Bruce MacDonald, left, with Roger Kash. Olivia Perillo/photo
by Roger Kash
My dear friend and musical compadre, the inimitable Bruce “Weasel” MacDonald, soulful guitar slinger and Louisiana musical legend caught the bus to the great beyond this morning (Sunday, March 27, 2022) after a long and protracted illness.
He was a musical force in both Lafayette and New Orleans and will be dearly missed by all who had the pleasure of sharing the stage with him.
I had the pleasure of being his band mate in the Cat Head Biscuit Boys for over 10 years. He taught me so much and encouraged me to sing when I didn’t even know I had a voice.
I’d seen him wipe the stage with guitar players who were much more famous than he…he played with such a fierceness and tons of soul, wrote great songs….most of all, he was a great pal and I’ll miss him dearly. He was so unique, there’ll never be another quite like him. Thanks buddy for all the laughs and inspiration. Love ya to the moon and back.
Roger Kash, musician/Freetown Radio program host on KRVS/88.7 FM, played with Bruce MacDonald in the band Cat Head Biscuit Boys.Kash granted Bayou Hack Press permission to use his facebook post about Bruce MacDonald.
There won’t be a funeral, so you’ll not find his body in a casket or his ashes in an urn because MacDonald donated his body to science.
But what you will find is a grand event, organized by guitarist Tommy Shreve, set for 7 p.m., April 20, 2022, entitled “Lafayette Musicians Unite for a Brother, A Memorial Benefit for Bruce MacDonald,” at Warehouse 535, 535 Garfield St., Lafayette.
“This guy has contributed so much musically,” said Danny Kimball, drummer/percussionist and lifelong friend of MacDonald. “To think about Lafayette music if he hadn’t been here, there’d probably no Rufus, no Coteau, not mention all of the other bands.
“He moved the music itself forward in this area,” he said. “I mean, Coteau changed Cajun music.”
Kimball chuckled when he recalled MacDonald’s take on Cajun music.
“Bruce said, ‘It’s just folk music that’s there to be jacked-around with.’”
MacDonald also had an impact on the New Orleans music scene “with George Porter, the Song Dogs — I mean, he was working in rare air over there — Weasel was respected as a player,” said Kimball.
Kimball said MacDonald, whose day job was a house painter, hadn’t worked in some time because of poor health.
That said, in addition to the April celebration of MacDonald’s life, an online fundraiser at GoFundMe was established by Kimball and Rhonda Egan under the medical, illness and healing category before he died.
Getting MacDonald on board took a some coaxing, according to Kimball.
“I knew he was going to give me every excuse in the world not to do it,” said Kimball. “That’s how he is. I said, ‘Bruce, this is something we need to do for you and we need to do for us.
“‘We’re going to have to let you go and it is not going to be easy for a lot of people in this town. And that’s when he looked at me and said, ‘Okay. I just want you to take care of Julie and take care of my boy. Make sure they’re ok.’
‘He moved the music itself forward in this area. ‘I mean, Coteau changed Cajun music.’
Danny Kimball
“And I said that’s what this money is going to be for,” said Kimball. “We’re going to make sure that she’s okay as she makes the transition to the next phase of her life.”
Julie is Julie Marshall. She and MacDonald were longtime friends before their friendship took a romantic turn and they ended up sharing a home for 20 years.
Although MacDonald and Marshall had disability incomes, “half of that left yesterday,” Kimball said Monday.
a/k/a Weasel
Going back to his teen days, MacDonald was tagged with the nickname Weasel.
“Bruce, what a character. He’s like a caricature or something, you know. It’s like you can’t create this guy. And everybody knows him in Lake Charles as Weasel — from his character.”
Bruce MacDonald Robin May/photo
MacDonald’s mother “got on me about it,” Kimball remembered. “She goes, ‘Danny. I didn’t named Bruce ‘Weasel,’ I named him Bruce.’ And I go, “‘Ok, Mrs. Weasel.’ And she put her head in her hands. She was a doll. Oh, God. Mary Ellen was so special.”
