The late Bob Krauss, an Advertiser columnist for more than five decades, often wrote about Don Ho. Here is a column he wrote in 1995 when Ho revamped his stage show.

Forget about a line of 16 hula girls on a Las Vegas set. The only big name, Hawaiian-style show left in Waikiki fits into the back end of a garage in Kapahulu.

Don Ho at the Waikiki Beachcomber Hotel has gone back to his roots.

He's playing the music he heard on the jukebox after school at Honey's in Kane'ohe. Add a few numbers from the Kamehameha Schools song contest, and you've got it.

"The trouble is I've been around so long, my musicians are too young to know the old songs," he said.

On the other hand, his musicians pick up the melodies a lot faster than he can fit his play-it-by-ear style on the Hammond organ into their sophisticated arrangements.

"Now I have such good musicians I can't keep up," he admitted. "When I can't play it, I lay off."

How does he make it look so easy?

"I'm a perfectionist who doesn't require perfection. It started off as a necessity. Honey's, my mother's restaurant, was crowded every night when I was a kid. When I came back from the Air Force about 1960, we were lucky to make $50 a day.

"My father was distressed. He told me to pick up a band. Maybe it would bring people in. I played a little (electric) organ. Educated myself to be an entertainer. And I picked good musicians."

"Yes, but you can sing," I said.

"At Honey's, I only sang with the boys occasionally. What happened, they would get drunk and not show up. I'd be sitting there all by myself. I had to sing.

"I played songs I learned from my mother and uncles, songs I heard as a kid when people plugged dimes and quarters into the jukebox; Joe Keawe, Johnny Alameda, Bill Lincoln, the Ink Spots, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day.

"At Kamehameha Schools, I learned a little bit of music from our teacher, Frank Kernahan. He was from Oregon, I think, taught us from Charlie King's song book.

"Let's not call it Hawaiian music. It's music from Hawai'i. What we do is music in general Hawaiian style.

"But our sound was one step ahead: swinging, bluesy, funky, light Latin rock, local Island, Pacific chop suey music. The key was my Hammond organ that sounded like 12 strings. We were electronically ahead of everybody, but we kept the Hawaiian sound."

Ho said the secret of survival is to do what you believe, in spite of market pressure to the contrary.

"Everybody has to have an identity, your own original thing," he explained. "Our thing was the way you sit around the garage on a weekend; play music, joke around. We just took it to the showroom.

"I was a quarterback on the football team in school. The small Japanese boys looked up to me to protect them from the bullies. On stage, it's like running the team. It's not like working for a hotel.

"Right now the best show in town is Sam Kapu's garage in Kapahulu. Andy Bumatai shows up. You get firemen from stations around town. Only it doesn't happen so much now that Sam has a granddaughter."