What makes and is greatness? (Los Angeles, Oregon, tours/performances US, world-wide; 1969 to present-day, with backstory): Zoro’s story is the Impossible Dream.
Not the song from the 1965 musical Man of La Mancha. Nor one of the songs a knit-together-like-glue family swooned over. Nor one of the many chapter titles that evoke songs in this remarkably loving memoir by one of the world’s great drummers – Zoro. Repeatedly voted #1 R&B drummer in the world, the “Minister of Groove” (rock n’ roll and hip-hop music too) sends a rocking message to “keep dreaming and reaching for the stars” no matter how impossible that seems.
Born Danny Donnelly, Zoro legally changed and tweaked his name to honor a fictional cowboy hero with Mexican roots who fought for justice wearing a black mask. Nothing appears to be hidden in this story in which Zoro’s heart leaps off the pages. The emotions he expresses come through as overly optimistic given what he, his Mexican-American mother Maria, and his six brothers and sisters went through for years and years.
Above all the gratitude he feels, it’s his mother he “owes a great debt” to. Maria’s Scarf – what a symbolic title you’ll find it to be. It took some thirty years for Danny to become Zoro.
“The world said I would never amount to anything.
My mother said all things are possible to those who believe.
I believed my mother.”
He dedicates the first “Act” of Maria’s Scarf to his “saint” of a mother, whose dreams to be an actress were cut off but never wavered in wanting her children to find theirs. Consistently she tells Danny someday he will do something “fantazmical” – and he did. Love is what makes this story fantastic and amazing – the two words Maria combined to invent a memorable one. His formative years with Maria’s unwavering love is fittingly the longest part, consuming the first half of this 400+ page memoir. Vivid, crushing, memorable scenes that enable an appreciation of the depths from which Zoro overcame.
The second “Act” honors Armando, Mary, Ricardo, Patricia, Bobby, and Lisa – the siblings who watched each other’s backs he “shared the journey” with. And what a journey it is! Five different fathers, Zoro the fifth-born child, the first born in America; all singlehandedly raised by one strikingly strong and devoted mother whose beauty betrayed her.
The third “Act,” the shortest, celebrates the woman he fell instantly in love with, and his two children he loves the way he wanted his father to care about him.
In his early sixties, Zoro looks back on Danny’s impoverished childhood; aching feelings of low self-worth abandoned by his Irish-American father; how survival pulled his family together rather than apart; the racism he and his family were subjected to; and his never-give-up spirit, soulfulness, and wistful way he frames his story. The stuff of a motivational speaker, which he also is, along with being a great educator writing The Commandments of R&B Drumming.
You can get a good musical sense of the upbeat, nostalgic, and appreciative tone of this story by the titles of chapters: “Wind Beneath my Wings,” I Feel the Earth Move,” “With a Little Help From My Friends,” “Come Fly with Me,” “I Will Survive,” “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”
How can a memoir of such hardship before reaching fame be so positively told?
This isn’t a Nature vs. Nurture question. It’s abundantly clear it took both, but without the indefatigable nurturing of his mother, Danny might not have been equipped to boldly break-through-the-impossible odds he was up against. And yet, he tells us he was born with “an “uncanny ability to make people dance, to make them smile, to make them happy in a world that wasn’t always happy.”
Early in his life people told him, “Your groove will take you places you can’t imagine,” but he battled with the scars of low self-esteem caused by an absent father. We’re moved by how long he spent desperately trying to meet and create a relationship with him. Eventually, he found his identity through drumming.
Danny’s story opens when he’s five and living in South-Central Los Angeles in Compton, “the most crime-ridden zone neighborhood” in California. By the time he was ten, the family moved thirty times.
This isn’t a story of woe-is-me. It’s a look-at-me story of great pride and resoluteness to rise above.
Take a look at these videos to see how charismatic, joyful, energetic, and grateful Zoro is:
The word inspiring is used so often it doesn’t adequately describe how poverty and marginalization led to homelessness before Danny saw the possibility of his dreams. Imagine what it must have been like for his large family to live in a 1962 Chevy Nova when the family moved to rural, white Oregon with its disturbing racism. They also met some well-meaning people, who along with his eldest brother and a sister were instrumental in helping the family move up, first to trailers of varying size and space. Trailers they turned into homes, offering a respectful perspective on what it means to own a place of your own.
Once Danny’s talents became recognized, breakthroughs snowballed. By being in the right place at the right time, but mostly by sheer grit, practice, training, and a passion that won’t quit. The memoir then reads like a Who’s Who in the history of musical genres over the decades tracked, with a playlist a mile long. Maria loved the music of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, so you’ll find all sorts of genres and legends you remember or learn of.
Friendships also make Zoro’s world go round. Chief among them is his lifelong friend Lenny Kravitz from their high-school-aged days when they dreamed of fame. Kravitz, who became a multiple Grammy award-winning rock n’ roll musician, was highly influential in Danny’s quantum leap to tour with the New Edition R&B group, “the most successful” in the 1980s, founded in Boston by Bobby Brown.
Thirty-pages of black-and-white images of Maria, brothers and sisters, friends, and a few icons Zoro played with visualize the written word. Lenny Kravitz is in a number of them, but not his friend Kennedy. Imagine being Danny driven in a Rolls Royce to his Beverly Hills mansion, then learning his father was Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records. (Kravitz’s mother was Roxie Roker, the actress in the groundbreaking 1970s TV show, The Jeffersons.)
Other photographs show stories told of some of the heroes Danny grew up on Zoro played with – Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Temptations.
This isn’t a story of naming names to be a bragger. It’s a story of: If I can do it so can you. Maybe not to the heights Zoro reached, but in terms of reaching for your dreams, sense of purpose, and happiness. All the while, remembering “family is everything.”
Lorraine