It was about a decade or more ago when MacDonald preferred his given name to his nickname.
“He was kind of tired of it,” said Kimball.
Homeboys
Kimball and MacDonald go back to their days at LaGrange High School in Lake Charles. That, coupled with the fact that they would play in bands together for nearly as long, gives the drummer keen insight into the guitar player.
“Off and on forever. Yeah, he’s family,” said Kimball. “He’s like a brother to me.”
Brotherly love, however, wasn’t in the cards at their first encounter as high school sophomores. An early version of The Bad Roads was playing a house when MacDonald and two others arrived.
“I didn’t know these people,” said Kimball, watching it all unfold behind the drum kit. “They were drunk on their ass.”
MacDonald repeatedly shouted out a request to the band.
“‘Hey, mother fuckers, play Beach Boys,’” Kimball recollected. “He wanted to hear Beach Boy songs and he was obnoxious.”
The band insisted that the rowdy trio leave the party and they left.
Three weeks later at a Lake Charles hangout, the two met again.
“Somehow, I ran into Weasel again. I’d lost my ride and I was stranded there,” said Kimball. “Bruce gave me a ride home. He was in his dad’s car. Somehow we, I forget the exact deal, but the night he gave me a ride home, he scared me to fucking death.
“He was drunk on his ass. He was going down Enterprise Boulevard about 60 mph, running stop signs. It was raining,” he continued. “And when I finally got him to my parent’s house, which was on the way to his house, I got out, closed the door and he peels out.
“I swear to God, I fell on my knees in the ditch and thanked God I’m alive,” said Kimball. “And I never wanted to see that mother fucker again.
“Of course, the next week, I was over at his house,” laughed Kimball. “I fell in love with his mother. And we just started hanging out together with his little crew.”
Guitar curious
MacDonald was learning to play guitar at the time.
“He had this thing called the Color Way,” Kimball said, where the novice picker put little color-coded stick-ems on their fingers that coincide with the chords in the book.
Briant Smith and Terry Green, two guitarists in The Bad Roads, also started hanging around and they told MacDonald to ditch that method “and started showing him how to play,” said Kimball. “He was just starting to pick it up.”
Megan Barra/poster
MacDonald then became a roadie for The Bad Roads.
“And he was the worst roadie in the world,” Kimball said. “We paid him $25 a night to move the equipment. So what he would do is find some yo-yo that knew a little bit about the equipment and pay him $10 and he’d take the $15 and go buy beer. But he could solder really well.
“And if I demonstrate how he soldered, it was a physical thing how his elbows were out when he soldered, you’ll die laughing,” he said. “It was just amazing. He was such a character. We were all characters, bopping around playing music.”
Eventually, Green left the band and Smith took over lead and MacDonald played rhythm.
“He’d been learning how to play the whole time,” said Kimball. “And wanted to learn how to play so he could play Beach Boy songs.”
San Francisco
Kimball was the first of his friends to head out to San Francisco in 1968 and a few months later, MacDonald and Benny Graeff showed up, “because I was out there and said, ‘Man, y’all gotta come out here and check this out.’”
MacDonald was taken by Santana, who hadn’t even released an album yet.
“And then he saw the (Grateful) Dead. He, like, picked up the vibe, the whole thing,” said Kimball, who told his friend to wait until he sees the Sons of Champlin, “one of the top bands in San Francisco. They could give a shit about, ‘making it.’”
Kimball recalled an interview with Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead) in which the musician was asked who he thought was the best guitarist in the Bay Area and he replied, Terry Haggerty, a guitar player with Sons of Champlin.
“He was a monster,” said Kimball.
MacDonald, at the time, “wasn’t the player we have now. Bruce was fumbling around, but he synthesized those guys,” Kimball said. “That’s where he went and started working from and all that later on came out through him.”
