Loved ones, friends try to keep studio alive

By Will Hoover
Advertiser Staff Writer

Brad Thayne, left, had a dream but little time to fulfill it. He worked with marketing director Bobby Pileggi, singer Darrell Labrado and recording artist Sterling Kalua. Courtesy Bobby Pileggi

But at Moloka'i's Monkeypod Records — in a small building on Lot 52 in Kawela, five miles south of Kaunakakai — business was never "as usual."

Brad Thayne, the late California construction worker and professional studio musician who built Monkeypod on a shoestring and borrowed money in 1996, was hardly your average record-industry mogul.

He almost never charged for use of his studio. Although his budget was limited, he produced free demos for performers who weren't even on his label. He could play the guitar like Carlos Santana but gave lessons free.

Those who were close to him say Thayne was that way because someone had believed in him and taken a chance back when he was starting out as a kid. Thayne wanted to help others get a break.

By last December, Monkeypod, which focused solely on the music and musicians of Moloka'i, had three CD releases to its credit. One, "Shaka the Moon," by teenager and island contemporary singer Darrell Labrado, produced a statewide hit, "Da Kine," possibly the biggest recording by any Moloka'i artist in a decade.

That same month, however, Thayne, 35, died of esophageal cancer that had been diagnosed less than a year earlier. With that, Monkeypod lost its studio engineer, musical arranger, producer, lead musician, chief executive and driving force.

"We're trying to find all these people who can replace this one guy," said Monkeypod recording artist Sterling Kalua, 48. "It's going to be really hard, but we're going to try. Brad was the whole foundation."

For now, the fate of Monkeypod rests in the hands of Thayne's wife, Andrea, and a hard-driving New York producer and promoter, Bobby Pileggi, who also is the company's marketing director.

Both vow to keep the company alive.

"Impossible dream? Yeah, we know that," said Andrea Thayne, who recently canceled the company's toll-free phone number and whose most optimistic financial appraisal of Monkeypod is that it's "teetering in and out of the black."

"But I know how much this meant to Bradley. And Monkeypod Records also became very important to the people of Moloka'i. It's important to try and keep it going."

Moloka'i hula teacher Moana Dudoit agrees: "All the people who are recording here are happy about Monkeypod. And the people in town are happy for them. Because otherwise, they wouldn't be making any recordings at all."

Pileggi, who wrote "Da Kine," co-produced Kalua's "Feel the Mana," album, featuring traditional and contemporary Hawaiian music with flavors of reggae, funk and ska. Pileggi relishes the challenge of keeping Monkeypod alive.

"Against all odds we're still hanging in," said Pileggi, who discovered Moloka'i in 1991, around the same time the Thaynes arrived, and like them, became addicted to the island's beauty, friendliness and isolated charm.

"People root for the long shots in life," Pileggi said. "That's us."

Pileggi, a quintessential New Yorker who talks so fast he hardly seems to draw breath and barely pauses for punctuation in his e-mails, admits he's "a fish out of water" on slow-moving Moloka'i. But he has used his connections to get noted New York producer and engineer Chris Pati to come to the Friendly Island to finish up the second CD of Labrado, who is now 16. Pileggi says the yet-unnamed CD could be out by the end of the year.

But Pati won't be the studio's permanent engineer, and the company currently has no prospects for an engineer who will stay on. Can Monkeypod make it without the man whose vision created it?

"Brad was very giving," said Raquel Dudoit, who discovered Labrado when he was 12 and initially filled the role as Labrado's unpaid personal manager until she turned him over to Thayne.

She says Brad Thayne gave Labrado free guitar lessons and even produced a free demo for him to pitch to a competing Honolulu record label. It was only after the Honolulu deal fell through that Thayne signed Labrado to Monkeypod.

Even after he was too weak to function, Thayne struggled to finish Kalua's album.

"When Brad was dying, he heard from an old friend, Vick Patron, who started him out in the music business — the guy who hired Brad to play guitar in his band when Brad was only 16," said Andrea Thayne. "And Brad said, 'Vick, can you help me out here? Can you come finish the Sterling Kalua project?'

"So Vick came out. He's an engineer and has his own studio. He also had some experience with hospice patient care. So Vick was helping me with the hospice care in the day, and at night he'd go in the studio and work on the CD."

Added Raquel Dudoit: "Monkeypod was Brad's dream. Brad got things done. He always made the extra effort. Will it make it without him? I don't know. They need a good engineer. And Brad also did all the instrumentation. It'll be tough without Brad."

But Andrea Thayne, who owns the company, says come what may, she won't be leaving.

"This is my home," she said. "This is where I'm raising my 4-year-old son, Cameron. And if Monkeypod Records doesn't make it, then it goes back to becoming a project studio — you know, where musicians come to work out their stuff and do their own marketing. Which is what the studio originally was going to be, before Darrell Labrado walked through the door.

"I realize that having a record company on Moloka'i is a little bit startling. I don't know how much of an uphill battle it is going to be to keep the company going. But I do know that everybody — the entire island here — wants it to be going.

"And I know we're always going to be a community resource."