I met him, he was his own boss, selling at swap meets and taking care of his second wife, Nell, who had emphysema. Between the swap meets and garage sales—where he always managed to snag old Martin D-28s moments ahead of me—we wound up becoming friends.

He didn’t make a big deal about his uke playing, but eventually I and others noticed that he might just have been the best uke player on the planet. He and his buddy Don would show up at my BBQs, where my friends and I would do our best to impress people with our uptight loud R&B band. And they would come in with their toy-like unamplified instruments and clean our clocks, using sneaky qualities like talent and charm. They took it easy, but they sure took it.

Travis and the uke had pretty much saved Don’s life. Don and his wife Ivy had been inseparable since they’d been in school, back in the rumble seat days. They’d worked together as puppeteers at the Pageant of the Masters and Santa’s Village. When she died, he told me, the joy in life died for him too.

Then he met Travis at a senior center. They started strumming together, then performing, and they became like two kids. They called themselves the DTs. They’d hop on a public bus and play for the passengers, who would miss their stops to hear the two play. They played scores of free gigs at convalescent hospitals to cheer the patients up. My friend Jonathan Richman heard them, and soon they were opening his shows, to audiences less than a third their age. I’ve hardly ever heard anything so good as when they’d do Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me.” It’s no great surprise that when the OC Weekly named its 129 Greatest OC Bands Ever, with just the smallest nudge from me, they placed the DTs at Number 4.

God, they were funny, in that low-keyed Bob & Ray way. Interviewing them for the L.A. Times back in 1992, I’d asked them how they got by when they weren’t playing music. Travis deadpanned, “Well, Don here repairs key chains.”

They went on for years. Then Travis’ wife Nell died; then Don died, and some of the life went out of Travis, but he hardly let it show. By then the uke was making a comeback, and its new adherents like Jim Beloff (who now helms the uke-centric Flea Market Music) noticed Travis’ talents. He was featured in two documentaries, “The Joy of Ukes” and “Rock That Uke!” He went from starring in people’s back yards to performing in Tokyo and other far-flung locales, and sharing stages with such ukulele legends as Herb Ohta and Lyle Ritz, who would be agape at his Django Reinhardt-styled flights of whimsy on the tiny fretboard, as well as his unique strum, which sounded like no fewer than three people having at it. Fans would film him and slow it down in hopes of comprehending what he was doing, and still couldn’t figure it out. Nor could he, but there it was.

He’d have these little adventures, then go back to playing luaus and beach parties. He recently told his friend and musical cohort Eddie Montana that the mood of the players mattered more to him than their ability: “Jamming, being with fellow musicians—good, bad, indifferent, no matter what as long as they’re playing music and having fun—that’s what I prefer.”

He’d suffer me to play with him, and didn’t seem to mind that I’d make a clam chowder of the ’20s and ’30s tunes he loved. A friend and I tried taking lessons from him once. We could follow him up to a point, then the music would catch hold of him; his fingers would take off and we’d be left feeling like apes in the jungle watching a jet streak overhead. Then he’d kid us a bit and we’d feel better.

Travis got happy again in his last decade. He met his final wife, Celeste, and it’s like they were made for each other. He played, she danced the hula, and the world was a better place for it.

We had some adventures, he and I. And he had many, many more with others. He was like a father to his siblings, to his own five kids and to many more of us; the kind of guy you aspire to be like. Things were always better, lighter, funnier, when he was around. And he was so solid at that you’d feel like he was always going to be around, as if he were akin to Tom Bombadil in the Tolkien Trilogy: there before the story began and still there singing after it ended.

I suppose he is still there, in all the people he touched in his life. I can hear him right now, saying, “Relaxal, take it easal, don’t get nerval,” which was one of those phrases he’d pull out of the ether. The last thing he wanted was a funeral or for people to feel down on his account. We’d talk about the deep, sad stuff sometimes, but there was always a uke tune or a pun just around the corner.

He was the youngest old man I’ve ever known, and I’m feeling so much older without him. His legacy is a buoyant thing, and I hope I’m able to do my part to keep it aloft, but just right now it feels like a heavier thing than I know how to hold.

Comments

Comments closed.