MacDonald, Breaux & Zach
Kimball called “Migration,” Zachary Richard’s “big breakthrough album” in Canada in 1978. MacDonald and Dana Breaux were on guitars.
“It was basically Coteau and Zachary’s songs, as far as I’m concerned,” said Kimball. “Tells you Zachary’s really smart. ‘Migration’ broke him in Canada big time.”
The two guitarists had a unique working relationship and style.
“(MacDonald and Breaux) had all of these dual harmony things going on that were really amazing. Nobody was doing anything like that, having the patience to work all that kind of stuff out and push it the way they did rhythmically,” said Kimball.
Kimball explained:
“Dana and Bruce each had a guitar. A lot of the time they played on different sides of the stage. Bruce would run his extension speaker over to Dana’s amp, so it was sitting right there and Dana’s extension speaker was over on Bruce’s side.
“So they were like immersed in those two guitars. It was weird, it was fascinating,” he said.
In other words, the guitarists could hear what the other was playing and respond at the same time, merging the two guitars into one sound.
“The way they were so in tuned to each other they could pull off those ongoing rides together, harmonic rides and stuff,” said Kimball. “It wasn’t like everybody was trying to shred. It wasn’t about that. It was all these beautiful, melodic things and the rhythm was Cajun rhythms; shuffles and two-steps and everything.”
Reference point
Kimball said MacDonald’s performance at the Medicine Show 2 fundraiser for The Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music at UL Lafayette (captured on the Medicine Show 2 CD, recorded live at Grant Street Dancehall), is a classic example of his guitar skills.
Da Beans, with Kimball on drums, played that night.
“We didn’t have (Tommy) Shreve, he couldn’t make it and (Steve) LeCroix couldn’t make it, he was in Cape Cod,” said Kimball of the line-up that did consist of Gary Newman, bass; Sam Broussard and MacDonald on guitars, Pat Breaux, sax/accordion, Tommy Withrow, piano, and Mike Hanisee, guitars/vocals.
“I think we rehearsed for an hour,” said Kimball. “Our contribution on that CD is a medley of two songs, ‘We Been Runnin’ and ‘The Cuckoo’.
“We went through the set and everything’s going good and then we get into this thing and those two mother fuckers erupted. They just took the fuck over,” Kimball said. “There’s just four guitar rides, two on ‘Runnin’ and two on ‘Cuckoo.’ They both played absolutely brilliantly. “Bruce had the last run and he ripped the roof off of the fuckin’ place. The roar at the end of that, when we stopped that song, the roar that came off the crowd — they were stunned,” he said. “We were stunned.”
“I listen to it periodically and I still get chills from what he did, and the whole band. But what Bruce did.” A quick pause, and then he continued. “Sam played Sam to the max. And they kind of pushed each other a little bit, you know? And it’s magic. Pure fuckin’ magic.
“So,” Kimball added. “If you want a reference point on Bruce MacDonald’s playing, go to that and listen to the breadth of the chops that that man had.”
Celebration
No different than a New Orleans Jazz Funeral, the celebration of MacDonald, April 20th at the Warehouse, will be just that: a rollicking remembrance of a friend, father and helluva guitar player.
“I don’t see it as mourning a death so much as celebrating a life,” said Kimball. “And what better way to celebrate a musician’s life than to just play some music.”
Kimball expects “a pretty seamless deal. We’re making a CD of recordings that Bruce played on, a lot of songs that he played and sang his songs,” he said. “So we’ll have that swirling around between bands.
“It’s a night of reminiscing, it’s a night of memories and the tribe getting together again like the Medicine Shows where you had to be there because you wanted to see everybody,” he said.
“We’ll just celebrate his life and hopefully people will keep him in their hearts and their minds,” Kimball said. “And hopefully, with all that music he created — there’s a lot of it out there — people will note that this guy was a great guy and a great player.”
