LAFAYETTE, LA — When Tommy Comeaux died tragically in November 1997, the music community rallied around the fallen musician and pathologist and sought a way to honor his life.
And, as tradition has it here, the effort to raise funds was centered around music, which was done with annual Medicine Shows. It was the right thing to do for many reasons, but especially because Comeaux, a renowned multi-instrumentalist, had played with BeauSoleil, Basin Brothers, Coteau, the Clickin’ Chickens and others.
Come Friday, April 22, 2022, 7 p.m., the 16th in a series of these evenings is set for Angelle Hall, St. Mary Boulevard and McKinley Street, on the UL campus.
Opening the show will student bands, the Angelle Aces (Cajun), Ragin’ Steppers (zydeco), Saint Street Songsters (string band), Ragin’ & Blues Band (R&B), and Vermilion Express (bluegrass).
General admission to Medicine Show 2022 is $10.00 (free with UL I.D.); and $25.00, which includes admission to a post-show reception honoring the performers, as well as Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music, who was chosen for the inaugural position a dozen years ago and who is retiring this year. Advance tickets available here.
“I did the best I could to move slowly, at first, to get the lay of the land and to see where the demand was and where the low hanging fruit were in terms of what students wanted and what resources we had in the community which turns out we had a lot,” said DeWitt, who relocated from California to Louisiana for the position.
“We were going to do more than Cajun and Creole music all along. Although I feel strongly that that needs to be the core of the program.”
Mark DeWitt, Professor of Music, Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music
The community resources were abundant and skilled and anxious to get to work and they all figured out the course together.
“The amount of musicians in the community who are so good at what they do and also interested in working in a university environment even if they had never done so before,” he said. “Some of them who hadn’t even gone to college themselves. It was cool.
“We kind of learned as we went. We learned things like teaching fiddle and accordion at one of those summer camps, which is like a one-week camp — as opposed to doing it for 15 weeks — it’s a whole different thing.
“There’s just more time to teach things. You can do it in a different order and do it in a different way,” he said. “So we learned some of that stuff together.”
The first course was Cajun music, something DeWitt was familiar with.
“So I started with Cajun music because that was my interest when I came here, and it also seemed like an obvious thing to start with,” said DeWitt. “And then we also found out there’s also student interest in other types of music too.”
“So we we added bluegrass and that was real popular for a while,” he said. “One of the things I also learned was that the students like something that’s new. So they go for the new thing and then it’s not so new anymore and then you have to do a little more persuading.
After Cajun music came bluegrass “and then we added zydeco band and then some blues and it just kind of grew over time. And now it’s all I can keep up with, it’s about as much a one person can do,” said DeWitt. “So I feel like it’s a good time to hand it over to the next person, whoever that turns out to be. I’ll do my best to share with them tips or secrets or things to remember.”
“We were going to do more than Cajun and Creole music all along,” he said. “Although I feel strongly that that needs to be the core of the program.”
While it was a new program at UL, DeWitt knew it was no secret how the area’s traditional music had kept going all these years and he responded accordingly.
“I knew pretty well we weren’t going to lead with music theory,” he said. “People learn music by ear, right? They learn by hanging out with other people and jam sessions are a relatively recent thing in Cajun music, but it’s still a way for folks to get some reps and get the music in their ear which is really important.
“I knew that going in that music theory was something to teach second, not first,” he said, adding, “or second or third.”
“We have a few traditional music majors, but it hasn’t been as popular a major as I would’ve liked. But then there’s always hope for the future on that,” said DeWitt. “Nonetheless, we’ve had a few and I had taught them a music theory class that was kind of tailored toward traditional music as part of their major.
“And they also got to learn how to read music a little bit in the same classes that the music business majors take, keyboard musicianship classes and so they get exposed to it, but it’s not like a prerequisite coming in. It’s not like they’re getting a sight reading test and they’re auditioning.”
DeWitt returns to California in June and he’s grateful for the opportunity the Comeaux Chair afforded him and all that came with living in South Louisiana.
“I certainly got to meet a lot of great musicians and work with them. Some of those were students, too,” DeWitt said. “But, certainly, the faculty we had and just the chance to actually live here in the middle of all this great music and kind of experience how it all fits together.”
DeWitt, an ethnomusicologist, paused, then continued.
“I’m not sure I can put it into words, even, how the cultural environment that nurtures the whole musical scene here is really interesting to be a part of and try to understand,” he said. “I’m still not sure I could really explain it, but I’m a lot closer than if I never lived here.”
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.”
