Donnie & Bernie
Quote # 1 (The Impact of Bush)
My life changed forever when I first saw Donnie play with The Mandala. He offered a completely different slant on guitar playing, and it motivated me to study the guitar even more diligently. Donnie’s new band after The Mandala was called Bush. I was just starting a band with the idea of trying to play the tunes from their fantastic album, and I was hoping that we would be a fraction as good as Bush at most, so I called my band Stem. I’ve been trying to copy some of Donnie’s licks for years, and I’ll go to my grave with the same desire.
Quote # 2 (Roy Kenner takes one for the band)
I went to see The Mandala play at a church called St. Nick’s in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1968. George Olliver had left the group and Roy Kenner had joined as lead vocalist and frontman. He had huge shoes to fill, seeing that George was a stellar frontman with incredible athletic ability. So here was Roy Kenner, Hugh Sullivan on Hammond B-3, Donnie Troiano on guitar, Whitey Glan on drums, and Don Elliott on bass. I had made my way to the front of the stage, as usual. The curtain opens, and there’s Roy, standing on top of Donnie’s stack of Traynor amps, six feet above the stage floor. As the band launches into the first power chord, Roy Jumps off the amp, performs the splits onto the stage floor, and lets out a blood-curdling scream, due to the fact that he had landed squarely on his “family jewels”. Two roadies carry him off to the broom closet/dressing room at the side of the stage, and the band plays on. I love Roy with all my heart, but in an instant I’m watching the band play instrumentally, stretching the songs out as Donnie and the boys launch into some amazing playing. They blew everyone’s minds with their virtuosity. They finished the set, and I nervously knocked on the dressing room door to see if Roy was okay. (At this point, I had never met my heroes). The door opens, and there’s Roy, covered in sweat, with an ice pack gently placed on his crotch. Whitey smiled at me and, seeing the concerned look on my face, told me that Roy was okay. They played their last set with Roy, and they were stellar. I heard later that Roy was incommunicado for a few days after that.
Quote # 3 (The Telecaster)
In 2006, during one of several Troiano Tribute shows, I got to play Donnie’s legendary 1961 Fender Telecaster. After the concert, Frank Troiano asked me to keep the guitar. In my heart I know that the guitar will always belong to Donnie. No one will ever make it sing like he did, but I’m thrilled to be its caretaker. Thank you, Frank. That guitar looks like a prototype of every guitar that came after. It was a living, breathing workbench! It oozes The Toronto Sound, although only Donnie’s fingers could massage it to perfection. At some point I think the guitar should be in a music museum. Whenever I play, I always have in the back of my mind “WWDD?” (What Would Donnie Do?). Donnie was my hero and my friend. I’m so incredibly lucky. I will honour his memory to my last breath.
For Your Consideration
I have a pet peeve about musicians who hound you to get up and play with the band, (especially when they yell it into your ear in the middle of a song). I find it obtrusive. Never in a million years would Donnie have asked to get up and play. He came to see the band. Donnie was a class act, through and through. He came to see me in the studio when I was recording my first album in 1983. When I asked if he’d like to play on a track he said to me, “You’ve been waiting for a long time to do this, Bernie. You don’t need me to play.”
I’ve never told anyone this, but just a few months before Donnie’s final trip to the hospital, he called me one morning after a benefit we had played together the previous night. After telling me how generous I was to let him play (as if), he said to me, “Bernie, sometimes I don’t think you realize how good a guitar player you really are”. The memories flooded through my mind about the years I spent as a pupil of this man, and I thought back to the moment I walked in my parent’s house in 1968 after first seeing The Mandala. My mom was sitting in a chair waiting for the report. “Mom, remember the name Don Troiano. He’s going to be famous”. I called my mom as soon as I hung the phone up with Donnie and I told her what he had said to me. She cried.
