March 27, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, rarely does artistic rhythm rest as it does in Zoro the drummer. Hear from the man behind the great book Maria's Scarf how his talent and temerity ultimately equipped him for a mountain of fun for everyone.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Zarro the drummer. He's worked for musicians the
likes of Lenny Kravitz, Frankie Valley, and Lisa Marie Presley.
But before he was a renowned drummer, he was a
poor kid from California named Daniel Donnelly. Let's get into
the story. Take it away, Zorrow.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
My life is very much like Forrest Gump. All the
things that were not supposed to happen to Forrest happened.
If you remember in the movie, you know he's in
the White House with Elvis. All these amazing things to
this kid, the unlikely kid that was pretty much me.
(00:53):
My mother, Maria, had the enormous task of raising seven
children alone in the area known as camp in the Hood.
So I was straight out of confident. Like the rap
song says she was an immigrant, she actually came from
(01:13):
an aristocratic family. She was the daughter of a Supreme
Court justice. She had married my father about six months
of age. He took the only car we had and
abandoned us. So life was very difficult. We moved around
a tremendous amount because we were getting evicted for either
being late with the rent, and back in those days
(01:35):
in the sixties, they could kick you out if you
had too many people. All that has changed now. But
my mother tried to hold down as many jobs as
she could, but still wasn't enough, so we struggled a
lot just to make ends meet. In fact, there were
times when we moved when there was no money for
a U haul or anything to move from one apartment
to the next. So I would use literally my red
(01:57):
radio flyer wagon and we could load up furniture on
there if you stack it a certain way, and me
and my brothers would hoist it and haul it down
the street a couple of miles to the next place.
But at the same time, my mother had this incredible faith,
She had this vision and dream, and something pretty amazing
happened during the like when I was going into the
(02:19):
second grade. Even though we were poor, she always dressed
very dignified, and so she always carried herself as the
person she grew up being in Mexico, So she never
saw herself like that poor person. She carried herself in
a different way even though we were poor. But she
wore these scarves and she always looked fabulous in these scarves,
and inside of me was like a budding rock star,
(02:42):
which I had no idea was there at the time,
but there was this artistic flare about me. And I
asked her if I could wear her orange silk scarf
she was wearing. I asked her if I could wear
it for my second grade school picture. And she looked
down at me and she laughed and go, oh, no,
you can't wear my scarf. The boys will beat you up, Mako.
This is the United States. But I wanted to wear
(03:02):
it really bad. So I kept reasoning with her, and
I said, I don't care what they think. And so
the scarf looks cool. Elvis Presley wears one, Tom Jones
wears one. I want to wear a scarf. I want
to be different. And so she knelt down and tied
her orange silk scarf around my neck and then she
whispered in my ear. She says, one day, my precious son,
you will do something fantasmical with your life. Fantasmical was
(03:25):
the word she used. It was a mixture between fantastic
and amazing and wonderful, and it was her own own
word that she coined. But that's how she truly felt.
So I grew up in this household full of love,
even though we were in abject poverty. And I think
during those years of being sort of heartbroken, because I
remember trying to send letters to my father. He never
(03:47):
responded to any of the letters or the report cards
of the pictures. So I grew up with this incredible
sense of rejection. It would have been different if he
died or died in the war. Then I would just
have to have dealt with this is no longer can be.
But there was always this glimmer of hope inside this
kid that something he would write or do or say
would make his dad respond. And so he never did,
(04:10):
and that sent a big spear of hurt, pain and
rejection in me, which became the fuel later for me
doing what I ended up doing. Really, one great thing
that happened during those days we lived in Compton was
all my brothers and sisters loved music, and so I
(04:31):
grew up in a house where everyone was playing different records,
all the great rock and roll records, soul music and
motown jazz. My mother loved big band and Mariacci. And
then I had the great fortune a neighbor bought us
some tickets took me to go see Diana Ross and
the Supremes and the Temptations when I was seven or
(04:53):
eight years old, and I got so excited from the
concert that the next day I just wanted to play
drums onto the rhythm of soul music. I didn't own
any drums, but I was creative, so I looked at
my mother's cupboard and found some tupperware canisters and some
(05:13):
salad spoons, and then looked at the trash cans and
found like some Folders's coffee cans, all Monroca cans. And
I made a ghetto drum set, put it in my
red radio fire wagon, took it out on Compton Boulevard,
turned on my transistor radio to Wolfman Jacket, how doing
made Away and call it Brown, and put on soul music.
