Interview with Kevin Jones (The Catalogs/A Young Poisoner's Handbook) - Hawaii, Music, and Beyond
Interview by Dave Carr for the Hawaii Punk Museum May, 2025
In May of 2025, David Carr of the Hawaii Punk Museum asked to interview me about my experiences in the Hawaii punk and underground music scenes. I can’t think of a better way to introduce myself to the readers of this substack and give you a preview of the kind of content I hope to feature here. I promise it won’t all be me talking about myself, as much I do enjoy that. 😉 Below is the first part of 4 (I had a lot to talk about) for your reading pleasure (or displeasure). Subscribe to be alerted of upcoming parts and all other future content.
Introduce yourself and give us a sense of who you are.
Hi, I’m Kevin, and I am an Aries. I enjoy nature walks, holding hands, and absolutely destroying people at a game of “Numbers.” I also hold my own in the fiercest of rounds of Jan Ken Po.
I’ve also been in bands and things in the islands, including bassist for The Catalogs and bass (and then vocals) for A Young Poisoner’s Handbook. I have been a promoter, bringing national acts to Hawaii during the mid-90s, including The Queers, Mr. T Experience, Scared of Chaka, The Invalids, Steel Pole Bathtub, and others of that ilk.
Outside of life in Hawaii, I have spent much of my time collecting and DJing rare soul 45s and have participated in the mod and northern soul scenes. I have been a founding member and promoter of some of the country’s largest and longest running Northern & Rare Soul dance nights, including Emerald City Soul Club in Seattle, Windy City Soul Club and Soul Togetherness USA in Chicago, and Testify! in Knoxville, TN. These days, I spend most of my time and money collecting records, working as a full-time graphic designer and art director in the advertising world, and doing my best to be a good father to my daughter.
Some people have called me a snob, a gatekeeper, even an edgelord (before that was a thing). None of that’s true, of course. Probably. I’m sure we will get into all of that further down the page.
Part I: The Early Years
If you could start at the beginning. How did you get into the music scene in Hawaii? When was that? What was it like at that time? Did you think of it as a punk scene or in broader terms?
Sure, but I think we may need to go back even further.
Before moving to Hawaii, my family lived in the Bay Area. While we were there, my father was in a serious relationship with a woman who had two teenage daughters—both massive metalheads. They introduced me to bands like Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and so on. They even took me to my first concert in 1985: Iron Maiden at the Cow Palace in Daly City. So by the time I got to Hawaii, I already had a pretty solid grasp of “heavy rock music.”
We moved to Pearl City sometime in 1987, where I lived within walking distance of a record shop called Choice Cuts on the corner of Lehua Avenue and Kam Highway, next to a 7-Eleven. I used to save up money from mowing lawns in the neighborhood or from whatever allowance my parents gave me, and every few weeks I’d walk up there to buy a record.
I cannot overstate how much record collecting has shaped the course of my life through music. Most of the time, I was buying blind, but the folks who worked at Choice Cuts (and later places like Jelly’s Books & Music) would occasionally suggest things. Someone must have pointed me to the No Place to Play compilation (thank you, sir), because that is the first time I recall hearing any local punk.
By the time I was going to shows on my own though—around seventh and eighth grades—most of the bands on that comp had already dissolved. But I did get to see later shows by SRO, M.U.G., Luau Guys, Broken Man, Oriental Love Ring, and Mystery Crash. That was also around the time I first attempted to put together a band myself.
Tell me about the music scene in Hawaii at that time. I want to know more about your bands and what it all meant to you personally.
Being all of 13 or 14 at this point, it would be a little while before I discovered anything that was remotely a music “scene.” In the earliest days, I was just buying records and discovering music on my own, with a bit of influence from the local skater kids that I surrounded myself with back then.
In my neighborhood in Pearl City, skateboarding was just taking hold. These were the days of “searching for Animal Chin.” Full disclosure though: I was an awful skater. Like desperately bad. But, as a result, I unofficially became the photographer/ boom-box-operator of the small group of kids that I ran the streets with. A lot of The Accused, DRI, COC, and thrashy-punk was played loudly over shitty speakers while the dudes did judo-airs on backyard halfpipes and I took blurry photos.
