HONOLULU — The nightclub business isn’t easy. Popular entertainers get better offers. Top-draw groups break up. Owners may decide it’s time to sell. Corporate “suits” may choose to a replace a successful format with something they think will work better. A high-powered developer may come in and bulldoze everything en route to long-term megaprofits.
Politics can kill successful nightclubs too. The decision to raise the drinking age from the age of majority, 18, to 21 in 1986, changed Waikiki forever and cost many service industry workers their jobs and livelihoods.
Then there was the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in early 2020 shut Waikiki down.
Jack Law has steered Hula’s Bar &Lei Stand through all those challenges for 50 years.
Hula’s, which bills itself as “one of the longest-running LGBTQ+ bars in the world,” will celebrate its 50th anniversary Wednesday, July 17, and Thursday, July 18.
“We’re having it for two days because so many people are coming from all over the world,” Law said. “We’re having (Hollywood party designer) Billy Butchkavitz, an old friend of mine who used to live in Hawai‘i, come over with his crew to decorate Hula’s. They’ll transform it, but it’s still going to be Hula’s, sort of like a Hula’s tiki bar.”
Kit Ebersbach’s Wiki Waki Band featuring Starr Kalahiki will be early evening entertainment; musicians who played at Hula’s in years past are expected to sit in. Video deejay VJ KSM will take over at 9 p.m. and play the music and music videos of the past 50 years until closing.
The must-have memento for partygoers is the Hula’s Bar &Lei Stand 50th anniversary kukui nut lei with a QR code pendant that links to Hula’s archives.
“Over the years, we’ve accumulated a lot of photographs and memorabilia, but all the regular photographs and stuff like that were just thrown in cardboard boxes and put in the storage and not put in any kind of chronological ordering because we were always concentrating on our next event.”
Until now, that is. Law had Hula’s audio/video archivist Anne Selby organize his archives into a documentary that will be more than three hours long.
If you figure each year times 50 years and three minutes per year, that’s a lot of minutes,” Law said. “Our DJ/VJ laid the music bed so the music playing under the visual matches the same time frame as the chronological order of the pictures.”
The story of Hula’s Bar &Lei Stand began in 1974 when Law and his business partner, Eaton “Bob” Magoon Jr., saw an opportunity in Waikiki when a business on land owned by the Magoon family estate had closed. The building, originally the home of one of Magoon’s aunts, was vacant.
“Bob said, ‘We can put a bar there. How hard can it be?’ I remember those words distinctly,” said Law, who had no experience in the bar business. “It was pretty hard, but after a couple of years we got it going.”
Part of it was following what was happening in the cutting-edge clubs in New York and San Francisco. First and foremost, Law credits the employees.
“We’ve had great DJs, we’ve had great employees overall,” he said. “The servers and the bartenders and everybody, I’ve always considered them part of the entertainment. Everything was part of the entertainment.”
Along the way, Law always looked out for his employees. When the original Hula’s burned down, he moved them over to another nightclub he owned, Wave Waikiki. When a developer canceled Hula’s month-to-month lease and forced him to shut down in 1998, Law opened Wave Waikiki in the daytime to keep them working until he finalized the move into the current location at the Waikiki Grand Hotel.
Hula’s was in its original location for 24 years. It has been in its current location for 26.