(05:38):
And then I just commenced to pounding on the drums,
and all the people around me were digging it and
throwing coins into my wagon. Something sparked in me that day,
and something came alive. That rhythm and that drummer thing
was calling to me. We ended up moving to Grant's Pass, Oregon.
(05:59):
It's beautiful up there. There's mountains, rivers, lakes, trees, and
they hated us because my mother was Mexican. But this
is fully the American dream. My mother was tired of
renting and she had this dream of having a house
one day. So we scrimped and saved, all of us
(06:20):
worked and put a little tiny piece of down payment
on a little plot of land out in the middle
of nowhere in the country. But we didn't have any
money for a dwelling. We lived in our nineteen sixty
two Chevy Nova, which was hot as hell in the summer.
No running water, no electricity, no outhouse. But I remember,
(06:40):
for all the harsh people that we met, we met
some godly Christian people as well. And there was a reverend.
His name was a Reverend Ed Williamson. He is the
one who let us shower at his house, and he
also bought me and my brother's shoes. We didn't have
the money to buy the shoes because we wanted to
go on this camping trip, so he bought us the shoes.
(07:03):
That's what allowed us to go to the summer church camp.
And that's actually the camp where I gave my heart
to Jesus. So sometimes it takes just a pair of
shoes to get a kid to find Jesus. And the
most beautiful part of that story, I was in Grant's
past preaching at a church and doing some book signings,
and that pastor showed up fifty years later and we
(07:24):
had this beautiful full circle moment. And I've been tracking
him down because I wanted him to know what I
had done with my life and how many people I've
affected because of the love of God he showed to
me and my family. So it was just the most
beautiful thing. But anyway, so in Grant's Pass is where
I officially wanted to be a drummer. So I entered
a talent show that were putting a band together, and
(07:47):
I just told him that I was a drummer, even
though I didn't have any drums or had never played
any drums other than the ghetto drum set on the
streets and Compton, which was not a drum set. So
I calmed my way into this band. And when we
had the first rehearse, so they were like, hey, you know,
where's your drums? And I said, they're in the shop
getting fixed. But I can play with my hands on
the back of the chair just to keep time. For
(08:07):
you guys, and so I faked my way through that
until the day of the show, and which of course
I wasn't going to have the drums that hadn't known
any We found a big, giant box. We ended up
painting a drum set on it by hand with glitter
and glue and all that stuff, and I ended up
playing at the talent show on the box with my
hands like I had been playing on the chair. The
(08:27):
kids in the band were totally disappointed, but I just
wanted to be in that talent show. And kind of
what sparked that whole thing was watching Elvis Presley on
the big televised satellite show he did called Elvis Aloha
from Hawaii. It was the world's first satellite broadcast broadcasts
all over the world. At the same time, I watched
the drummer behind Elvis. His name was Ronnie Tett, and
(08:50):
when I saw him play man, the guy looked like
he was having so much fun. I'm like, that's what
I want to do. I want to do what that
guy's doing. But then it kind of went dead for
a while because I didn't get in the school band,
and so at that point I needed a new dream,
and so living in rural Oregon. Everyone raised animals we
couldn't afford, like cows and horses and goats and stuff.
(09:12):
So I decided I was going to raise chickens because
they were really cheap to buy and they were small.
I wanted to be the world's greatest chicken farmer. Then
I raised a couple of Saint Bernards and then one
of them got loosed and destroyed my entire chicken farm
in one day. And that's what sort of God's plan
for my life. I needed a new dream, and so
I thought about it. I'm like, man, Music's what I
(09:33):
always really wanted to do, but I didn't know how
to get into it. I didn't own any drums.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
So, and you've been listening to the story of Zorro
the Drummer. His mother Maria, raised seven kids alone in Compton.