At some point, I decided I was going to pick up bass. I remember begging my father for guitar lessons, but we could never afford it. He told me bass would be easier, and well, my grandfather had played bass professionally in country bands back in the 1930’s and 40’s, so there is a bit of family legacy there too. So, with the help of my dad, I taught myself the basics of bass (the bass-icks?).
It wasn’t until intermediate school that I met other musicians and tried to make something that sounded like real music, or like, go to a “show.”
So you were around skaters and then started playing bass. Did you start a band around this time? Did you play shows or record music?
When I began seventh grade at Highlands Intermediate, I was focused on finding “my people.” The skater kids in the Peninsula were, honestly, kind of massive fuck-ups—and not in a fun way. I kept a few at arm’s length for awhile, but for the most part, I cut them off. I was looking for something different.
That’s when I met Mike Mayes (later of Chemical Fish), Ryan Potez (later of Unit 101), and a kid named Dan Iho from my 7th grade homeroom, who was just learning to play drums (There was someone else too, but his name escapes me). The group of us clicked enough to try starting a band.
We practiced in Dan’s living room at first, but his conservative Japanese parents shut that down pretty fast. Mike and I were both military brats, which meant we had access to rehearsal rooms on base. We met up at the one on Schofield a few times, but mostly we used the rooms at Āliamanu. Our parents would drop us off, of course.
We dubbed ourselves Malicious Intent 🤘 and tried our best at banging out Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer covers—plus a few attempts at the Sex Pistols, and The Cure. Mike was a ridiculously talented guitarist. Honestly, a prodigy. He could hear a song once and figure out the entire thing, solos and all, within a few hours. Super inspiring.
We both had eclectic tastes as well. Mike liked metal because it challenged him as a player, but most of what we were listening to were things like Black Flag, Bad Brains, and The Cramps.
We never played a real show. We were supposed to perform at our seventh grade talent show at Highlands, but Mike transferred schools just prior to the contest. The school wouldn’t let him come back to play, so our dreams of middle school stardom were crushed.
Mike and I stayed close, but that was our last real attempt at playing music together. I vaguely remember us talking about getting on a show at The Back Door, but I can’t say if that was real or just us drawing fake Malicious Intent flyers and talking bullshit, as one does.
You mention The Back Door. Were you going to local shows at this point?
I think we’d heard about The Back Door, but neither of us actually went until sometime around the summer between seventh and eighth grade—or maybe during eighth grade itself.
The first proper show I ever attended was Camper Van Beethoven at the Campus Center Ballroom at UH. I went alone, catching the bus into town from Pearl City. To this day, I’m still amazed my parents just let me do that.
That was a mind expanding experience for me. It was my first real exposure to live underground music, and it changed everything.
I can’t even remember how I found out about it. Maybe a flyer at the recently opened Jelly’s in Pearl Kai? The timeline’s a little blurry.
I DO know for sure it was eighth grade when I really started going to shows regularly.
A girl named Melinda—affectionately known as Beanie—transferred to our school from town. She was effortlessly cool. Doc Martens, ripped fishnets, that whole look. All the weird kids instantly gravitated to her.
Turns out, she was dating a guy named Marty Lau from Manoa. One day he showed up at our school, glued up mohawk and all, with his friend Eldred Tahara, and I hit it off with both of them right away. They invited me to see the Dead Milkmen at Aloha Tower, which kicked off a friendship that would last decades.
All that said, again, I could totally be fucking up the order of events here. The timeline IS blurry. I do know it all happened in 8th grade though.
Tell me about your participation and connections in the music scene as a player, a fan, a punk? Is “punk” what people called their scene or was that not really the overarching term by the early 90s when you were becoming involved with any kind of “scene.”
Through Marty and Eldred, I met all sorts of townie punks—the kids who hung out at the Burger King across from UH, Puck’s Alley, and Kanewai Park. Don’t know what happened to Beanie after that. She was gone from Highlands as quickly as she came, and I don’t recall seeing her much after meeting Marty and Eldred.
