Rupert Tripp Jr. Continues to Joyfully Sing

By Alan D. McNarie

It’s Thursday night at Café Pesto in Hilo, and Rupert Tripp Jr. is singing and playing his guitar. It’s not easy. Café Pesto is famous for its food, yet the many glass windows and the high ceilings make for lousy acoustics. Much of Rupert’s patter between-songs is lost in the noise of people trying to speak loud enough to be heard over the voices of all the other people trying to speak loudly enough.

When Rupert sings, though, you can hear all the words. He hasn’t got his amp cranked to anything like loud, yet his gentle and rich voice sings each word carefully, as though he loves it and wants his audience to love it, too.

He’s doing mostly upbeat cover songs—House on Pooh Corner, What a Wonderful World—though at one point near the end of his set, he launches into Leonard Cohen’s haunting Hallelujah. He also includes another song where each stanza ends in “Hallelujah”: a piece he wrote himself. Its refrain defiantly affirms that despite past sorrow, “we will joyfully sing.”

That expression of joy in the moment, in song, takes a special poignancy, given what Rupert’s been through since 2009. A Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award winner and member of the popular guitar trio Kohala, he’s still in constant pain from a car accident that broke his spine, five of his ribs, his femur, his collarbone, one forearm, cracked his sternum, and left him with nerve damage.

“It’s just been crazy,” he says. “I can’t walk these days. I can still play, but I’m struggling to play, and struggling to sing.”

What happened in the wake of that accident has been a tale of music, faith, and endurance—and perhaps above all, it’s a love story.

One night during the Labor Day weekend of 2009, Rupert’s wife Adele was babysitting their pastor’s children in Volcano, where the family lives, when Rupert called to say he’d finished his gig at the Malolo Lounge of the Hilton Waikoloa, and was starting home. About fifteen minutes or so later, the phone rang again. This time it was Rupert’s phone, but a stranger’s voice.

“I was driving back at 11pm and this drunk driver ran into me at, I think, 90 miles per hour, according to the police,” Rupert recalls. He later learned that the other car’s driver, his wife, and one daughter had died; the family’s only survivor was a young girl with cerebral palsy, who’d been securely strapped in her seat.

Somehow, despite his horrific injuries, Rupert stayed conscious long enough to give a bystander his phone and ask the man to call Adele.

Their pastor drove her to the hospital in Waimea. “Walking in there, I could hear a lot of crying and wailing, and I didn’t know what to expect,” she recalls. The crying was coming from a room where friends of the family that had hit Rupert were gathered. Rupert was in the next room, alone.

For the next two months, she would not leave his side for more than an hour and a half at a time.

Rupert spent about 10 days in a fog of pain in the Intensive Care Unit.

“I remember a number of times opening my eyes and seeing a big number of people, but not knowing who they were. I recognized my wife’s voice, my mom’s voice, but that was about it.”

“Adele,” he says, “was a bedrock for me.”

He credits his wife for an intervention with the doctors that may have saved the use of his legs.

Adele recalls that moment vividly. The doctors had done a magnetic resonance imaging scan of the upper half or Rupert’s body, and found that his upper spine was “unstable.” They wanted to operate immediately, however Adele insisted that they finish the scan first. “Not that I’m a doctor or anything, but you’ve got him stuck in that machine for 45 minutes, and you’re only going to do half the body?“

As it turned out, she was right. “Actually the bottom was worse than the top, because it was going into paralysis already.”

When Rupert was medivacked to Honolulu, Adele went, too. Family and friends soon followed, in such numbers that Adele finally had to ban them to the waiting room, so Rupert could get some rest.

Still, she says, “They would come for support for all of us, in the waiting room.” Their daughters—Pualei, who was in college at the time, and Leyla, who was a high school junior—both got support from their schools so they could be frequent visitors.

Rupert and Adele have been close for a long time. Though both Hawaiian, they first met at a hotel in Japan, where he was performing while she danced hula.

“I didn’t know he was the one,” Adele admits. “I kind of enjoyed hanging out with him. I had just turned 18, so life was—there were so many things ahead of me.”

When they returned to Hawai‘i, she remembers, “I thought I’d never see him again, but he never left. He pursued the relationship, and I’m very grateful to him for that.”