But his mom's incredible faith, well, it was always in evidence.
When we return more of Zorro of the Drummer's story
here on our American Stories, And we returned to our
(10:10):
American Stories and the story of Daniel Donnelly aka Zorro
the Drummer. When we last left off, Daniel had set
aside his dream of being a drummer, because while he
couldn't afford a drum set, didn't get into the high
school band, and chickens were cheap. But he'd soon have
a meeting with his school counselor that would change the
course of his life. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
He said, what do you like? I said music. Can
you find me a job that puts me around music?
And he goes, I'll see what I can do. A
week later he comes back and he goes, man, I'm sorry,
I couldn't find anything like what you wanted, but I
did find you a job, and I'm like, well, what
is it. He goes, well, it's a custodial position. And
I'm like, okay. Where He goes right here, right where,
right here? At the school my school. He goes, yeah,
(10:59):
oh man, it's like an embarrassing job, like the school
bell rings and all the kids are seeing you clean
the toilets. But he said, well, the good news is
you get to clean the band room. So I was like, wow, great,
I get to clean the bandroom. Well, at the end
of the two hours of the job, the last ten
minutes I reserved to sneak into the bandroom. After I
cleaned it, and then I would sneak on the drums
(11:21):
and play. Now, I never took a lesson. I didn't
own a set of drums, but I guess you could
say I was given a gift because from day one
I could play. I would do that every day, you know,
just daydream about being on stage one day. And then
one day, un beknownst to me, the band director was
(11:42):
in his office. He came out and startled me. He
caught me drumming on the job. So he goes and says,
wait right there, and goes and get somebody else. And
I know I'm getting fired. So I think he's bringing
my boss, Clarence, to tell him this kid sneaking on
the drums and playing. Instead. It was the swing choir
director says, play again like you were playing it, And
(12:06):
so I played, and they both looked at each other
and they're mumbling while I'm playing. And then and they said, stop, kid,
You've got an incredible amount of talent. You're like a
rhythmic genius. I need you in the swing choir, the
stage band, the marching band, all the school bands. And
that is how my career started. So I graduated high school.
(12:33):
Then I auditioned for and landed a gig with a
local band Italian family, a bunch of brothers and a sister.
They had an opportunity to go down to LA to
audition for Disneyland as the house band at the Tomorrowland Terrace,
which was the stage. It would rise from the ground
like hydraulically and then all of a sudden it would
be up in the band would be playing. And they
(12:54):
had held that job a couple of years earlier as
the house band, so I was certain we'd get the
job again, and now I'd be back in my southern California,
La area, live in my dream of playing. Additionally, I
with a show band. For whatever reason, we auditioned and
they didn't get the gig. It was heartbreaking. So I
(13:14):
ended up quitting the band and I was ready to
go back, and I called my mother, told her what
had happened. The band was falling apart, and she said,
she said, son, don't come back. I said, what do
you mean, She goes, If you come back, you'll never
make it. She said, you have real talent, but you
got to stick it out in LA You've got to
be there. That's where all the gigs are that's where
all your potential is, that's where opportunities are. There's nothing
for you up here, and I was scared it's gonna
(13:37):
be I didn't really know what to do, but I
listened to her advice and said okay. And then I
drove all around LA for a a couple of few days,
just you know, Hollywood and Beverly Hills, trying to figure
out the lay of the land, reading newspapers looking for
ads about drummers. Just couldn't figure out where to meet
the people. You know, I hadn't been there since I
was a kid, and I drove by Beverly Hills High
(13:59):
School and I thought, wow, it looked like a college camp.
Is like an Ivy League college campus, like Harvard or something. Gee,
I wish I wouldn't went to school like this. And
then this idea came to me. I wanted to meet
kids my age to play. So I went one day,
spent the last bit of money I had on the
latest Panasonic boom box, and then I went to Beverly
(14:23):
Hills High School one day in the afternoon and I
got there around lunchtime and I sat on the lawn
of this pristine well manicured lawn, a beautiful fall day.
