Strings Attached : There Are Few Places Ukuleles Won’t Take This Charismatic Pair

“Oh, sorry,” says Don Wilson, apologizing to an old friend he’s just knocked into a wooden chair. That friend is his 1930s Martin baritone ukulele, which isn’t as likely to gripe as his other friend present, Travis Harrelson.

Harrelson is in his 60s, while Wilson only admits to “70-plus,” and neither have quite gotten the idea yet that they’re in their golden years, and that silence is golden.

Wilson still has an excess of thick wavy hair. Harrelson would probably like some of it. While too in love with life to be seriously cantankerous, they do enjoy it as a pastime, making merciless fun of the expectations of old age. Making light of the low-respect jobs to which the aged are often relegated, for example, Harrelson described how they survive: “Well, Don here repairs key chains.”

The pair are far from harmless, at least when it comes to their ukuleles. They used to bill themselves as Don and Travis, but they recently have taken to calling themselves as the DTs. I invited them and their ukes--instruments not known for their robust power or sexual allure--to a barbecue I had once, where my own heavily amplified R&B; band was also playing. We, as a band, think competition has no place in the creative arts, unless the odds are overwhelmingly in our favor.

We were loud. We were manly. Our vintage-cool amps barked like cheese-steak-fed Rottweilers. But Wilson and Harrelson, with their unamplified little ukes, tunes about Hilo Hattie doing the Hilo Hop, and secret weapons such as talent and charisma, stole the day from us.

They may never get past my door again, but there are few places their ukuleles don’t take them. They play in the houses of Newport’s rich, at trailer park potlucks, in convalescent homes and senior centers, on boats, buses and beaches. They performed at the festivities for the new Huntington Beach Pier, and go “troubadouring” through the Sawdust Festival.

“We like performing at wakes,” Harrelson says, “because the host never complains.”

Earlier this month they serenaded their close friend, 96-year-old Jack Toon, in a room at Hoag Hospital, two days before he passed away. They played his favorite songs, and he told them he loved them one last time. Toon, who composed the hit “Minnie the Mermaid” in the ‘20s, was a ukulele advocate who led a class at Newport’s Oasis Senior Center. It was there Harrelson and Wilson met and began playing together eight years ago.

“I was very sorry, among many other reasons, to lose Jack Toon, because with him here at least somebody was older than I was,” Wilson lamented. They played at a memorial service for their friend Monday.

Sitting around Harrelson’s small Costa Mesa home--where he has some 130 ukes in various states of repair--the pair talked and quipped about the lives that drove them to play the ukulele.

After raising five children, Harrelson decided to get back into playing a decade ago. Wilson had recently lost his wive, Ivy, and was similarly reacquainting himself with the uke when they met.

Harrelson said: “I think the ukulele saved his life, not to be melodramatic, but I mean it. He almost passed away because he and his wife were so close.”

Wilson concurred: “Like most people who lose a spouse, you do an awful lot of brooding. When I lost her I kind of lost the interest in everything for a while. I thought I had to do something to keep my mind together.”

The pair quickly found they got along musically and as friends. “Our minds meshed,” Harrelson said, with Wilson adding, “When we play we never do songs quite the same way twice, and even on songs we’ve never done before, we can always feel what the other one is going to do.”

Wilson grew up in a small town in Illinois--”They had to scrape like the dickens to find the 350 population to put on the sign”--and got a uke from Sears while in high school in the 1920s. “I used it all through college. It was of great advantage in the rumble seat of a car,” he said. Taking a year off from college, he and some acquaintances hitchhiked through several states, performing at parties, radio shows and wherever they could.

The uke also came in handy while wooing his wife. Once together, they became marionette puppeteers, who performed at Laguna’s Festival of Arts from 1939 to 1954, and later spent eight years doing shows at Santa’s Village.

Harrelson grew up in Long Beach and came to play ukulele because his mother loved all things Hawaiian, even naming his sisters Lei Lani, Aloha Lee and Geneva Luana. “I’m lucky I wasn’t named Uku Uku,” he said.

During the Korean War he was an aerial photographer stationed on the aircraft carrier Princeton. “That was the second one,” he noted of the ship, “It was too hard to use the first one after it sank.”

As you may be gathering about now, both Harrelson and Wilson are cutups who wouldn’t quite fit the corporate mold. Indeed, both made a point of being their own bosses for most of their lives, Wilson with his puppets and Harrelson with photo studios and shops. Harrelson still gets by selling used cameras, swap meet items and rare ukuleles. Wilson found it difficult to do puppet shows after his wife got cancer and for a while had to work in a doughnut shop.

They make some money singing, but about 75% of the work they do, either as a duo or with a jazz band called Shoreboat Gigs, is charitable. “That’s easy to explain,” Harrelson said. “Nobody will pay for what we do. Besides, it gives us a captive audience.”

They make the rounds of three or four convalescent homes a week, and they sometimes find that people who don’t respond to anything else will respond to their music.

Other times they play at parties for the rich, some of whom are their friends from the ukulele class.

Harrelson said: “We just played for a little group in Corona del Mar, and I would say there were three millionairesses there, a tremendous amount of money. But everybody let their hair down. It doesn’t make any difference at all. We were having tacos and playing music. They know we don’t have a thing, but they could care less.”

But doesn’t he care about that disparity in wealth?

“Well, sometimes I intentionally break something,” he joked. “Also, when I go there I try to find if there’s anything loose laying around. Where do you think I get the things I sell at the swap meet? Don and I spend most of our time sanding off serial numbers, don’t we?”

They don’t, of course. And Harrelson says the pair have sufficient riches of their own, stored up in experiences.

“There are times I wouldn’t trade for anything. Don and I one day decided, ‘Hey, let’s just be like little kids, catch a bus, ukuleles in hand, and go down to the beach.’ So we got on the bus, started playing, and it was just like ‘Busman’s Holiday’: Instead of getting off at their stops, people just kept going with us. Before we’d got two or three blocks we had the driver singing along with us on all these songs. She begged us to keep riding with her, said we’d never have to pay. Then the people followed us out of the bus and surrounded us as we played on the beach. This one couple picked us up and took us to how many bars . . . and they kept feeding us drinks. That whole day was bent.

“I was stunned by the response. I thought: Here is the genuine America, where you can do this and you don’t have to write a script for it. It used to be that people had not that much money, so entertainment was, ‘Hey, come on over. We’ll have some wine, play some cards and play some music.’ Or they’d go to the beach with a wash pan, throw some old chicken bones in and a net over it, catch a couple of crabs, cook them in salt water, and play music. That was their entertainment. And we’ve lost that dimension. It’s all two-dimensional now, on that damn tube. We’ve lost the creative thing, the people part.”

Such laments aside, the pair are having the time of their lives performing. They describe it as a second childhood.

Barring health problems, they don’t think they’ll ever quit.

Harrelson said: “Unless there’s some compelling reason, like the crowd marching against us with torches, I can’t see it. We enjoy it too much. Once we played three gigs in one day, and we were just as alive at the end as when we started. If I’m away from music for a couple of days, I go nuts.”

“Some days I go, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ where I just don’t feel right. Then I get the instrument and start playing, and that’s all that was missing,” Wilson said.

Picking up his aged uke, Wilson then launched into a less-then-idyllic ode to old age:

“Old rockin’ chair’s got me / Cane by my side / Hand me that gin, son / ‘Fore I tan your hide / Can’t get from this cabin / Ain’t goin’ nowhere / Just sittin’ here grabbin’ at the flies ‘round this old rocking chair.”