Roger Bong was 8 years old when the Veterans Administration brought his father to Hawaii to do design work at Tripler in 1995. While attending Mililani High School, Bong began collecting vinyl records and making hip-hop beat mix tapes with some like-minded friends.
A few years later, Bong, by then a homesick University of Oregon student, heard “Hawaiian Breaks,” a one-hour mix tape of music from Hawaii assembled by Japanese hip-hop pioneer DJ Muro. Bong recognized only one of DJ Muro’s choices — “A Million Stars” by the Mackey Feary Band. The others represented genres of locally recorded R&B, funk and soul music he’d never heard before. Before long he was actively searching for them.
Bong announced that search on his blog Aloha Got Soul, which he started in 2010. In 2015, he took the blog’s moniker and launched an eponymous record label in 2015, when he reissued guitarist Mike Lundy’s long-forgotten 1980 album, “The Rhythm of Life.” It was the first of many Aloha Got Soul releases.
Bong, 32, is celebrating the Aloha Got Soul blog’s 10th anniversary at the end of this month. His next reissue, “Catching a Wave,” the out-of-print debut album by Steve & Teresa, comes out in August.
It’s wonderful to see so much interest in locally-recorded music that didn’t get much airplay — if any — back in the day.
I’ve been fortunate that people have paid attention to Aloha Got Soul since its inception. I am very grateful for that. I’m still looking for the “passion projects” and the underdogs that maybe didn’t have the necessary resources at that time to get their music on the radio.
And it all started with DJ Muro?
His “Hawaiian Breaks” mix just blew my mind. He didn’t release the track list, so I was fresh out of journalism school, I was living in Portland and missing Hawaii, and I decided that I was going to start a blog and uncover what the tracks were. That’s how it all started. There were some message boards at the time for collectors and DJs, and I heard from a DJ in France who knew all about the album by (the Hawaii group) Aura. Here’s this guy in France telling me about an album by a group in Hawaii!
How did you go from a blog to a record label?
I was meeting all the musicians ‘cause I was interviewing them for the blog. I realized a couple of years in that all of their music was out of print and somebody should do something about it. I knew the guys, and I had the audience now, so that’s how the record label came about. It goes hand in hand.
You’ve released a series of reissues, including the Aura album in 2016. When did you decide to start recording new artists?
It was Nick Kurosawa’s debut EP, “Home,” in 2018. I always knew that I would like to at some point help to produce new music because I feel it’s important that 30 or 40 years from now someone will find these records that we put out now.
Are there a couple of highlights from your first 10 years?
One of them is sending a royalty check to Hilo musician Alice Wise for her song, “Kaimu Sun,” on the “From These Shores” anthology. The song (originally) came out in the early 1980s on a compilation, “Home Town 85.” She called me and said, “This is the first royalty check I’ve ever received!” Now she wants to get back into the studio and record her first album ever. Another is that DJ Muro is releasing a new “Hawaiian Breaks” mix that features cuts from the Aloha Got Soul catalog. It’s come full circle. The DJ who sparked AGS is now digging through the AGS catalog.