I'm going to play my boombox. I'm going to crank
some earth Wind and Fire in the earth Wind and
Fire Platinum boom box. I'm bringing my practice pad and
my sticks, and I'm just going to play on the lawn.
And if there's any musicians within an earshot, they're going
(14:46):
to go, hey, who's that new kid on the lawn.
You know, I was trying to bring attention to myself.
I wore like a yellow silk shirt and silk pants.
I had a panama jack hat with a sash around
it that was yellow, had some shape. I was like
big bird out on that lat I was yellow, and
you're gonna find me. Within ten minutes of doing that,
(15:10):
this kid comes walking up to me and goes, hey, man,
are you new here? And I just said yeah, because
you know, I'm not really supposed to be there. You know,
you're not supposed to be just walking in on the campus.
So I said yeah. And then he was like, where'd
you come from? So I just transferred from Eugene, so
I kind of pretended like I was a new student there.
He played the bass. His name was Kennedy, and we
(15:32):
became fast friends, and then another kid came up to
me about ten minutes later, and it was the same thing.
It was like, hey man, you knew here. You look
like you had some mean chops, you know. I was
practicing fast on the pad and his name was Lenny
Well later he turned out to be Lenny Kravitz, and
Kennedy turned out to be Kennedy Gordy, who was the
(15:55):
son of Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. It
wasn't long after I met Kennedy Gordy. I'm up at
the Gordy compound and one day I see two rolls
Royce's pulling up and Kennedy's the only kid I knew
who had pinball machines. And he had an arcade in
his front living room which you didn't have to put
(16:17):
coins on them. So I was in there playing arcades
by myself. He was upstairs in his bedroom taking a shower.
His dad was upstairs. Then the doorbell rings and I
opened the doorbell and it's Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five,
which is another one of my favorite groups I grew
up with. I had all their forty fives. I belonged
to the fan club. So I'm there trying to talk
Michael and the brothers into jamming with me, like Michael, Jermaine, Jackie, Tito, Marlin, Man,
(16:41):
I know all your songs man, ABC, the Love You Save,
you know one more chance? I named them all you know,
I want you back. Michael just looked at me with
this smile. He goes, oh, kid, you got a lot
of heart. But anyway, I ended up chatting with them
for like twenty minutes, entertaining them while they were waiting
for Barry Gordy to come downstairs. So it was like
a dream come true. So all these amazing things were happening.
(17:05):
And then within a couple of years I had got
a gig with Philip Bailey, who was the lead singer
of Earthwin and Fire, my favorite group, the group whose
music I played on the boombox that day, And that's
how everything started. My biggest break that really put me
on the map was in nineteen eighty five. The group
The New Addition was looking for a drummer and Lenny
(17:27):
Kravitz had met the managers up at MCA Records and said,
I got just a guy, and he goes, hold all
your calls. I got just a guy. But by that
time the word had gotten out and now every other
great drummer in La had heard about it. It was
like a cattle call. There's no way I'm going to
get this gig over these guys. These guys are pros.
And Lenny's like, now, come on, man, you're funkier than
(17:49):
those guys, and you're cooler. You got an image, you
got a vibe, you get your Zoro vibe and your
Zorro hat. So he talked me into believing I could
do it. But through playing with them, I became a
teen star on my own right. So there were Zoro
posters and centerfolds in the white teen magazine, Black teen magazine,
Latin teen magazine, every kind of teen magazine you can imagine.
(18:15):
So my story is an overcoming story of epic proportions
in the spirit of like Rocky. But it's about a
musician with a dream and a family. It's about this
mother and this faith that my mother had that God
could still provide, that God could still do incredible things,
that nothing could count us out. I adopted that same
faith myself, and I've preached everywhere from San Quentin prison
(18:38):
to the most hardened criminals in the world to Hollywood
oscar parties. Probably the most beautiful thing about my story,
this overcoming story. I got to become the very thing
that I never had. I never had a loving father
who mentored me, supported me, did anything for me in
any way, or she performed. But I got to become
(18:58):
a father to my children. The most important kind of success,
the one that really matters when you're on your deathbed.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And a special thanks to Zorrow the Drummer. His book
is called Maria's Scarf and by the way, as a
final note, Tsorrow the Drummer still wears a scarf to
this very day when he plays an homage to his mom.