In Pearl City, a new kid named Chad Byron transferred in. Chad pushed me to ditch metal altogether (I was still clinging to it a bit and would revisit it later) and introduced me to a ton of other music. He was deep into The Smiths—also U2 (no accounting for taste, right?).
We took our first bus rides together to The Dark Side, a goth and fetish shop that sold Doc Martens, and to Jelly’s Books and Music near Ala Moana.
We devoured issues of Scrawling Wall and smoked cigarettes on the overpass outside the Highlands campus.
Chad ended up dating another friend, Kari Nagamine, who I had met through one of Beanie’s friends, Vashti Stitscum (sp?). Kari would later become my absolute best friend throughout the ’90s and into the early 00’s.
Chad got sent to Kahi Mohala, an inpatient mental health facility in Pearl City, after swinging a baseball bat at his dad’s head. He left the state soon after that and we lost touch. We reconnected recently and it turns out that he went on to start Burnt Bridges Records in Nashville and now lives in Mexico.
Anyhow, we certainly thought of ourselves as punk rockers and always thought of our scene as such back then. I realize that some of you older fucks think that punk magically disappeared when you all became art-rockers or whatever the fuck you became in the late 80s, but us grommets certainly kept “punk” alive–at least in our own minds.
Interviewer’s note: At this point Kevin threw a can of tomato soup on my priceless Van Gogh “The Night Cafe” painting and ran away screaming “poseur!”
We were attending local shows at The Back Door, Campus Center Ballroom, The Puerto Rican Association (ahem), the UH YWCA (later Coffeeline), C5, and Sub Club. Larger shows promoted by Jellys and KTUH (thanks to folks like Mari from Jellys/Revolution Books) with bands like Bad Religion, Social Distortion were happening at places like Aloha Tower and Pink Cadillac.
On the local scene, the skinhead movement had really taken hold, with crews like H.A.R.S.H. (Hawaii’s Anti-Racist Skinheads—the local adaptation of S.H.A.R.P.) being a huge presence at shows. Bands like Broken Man, Luau Guys, BYK, MUG, and SRO (I like to refer to this period as the “era of the acronym bands”) were holding it down and catering mostly to that scene. (Did every fucking local band play the Agnostic Front version of Iron Cross’s “Crucified?” The answer is “yes.”)
A certain member of H.A.R.S.H., Vince Kwan, used to terrorize the fuck out of my friend Eldred for whatever reason. He was always beating the shit out of him. No idea why. Haha.
Anyhow, ska also started to show up on the setlists of some of these bands, my guess thanks mostly to influence from national acts like Operation Ivy, The Toasters, etc. finding their way into the record collections of local punks (and obviously influenced by the skinhead folk). Operation Ivy, in particular, will have a huge impact on my friends and I by the time the 90’s roll around.
You mentioned Operation Ivy as a big influence on the Hawaii scene, which seemed to include skinheads, ska and two-tone fans, and hardcore kids at this time. Did these different groups coexist, or was there tension between them?
Operation Ivy really resonated—both ideologically and musically—with my core group of friends, but I couldn’t say with any authority that this was true for the scene at large. All I can say with any certainty is that their records were clearly available somewhere on the island, and they were getting airplay on KTUH (and especially on Radio Free Hawaii when they began broadcasting around 1991).
Did the different sects within the scene coexist? Well, I think it was complicated—particularly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I could say, “Well, of course! We all went to the same shows. We all played shows together. Hung out at the same places,” etc. But—and I can’t really articulate why—sometimes the punks and skins didn’t feel so “united.”
Like I mentioned above, there were a few bad apples who went out of their way to make some of us feel unwelcome. From my perspective at the time, there was an inherent machismo that came along with the skinhead scene in Hawaii that just wasn’t what my friends and I were about. Maybe we were thought of as “pussies” for that reason. I really don’t know. I can only say that there were definitely some uncomfortable interactions.
I remember once waking up the morning after a show at The Back Door on the floor of a motel room in Waikiki surrounded by about 10 or so sleeping skinheads and wondering how the fuck I got there. I think the sentiment was shared with the other folks in the room as they started to wake up as well. Haha.