After two years, Festivals Acadiens et Creoles returns to the familiar surrounds of Girard Park for a weekend celebration of Cajun and Creole cultures in music, food and arts and crafts.
Yee-the-hell-haw!
And yet, the pandemic that dropped in on the world in March 2020 and which appears to be ebbing in the U.S., is, sad to say, on the rise in Europe and China.
And if all goes the way it has the past two years, the U.S. will probably again get the COVID en masse.
So the never-ending roller coaster ride continues.
This is way past exhausting. It’s been way too long and it’s way past on my last nerve which may be found in the crumpled mask I last wore in public nine days ago. It’s on the floorboard, passenger side.
Goodness gracious, I’m so tired of the pandemic. I’m tired and saddened by the unnecessary sickness and death of friends and countless strangers.
I’m especially over the obtuse chunk of citizenry who’ve been misled about the virus (and the election and the insurrection) by cynical politicians and their ilk whose platform of misinformation is peddled by certain media outlets.
You may know of these people. The ones who couldn’t be bothered with the simple task of wearing a mask, or getting the vax for not only themselves, but also their fellow Americans. Medical exemptions duly noted.
And now these same people are riding around the country in a convoy protesting any and everything designed to help put this pandemic to bed.
If I may, WTF?!
And there’s also the fresh pain of the War on Ukraine and where it may lead. I’m not a masochist, so I’ll not go there.
I’m so sick of it all. I’m worn down and nearly out.
I, we, all of us need a break from the insanity and inanity of the past two years before all meaning is lost and tossed, not unlike a book pulled from our public library shelves by the self-righteous.
So just in time, a hero emerges in the form of this upcoming festival weekend and it’s right here and it’s right now and it’s knocking on our door.
With tears of joy, I swear I can hear Monte Hall exclaim as only he could: “Festivals Acadiens et Creoles! C’mon down!”
Ah, yes. A reprieve. A respite. A revival, even. A weekend where we’re all sure to see, converse, hug and dance with friends we haven’t seen in two years.
We can still be cautious without being paranoid; Festivals Acadiens et Creoles is held outdoors. And our hearts can still go out to Ukrainians without being on our sleeves.
Take this break we’re given and revel in it.
Monday and the woes of the world will be here soon enough.
The late Courtney Granger will be honored Saturday, March 19, 2022, 1 p.m. on Scène Ma Louisiane. DCross photo
By DOMINICK CROSS
LAFAYETTE — In this much needed pause between calamities — a waning pandemic and the possibility of WWIII — make the best of the opportunity to indulge in Festivals Acadiens et Creoles, this weekend (March 18-20, 2022) in Girard Park.
The springtime version of the festival that’s usually held in the fall marks the 48th running of the music, food, arts and crafts extravaganza celebrating the Cajun and Creole cultures. One doesn’t have to go back in history to recall that COVID-19 put a halt to life as we knew it this time of year in 2020, and the virus kept most of us off-balance through 2022.
Virtual festivals became the rule of thumb everywhere and got us by, like decaf coffee, until the real deal that’s about to go down in two days and upcoming months. So, bring on the caffeine, the great outdoors, dancing shoes and an appetite for food, fun and frolic in all of the usual ways. Almost.
“We’re celebrating finally getting back together again, live in the park,” said Barry Ancelet, president of the board of Festivals Acadiens et Creoles. “We want people to please be responsible. Let’s not get carried away, careless at this point to undo the good things that are happening.
“Hopefully, as many people as possible will be vaccinated and just be responsible in how we gather. If anybody feels sick or symptomatic of anything, really, not just COVID, but anything, you know, they’ll stay home.
“Let’s just be safe. Let’s be smart,” he said. “If you’re coughing or running a fever, stay home.”
Festivals Acadiens et Creoles will again return to its normal time in October — yep, we’re getting a two-for-one this year — sans hurricane, pandemic or another world war.