The story of Zorrow the Drummer an overcoming story of
epic proportions. Here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from Zarro the drummer. He's worked for musicians the
likes of Lenny Kravitz, Frankie Valley, and Lisa Marie Presley.
But before he was a renowned drummer, he was a
poor kid from California named Daniel Donnelly. Let's get into
the story. Take it away, Zorrow.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
My life is very much like Forrest Gump. All the
things that were not supposed to happen to Forrest happened.
If you remember in the movie, you know he's in
the White House with Elvis. All these amazing things to
this kid, the unlikely kid that was pretty much me.
(00:53):
My mother, Maria, had the enormous task of raising seven
children alone in the area known as camp in the Hood.
So I was straight out of confident. Like the rap
song says she was an immigrant, she actually came from
(01:13):
an aristocratic family. She was the daughter of a Supreme
Court justice. She had married my father about six months
of age. He took the only car we had and
abandoned us. So life was very difficult. We moved around
a tremendous amount because we were getting evicted for either
being late with the rent, and back in those days
(01:35):
in the sixties, they could kick you out if you
had too many people. All that has changed now. But
my mother tried to hold down as many jobs as
she could, but still wasn't enough, so we struggled a
lot just to make ends meet. In fact, there were
times when we moved when there was no money for
a U haul or anything to move from one apartment
to the next. So I would use literally my red
(01:57):
radio flyer wagon and we could load up furniture on
there if you stack it a certain way, and me
and my brothers would hoist it and haul it down
the street a couple of miles to the next place.
But at the same time, my mother had this incredible faith,
She had this vision and dream, and something pretty amazing
happened during the like when I was going into the
(02:19):
second grade. Even though we were poor, she always dressed
very dignified, and so she always carried herself as the
person she grew up being in Mexico, So she never
saw herself like that poor person. She carried herself in
a different way even though we were poor. But she
wore these scarves and she always looked fabulous in these scarves,
and inside of me was like a budding rock star,
(02:42):
which I had no idea was there at the time,
but there was this artistic flare about me. And I
asked her if I could wear her orange silk scarf
she was wearing. I asked her if I could wear
it for my second grade school picture. And she looked
down at me and she laughed and go, oh, no,
you can't wear my scarf. The boys will beat you up, Mako.
This is the United States. But I wanted to wear
(03:02):
it really bad. So I kept reasoning with her, and
I said, I don't care what they think. And so
the scarf looks cool. Elvis Presley wears one, Tom Jones
wears one. I want to wear a scarf. I want
to be different. And so she knelt down and tied
her orange silk scarf around my neck and then she
whispered in my ear. She says, one day, my precious son,
you will do something fantasmical with your life. Fantasmical was
(03:25):
the word she used. It was a mixture between fantastic
and amazing and wonderful, and it was her own own
word that she coined. But that's how she truly felt.
So I grew up in this household full of love,
even though we were in abject poverty. And I think
during those years of being sort of heartbroken, because I
remember trying to send letters to my father. He never
(03:47):
responded to any of the letters or the report cards
of the pictures. So I grew up with this incredible
sense of rejection. It would have been different if he
died or died in the war. Then I would just
have to have dealt with this is no longer can be.