Of course, I am close with many of these people now, and maybe we all just misunderstood each other at the time. For instance, I don’t recall ever seeing any evidence of what people refer to as “traditional skins,” back in those early days in Hawaii. I’m talking about the sharply dressed, reggae-listening, often very politically leftist, types of skinheads, but to be completely honest, I’m not sure that I would have known the difference back then either. So who knows, maybe that element was there, and I just didn’t get it. I just know that there was some fear when it came to my friends and certain people or factions of the scene. We even had run-ins with metalheads now and again.
So then, coming back to Op Ivy, I think my core group of friends saw themselves reflected in songs like “Bad Town,” whose lyrics paint a picture of a place where violence, misunderstanding, and mistrust can make it hard to feel at home in your own scene—a personal reaction to the environment that’s not just political, but also emotional and ideological.
What impact did this mix of subcultures have on music coming from the scene?
I think what was being played during this period was definitely a reflection of the different identities on the scene. There was hardcore, ska, goth-rock, oi!, more traditional punk–it was all there. I think that’s one of the things that makes growing up in Hawaii unique. We were surrounded by different cultures—mainstream and underground—and lived close enough together that ideas moved easily between us. In my experience, that wasn’t always true on the mainland. But that sense of togetherness stuck with me, and I tried to carry it into everything I did publicly—whether as a DJ, promoter, or musician. That said, I think it is safe to assume that everyone involved just thought of it as the “punk scene.”
Also, I disagree with the sentiment that “real punk” had a shelf life of five years and then became something else. People came and went, and the sound of it changed, but the ideas that are associated with punk rock (individualism, social and political awareness, anti-racism, a safe space for outcasts) never went away. These ideas are the through-line that keeps the underground alive from the ’70s forward.
That’s not to say that bands and individuals haven’t taken advantage of punk’s sometimes "aggressive" sound and appearance to spew hateful and regressive messages, but that goes all the way back to the beginnings of punk, with National Front bands like Skrewdriver or the entirety of the RAC (Rock Against Communism) movement’s catalog.
We all have a different idea of what punk looks and sounds like, right? For instance, I passionately hate The Misfits. I find their schtick—and themselves as personalities—far from “punk,” and I’d go as far as to say that the B-52’s reflect more of a punk ethos to me than The Misfits and their circus garbage. But that’s just a personal opinion, and I think there’s plenty of room for that opinion. I’m also super bored by Patti Smith and Talking Heads, so... yeah, I’m complicated. And trust me, I get even more complicated as my time in the underground goes on.
For me, punk has always been an amalgam of sounds and ideas, and it has been from its roots. The Sex Pistols sounded nothing like the Ramones, who took their sound from ’60s rock/pop, garage rock, and their look from male prostitutes that hung out in front of seedy New York gay clubs. Equally, the anti-consumerism message of X-Ray Spex isn’t really found in bands like The Dead Boys. Who’s to say what is more “punk?”
So I guess the real questions are: What brings all of those people and bands together? Why did it work? And did it always work?
What about your own political take-aways from growing up punk? How did it influence your overall social and political views?
I’ll be honest—politics weren’t really on my radar in those early days. I vaguely understood the politics associated with punk—(Big circle A) Anarchy!—but I was by no means an activist, and it wasn’t a part of my daily life. I think I was intune with the social aspects of being a part of the scene, but frankly, I was more interested in the rebellious energy of the music, hanging with my friends, and having adventures with them.
Politics didn’t really enter the picture for me until my father and I moved to San Diego, just before my junior year of high school.
Intermission: Kevin’s Top 10 Albums for 1991.
Operation Ivy - Energy (Lookout! Records)
Zero Boys - Vicious Circle (Nimrod Records)
The Toy Dolls - A Far Out Disc (Volume Records)
Dayglo Abortions - Feed US A Fetus (Toxic Shock)
Sloppy Seconds - Destroyed (Toxic Shock)
The Ramones - Animal Boy (Sire)
The Vandals - Peace Thru Vandalism (Epitaph)
Crucifix - S/T EP (Universal Records)
Maximum Rock N Roll’s “Not So Quiet On The Western Front” Compilation (Alternative
Coming Soon: Part II - San Diego, The Constrictors, Post-Hardcore, and The Mods