The car accident and its aftermath aren’t the first crisis they’ve weathered together. For 10 years, they were both addicted to crystal methamphetamine. They finally got off it together, with the help of a second, mutual bedrock: their faith.

“I definitely put my faith in God and he helped us through,” Rupert says. “Today, she and I are ministers at our church.”

In 2003, he released a solo album of mostly original gospel music, For an Audience of One, on his own label, RTJ records. It earned him a Nā Hōkū Hanohano Award nomination for Religious Album of the Year (2004).

That’s the third bedrock: music. Rupert’s been playing music professionally since a time when he was still learning arithmetic.

“I actually grew up in a musical family,” he says. By the time Rupert was nine, he was the band’s drummer and featured singer in the family band, the Tripping Hawaiians.

When he was 12, he got his first solo professional gig at Uncle Billy’s Hilo Bay Hotel.

He was the musical director for his junior class at Kamehameha Schools. After graduating, he joined the armed services, and won base talent contests at three of the four bases where he served.

After his enlistment expired in 1984, he returned to Hawai‘i and went back to playing professionally. He joined a former classmate, Weymoth Kamakana, to form their own band, Nalu, which put out four albums, garnered several Nā Hōkū nominations and put out a string of popular songs such as “Pualei,” which he wrote for his daughter, and “In Your Hawaiian Way.”

Since Nalu disbanded, Rupert has played with several other bands and musicians. One popular YouTube video, for instance, features Rupert, Brother Noland, Lito Arkangel, and Kris Fuchigami playing tasty licks on Coconut Girl.

He’s probably best known, though, as one third of the guitar trio Kohala. For the past 13 years, the band has put out 10 albums featuring its innovative blend of folk, smooth jazz, and Hawaiian music. It’s become an international musical ambassador for the islands, playing in venues as far-flung as Nashville and Tokyo.

Rupert has also done two non-gospel solo albums: Heart to Heart and Live at Volcano’s Lava Rock Café. He was at work on a new gospel album, Righteous Son Rize, when the collision happened. He hopes to finally finish it this fall.

It’s been a slow and painful road back. It took Rupert six months before he could rejoin Kohala for a live gig. He’s done two tours of Japan with Kohala since the accident.

His health made him decide to stay out of the band’s planned 20-city Japanese tour this fall—which is too bad, he says, because “I love that tour.” The pace, however, is just too grueling.

“When you have something like this happen, it’s quite the challenge” says Adele, “But God is good, and that’s where we put our trust, that it all works out for good.”

“Strangers,” she says, “sometimes come up to Rupert to say how he’s inspired them: ‘When they have a headache, they think about what it takes for him to even get up in the morning, and then they remember how blessed they are.’”

“I tell him, ‘You don’t know how many people you helped today just by driving past them.’”

She’s also grateful that her daughters have had their father to experience life with them: to see them go to college, graduate, and fall in love themselves. Pualei now has a master’s degree and her first son, Caleb Ka‘ōpuaikal‘i Kekumuikawaiokeola Borge, arrived August 6, 2016.

“Now he has to write a song for his grandson,” Adele says gleefully.

Rupert is also still bringing joy to his fans. For now, he’s playing the restaurant circuit: Monday and Tuesday nights at Kaleo’s in Pāhoa, Wednesdays at Volcano’s Lava Rock Café, and Thursdays at Café Pesto.

“I’m kind of at 80 percent,” he says. “I can handle the restaurant performances. The restaurant is kind of laid back, performing in the background. I have friends who come and see me and say, ‘We couldn’t even tell. It sounds great.’ But I could tell. I could definitely tell.”

Even at 80 percent, though, he’s better than many players ever get. On these solo gigs, he’s often playing melody and countermelody at the same time, sounding like two separate guitars playing at once. His complex guitar notes drift, as natural as air, through the noisy crowd; the voice reaches in among the conversations, drawing out applause after each song.

That night at Café Pesto, he was scheduled to stop at 8 o’clock, and repeated cries of “Hana Hou, Rupert!” from the crowd coaxed him back to the mic for one more song.

He’s still singing, still making his guitar sing—pain, muscle spasms, and nerve damage aren’t going to stop him.

Hallelujah! ❖

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Contact Rupurt Tripp Jr.: 808.985.7474

Contact writer Alan D. McNarie