But there was always this glimmer of hope inside this
kid that something he would write or do or say
would make his dad respond. And so he never did,
(04:10):
and that sent a big spear of hurt, pain and
rejection in me, which became the fuel later for me
doing what I ended up doing. Really, one great thing
that happened during those days we lived in Compton was
all my brothers and sisters loved music, and so I
(04:31):
grew up in a house where everyone was playing different records,
all the great rock and roll records, soul music and
motown jazz. My mother loved big band and Mariacci. And
then I had the great fortune a neighbor bought us
some tickets took me to go see Diana Ross and
the Supremes and the Temptations when I was seven or
(04:53):
eight years old, and I got so excited from the
concert that the next day I just wanted to play
drums onto the rhythm of soul music. I didn't own
any drums, but I was creative, so I looked at
my mother's cupboard and found some tupperware canisters and some
(05:13):
salad spoons, and then looked at the trash cans and
found like some Folders's coffee cans, all Monroca cans. And
I made a ghetto drum set, put it in my
red radio fire wagon, took it out on Compton Boulevard,
turned on my transistor radio to Wolfman Jacket, how doing
made Away and call it Brown, and put on soul music.
(05:38):
And then I just commenced to pounding on the drums,
and all the people around me were digging it and
throwing coins into my wagon. Something sparked in me that day,
and something came alive. That rhythm and that drummer thing
was calling to me. We ended up moving to Grant's Pass, Oregon.
(05:59):
It's beautiful up there. There's mountains, rivers, lakes, trees, and
they hated us because my mother was Mexican. But this
is fully the American dream. My mother was tired of
renting and she had this dream of having a house
one day. So we scrimped and saved, all of us
(06:20):
worked and put a little tiny piece of down payment
on a little plot of land out in the middle
of nowhere in the country. But we didn't have any
money for a dwelling. We lived in our nineteen sixty
two Chevy Nova, which was hot as hell in the summer.
No running water, no electricity, no outhouse. But I remember,
(06:40):
for all the harsh people that we met, we met
some godly Christian people as well. And there was a reverend.
His name was a Reverend Ed Williamson. He is the
one who let us shower at his house, and he
also bought me and my brother's shoes. We didn't have
the money to buy the shoes because we wanted to
go on this camping trip, so he bought us the shoes.
(07:03):
That's what allowed us to go to the summer church camp.
And that's actually the camp where I gave my heart
to Jesus. So sometimes it takes just a pair of
shoes to get a kid to find Jesus. And the
most beautiful part of that story, I was in Grant's
past preaching at a church and doing some book signings,
and that pastor showed up fifty years later and we
(07:24):
had this beautiful full circle moment. And I've been tracking
him down because I wanted him to know what I
had done with my life and how many people I've
affected because of the love of God he showed to
me and my family. So it was just the most
beautiful thing. But anyway, so in Grant's Pass is where
I officially wanted to be a drummer. So I entered
a talent show that were putting a band together, and
(07:47):
I just told him that I was a drummer, even
though I didn't have any drums or had never played
any drums other than the ghetto drum set on the
streets and Compton, which was not a drum set. So
I calmed my way into this band. And when we
had the first rehearse, so they were like, hey, you know,
where's your drums? And I said, they're in the shop
getting fixed. But I can play with my hands on
the back of the chair just to keep time. For
(08:07):
you guys, and so I faked my way through that
until the day of the show, and which of course
I wasn't going to have the drums that hadn't known
any We found a big, giant box. We ended up
painting a drum set on it by hand with glitter
and glue and all that stuff, and I ended up
playing at the talent show on the box with my
hands like I had been playing on the chair. The
(08:27):
kids in the band were totally disappointed, but I just
wanted to be in that talent show. And kind of
what sparked that whole thing was watching Elvis Presley on
the big televised satellite show he did called Elvis Aloha
from Hawaii. It was the world's first satellite broadcast broadcasts
all over the world. At the same time, I watched
the drummer behind Elvis. His name was Ronnie Tett, and
(08:50):
when I saw him play man, the guy looked like
he was having so much fun. I'm like, that's what
I want to do. I want to do what that
guy's doing. But then it kind of went dead for
a while because I didn't get in the school band,
and so at that point I needed a new dream,
and so living in rural Oregon. Everyone raised animals we
couldn't afford, like cows and horses and goats and stuff.
(09:12):
So I decided I was going to raise chickens because
they were really cheap to buy and they were small.