Ancelet said that the original event that became this festival was held in the spring in Blackham Coliseum. But there are no plans to return to this time of year on a regular basis.
“We’re going to have the festival in October,” Ancelet said. “This spring festival is to make up for the one we didn’t have last October. In October, we’re still dealing with hurricane season, but I think it’s become our home, become our time.”
While bad weather may be an issue, it should take place when we’re all tucked away for the night. As of Wednesday, there’s “the chance for some severe weather as the front moves through, which is expected to be in the early morning hours of Friday,” according to KATC Weather, noting that the weekend outlook is good.
Music to your ears
The festivals’ line-up includes the usual Grammy-noms and Grammy winners, standard bearers of years past, envelope pushers of the present, and new bands with familiar names.
There is a tribute to the late Courtney Granger, Saturday, March 19, 2022, 1 p.m., on Scène Ma Louisiane. Granger, who left us way too soon at 39 in September 2021 , played Cajun fiddle and Cajun sang with The Pine Leaf Boys and Balfa Toujours. He sat in with everybody and would make the hair on your neck stand up knocking off a country crooner classic. Granger released Beneath Still Waters in 2016 and if you order it now, you should have it in your collection by next week.
Over the weekend, there’s the golden opportunity to listen and dance to Sheryl Cormier & Cajun Sound, Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band, Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys, Wayne Singleton & Same Ol’ 2 Step, Roddie Romero and the Hub City All-Stars, Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie, Bonsoir, Catin, Curley Taylor & Zydeco Trouble, Balfa Toujours, Joe Hall and the Louisiana Cane Cutters, Feufollet, Savoy Family Band, Cedrick Watson & Bijou Creole, Riley Family Band, The Potluck Band, Jesse Lege, Lil’ Nathan & the Zydeco Big Timers, Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rodailleurs, Wayne Toups & ZydeCajun.
Chris Ardoin and NuStep Zydeco, opening night, Friday, March 18. DCross photo
The Bayou Food Festival will give you a taste of the Cajun and Creole cultures, and the Louisiana Crafts Fair artists and craftspeople will have their wares to marvel over and purchase.
Looking ahead
Ancelet said the board will meet in early April to plan the fall festival, in which the week of will coincide with an ethnomusicology conference in Lafayette.
“We’ve got some interesting plans for the next one,” he said. “None of this is in stone, but what we’re discussing right now is celebrating Louisiana as an international Francophone crossroads, examining the connections Louisiana has to the rest of the French speaking world.
“Part of that is going along with the likelihood that we’re going to have a major, international Francophone Ethnomusicology Conference in Lafayette the week of the festival in October,” Ancelet said, adding, “all of this is in the planning stages, but this is what we’re shooting for.”
Look for scholars and performers from the Francophone areas “that we’re examining to see the connections,” said Ancelet. “Not only to ponder them, but hear them.”
A similar ethnomusicology conference was held over Zoom last year.
Who knew?
As it happened, Mason had a major impact on Ancelet’s life during his collegiate years, and, as it so happens, anyone who has ever enjoyed Festival Acadiens et Creoles.
Mason came to Louisiana in the early 1970s “and met with and learned from and recorded with the Balfa Brothers, Nathan Abshire, the Ardoins — a lot of the founding members of that generation — so he’s very well connected and a long-time, not only fan of, but very knowledgable of Cajun music and zydeco.”
While in Nice, France, when Ancelet was on his academic year abroad in 1972-73, Mason was playing “Crowley Two-Step” in a coffee shop, “And it changed my life,” said Ancelet.
Ancelet introduced himself and said he was from Louisiana and that the song eased his homesickness.
“And he said, ‘You must know all of the people I learned from, Dewey Balfa, Nathan Abshire…,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know any of those people, but I need to know who they are.’”
Roddie Romero & the Hub City All Stars, Saturday, 3:45 pm, Scène Ma Louisiane. DCross photo
Mason told Ancelet that when he gets back home, go to Basile, get directions to Dewey Balfa’s house and introduce himself. So, in the summer of 1973, he knocked on Balfa’s door.
