Rare air, rare breed: Lifelong friend remembers Bruce MacDonald, guitarist extraordinaire, and, quite the character

by DOMINICK CROSS

LAFAYETTE, LA. — Another impactful musician will no longer walk among us.

Stellar guitarist, Bruce MacDonald, 74, died Sunday morning (April 27, 2022) after a long illness basically in the form of congestive heart failure.

MacDonald played with Zachary Richard, David Egan, The Bad Roads, Rufus Jagneaux, Coteau, Little Queenie, George Porter, Exuma, Hard Heads, The Song Dogs, Native Sons, King Creole, Mamou, BeauSoleil, Cat Head Biscuit Boys and others.

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.

Music will be provided by Red Beans and Rice Revue, The Bucks, Has Beans with special guests Sonny Landreth, Zachary Richard, Roddie Romero and Alex MacDonald, Bruce’s son.

“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.

‘Heart poured in every note’

‘He played with such a fierceness and tons of soul’

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.”

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.”

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.”