I wanted to be the world's greatest chicken farmer. Then
I raised a couple of Saint Bernards and then one
of them got loosed and destroyed my entire chicken farm
in one day. And that's what sort of God's plan
for my life. I needed a new dream, and so
I thought about it. I'm like, man, Music's what I
(09:33):
always really wanted to do, but I didn't know how
to get into it. I didn't own any drums.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
So, and you've been listening to the story of Zorro
the Drummer. His mother Maria, raised seven kids alone in Compton.
But his mom's incredible faith, well, it was always in evidence.
When we return more of Zorro of the Drummer's story
here on our American Stories, And we returned to our
(10:10):
American Stories and the story of Daniel Donnelly aka Zorro
the Drummer. When we last left off, Daniel had set
aside his dream of being a drummer, because while he
couldn't afford a drum set, didn't get into the high
school band, and chickens were cheap. But he'd soon have
a meeting with his school counselor that would change the
course of his life. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
He said, what do you like? I said music. Can
you find me a job that puts me around music?
And he goes, I'll see what I can do. A
week later he comes back and he goes, man, I'm sorry,
I couldn't find anything like what you wanted, but I
did find you a job, and I'm like, well, what
is it. He goes, well, it's a custodial position. And
I'm like, okay. Where He goes right here, right where,
right here? At the school my school. He goes, yeah,
(10:59):
oh man, it's like an embarrassing job, like the school
bell rings and all the kids are seeing you clean
the toilets. But he said, well, the good news is
you get to clean the band room. So I was like, wow, great,
I get to clean the bandroom. Well, at the end
of the two hours of the job, the last ten
minutes I reserved to sneak into the bandroom. After I
cleaned it, and then I would sneak on the drums
(11:21):
and play. Now, I never took a lesson. I didn't
own a set of drums, but I guess you could
say I was given a gift because from day one
I could play. I would do that every day, you know,
just daydream about being on stage one day. And then
one day, un beknownst to me, the band director was
(11:42):
in his office. He came out and startled me. He
caught me drumming on the job. So he goes and says,
wait right there, and goes and get somebody else. And
I know I'm getting fired. So I think he's bringing
my boss, Clarence, to tell him this kid sneaking on
the drums and playing. Instead. It was the swing choir
director says, play again like you were playing it, And
(12:06):
so I played, and they both looked at each other
and they're mumbling while I'm playing. And then and they said, stop, kid,
You've got an incredible amount of talent. You're like a
rhythmic genius. I need you in the swing choir, the
stage band, the marching band, all the school bands. And
that is how my career started. So I graduated high school.
(12:33):
Then I auditioned for and landed a gig with a
local band Italian family, a bunch of brothers and a sister.
They had an opportunity to go down to LA to
audition for Disneyland as the house band at the Tomorrowland Terrace,
which was the stage. It would rise from the ground
like hydraulically and then all of a sudden it would
be up in the band would be playing. And they
(12:54):
had held that job a couple of years earlier as
the house band, so I was certain we'd get the
job again, and now I'd be back in my southern California,
La area, live in my dream of playing. Additionally, I
with a show band. For whatever reason, we auditioned and
they didn't get the gig. It was heartbreaking. So I
(13:14):
ended up quitting the band and I was ready to
go back, and I called my mother, told her what
had happened. The band was falling apart, and she said,
she said, son, don't come back. I said, what do
you mean, She goes, If you come back, you'll never
make it. She said, you have real talent, but you
got to stick it out in LA You've got to
be there. That's where all the gigs are that's where
all your potential is, that's where opportunities are. There's nothing
for you up here, and I was scared it's gonna
(13:37):
be I didn't really know what to do, but I
listened to her advice and said okay. And then I
drove all around LA for a a couple of few days,
just you know, Hollywood and Beverly Hills, trying to figure
out the lay of the land, reading newspapers looking for
ads about drummers. Just couldn't figure out where to meet
the people. You know, I hadn't been there since I
was a kid, and I drove by Beverly Hills High
(13:59):
School and I thought, wow, it looked like a college camp.