“I said, ‘Are you Dewey Balfa?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I am.’ I said, ‘I’m Barry Ancelet and I’m from here and I was in France and I met Roger Mason,” recalled Ancelet, who said in his nervousness, his response got faster and faster before Balfa urged him to slow down and invited him inside.
“I went in and that’s how I got involved in all of this,” Ancelet said. “And it was in part due to Roger Mason.”
LAFAYETTE — Conni Castille’s insightful documentaries are all about the culture where she was born and lives. For years now, Castille, Senior Instructor Moving Image Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has trained her insider eye on what most people may take for granted about the Cajun and Creole cultures in South Louisiana and put it out for all to watch, enjoy and, yes, get a better understanding of these peoples. From the ordinary task of ironing, there’s I Always Do My Collars First (2007), to tasty local staples and what it takes to put them on the table with Raised on Rice and Gravy (2009) and King Crawfish (2010); to a deep dive on the South Louisiana envie for its other favorite four-legged friends in T-Galop: A Louisiana Horse Story (2012). And now with The Quiet Cajuns: One Heritage. Two Generations. One Disease, comes the story of two generations of Acadian Usher Syndrome, which has sprinkled many family trees with deafblind aunts, uncles and cousins.
The Quiet Cajuns, Saturday, March 12, 2022, 5 p.m., Acadiana Center for the Arts, 101 West Vermilion, Downtown Lafayette, LA Free and Open to the Public
The subject of the documentary, Acadian Usher Syndrome (AUS), may seem a departure from previous documentaries of daily life, food and horses/horse racing in South Louisiana, but not so for Castille. “I don’t find it a departure at all. The DeafBlind Cajuns are merely a sub-culture of the Cajuns, a group I’ve always documented,” said Castille, who had not heard of AUS until then ULL biology professor, Phyllis Baudoin Griffard, brought it to her attention. “I learned there was a subculture of Cajuns who have never heard a fiddle waltz and who lose their vision because of a genetic quirk that came here with the Acadians. “It made me think there may be others like me who didn’t know that the largest population of DeafBlind Americans lives right here in Acadiana,” she said. Griffard, who has the Usher Syndrome gene variant in her family, launched OurBio, a curriculum/oral history project that explores how the biology of our region shapes the story of its people. “I initially contacted Conni because of her film, King Crawfish, a wonderful example of how I envisioned an OurBio project could work, teaching biology through local examples,” said Griffard. “Like our bayous and prairies, the genetics of Usher Syndrome presented an opportunity to tell a good story about ourselves.” Castille hopes the documentary can help the afflicted by making more people aware of AUS and what’s available to them. “First, I think the film may help in identifying more DeafBlind in our community, making them more aware of the services available to them, as well as offering an opportunity to connect to the larger DeafBlind community,” Castille said. “Second, the general Cajun population can learn about the disease through the film. Understanding more about one’s genetic history can always be beneficial. “Third, we will hand out greeting etiquette guiding anyone who may see or meet a Deaf or DeafBlind person,” she said. “This can encourage contact, making the seeing population more willing to visit with the Deaf or DeafBlind.” The usual suspects came together to make the documentary on a shoestring budget. “With little to no funding, I was fortunate to have the creative team I’ve worked with in my previous documentaries agree to help me with this passion project,” said Castille, with a nod to cinematographers Allison Bohl Dehart and Brian C. Miller Richard and others. “The cinematography is beautiful. Students in our UL Moving Image Arts film program helped produce the film by working as second camera units and in some post-production,” she said. “I had the pleasure of meeting and working with local editor, Trevor Navarre, for the first time. His total creative immersion in the project, and his attention to detail, added deep emotion to the script.”
The film is closed-captioned. Following the screening there will be Q&A session. Platform interpretation in American Sign Language will be provided.