Is like an Ivy League college campus, like Harvard or something. Gee,
I wish I wouldn't went to school like this. And
then this idea came to me. I wanted to meet
kids my age to play. So I went one day,
spent the last bit of money I had on the
latest Panasonic boom box, and then I went to Beverly
(14:23):
Hills High School one day in the afternoon and I
got there around lunchtime and I sat on the lawn
of this pristine well manicured lawn, a beautiful fall day.
I'm going to play my boombox. I'm going to crank
some earth Wind and Fire in the earth Wind and
Fire Platinum boom box. I'm bringing my practice pad and
my sticks, and I'm just going to play on the lawn.
And if there's any musicians within an earshot, they're going
(14:46):
to go, hey, who's that new kid on the lawn.
You know, I was trying to bring attention to myself.
I wore like a yellow silk shirt and silk pants.
I had a panama jack hat with a sash around
it that was yellow, had some shape. I was like
big bird out on that lat I was yellow, and
you're gonna find me. Within ten minutes of doing that,
(15:10):
this kid comes walking up to me and goes, hey, man,
are you new here? And I just said yeah, because
you know, I'm not really supposed to be there. You know,
you're not supposed to be just walking in on the campus.
So I said yeah. And then he was like, where'd
you come from? So I just transferred from Eugene, so
I kind of pretended like I was a new student there.
He played the bass. His name was Kennedy, and we
(15:32):
became fast friends, and then another kid came up to
me about ten minutes later, and it was the same thing.
It was like, hey man, you knew here. You look
like you had some mean chops, you know. I was
practicing fast on the pad and his name was Lenny
Well later he turned out to be Lenny Kravitz, and
Kennedy turned out to be Kennedy Gordy, who was the
(15:55):
son of Barry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. It
wasn't long after I met Kennedy Gordy. I'm up at
the Gordy compound and one day I see two rolls
Royce's pulling up and Kennedy's the only kid I knew
who had pinball machines. And he had an arcade in
his front living room which you didn't have to put
(16:17):
coins on them. So I was in there playing arcades
by myself. He was upstairs in his bedroom taking a shower.
His dad was upstairs. Then the doorbell rings and I
opened the doorbell and it's Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five,
which is another one of my favorite groups I grew
up with. I had all their forty fives. I belonged
to the fan club. So I'm there trying to talk
Michael and the brothers into jamming with me, like Michael, Jermaine, Jackie, Tito, Marlin, Man,
(16:41):
I know all your songs man, ABC, the Love You Save,
you know one more chance? I named them all you know,
I want you back. Michael just looked at me with
this smile. He goes, oh, kid, you got a lot
of heart. But anyway, I ended up chatting with them
for like twenty minutes, entertaining them while they were waiting
for Barry Gordy to come downstairs. So it was like
a dream come true. So all these amazing things were happening.
(17:05):
And then within a couple of years I had got
a gig with Philip Bailey, who was the lead singer
of Earthwin and Fire, my favorite group, the group whose
music I played on the boombox that day, And that's
how everything started. My biggest break that really put me
on the map was in nineteen eighty five. The group
The New Addition was looking for a drummer and Lenny
(17:27):
Kravitz had met the managers up at MCA Records and said,
I got just a guy, and he goes, hold all
your calls. I got just a guy. But by that
time the word had gotten out and now every other
great drummer in La had heard about it. It was
like a cattle call. There's no way I'm going to
get this gig over these guys. These guys are pros.
And Lenny's like, now, come on, man, you're funkier than
(17:49):
those guys, and you're cooler. You got an image, you
got a vibe, you get your Zoro vibe and your
Zorro hat. So he talked me into believing I could
do it. But through playing with them, I became a
teen star on my own right. So there were Zoro
posters and centerfolds in the white teen magazine, Black teen magazine,
Latin teen magazine, every kind of teen magazine you can imagine.
(18:15):
So my story is an overcoming story of epic proportions
in the spirit of like Rocky. But it's about a
musician with a dream and a family. It's about this
mother and this faith that my mother had that God
could still provide, that God could still do incredible things,
that nothing could count us out. I adopted that same
faith myself, and I've preached everywhere from San Quentin prison
(18:38):
to the most hardened criminals in the world to Hollywood
oscar parties. Probably the most beautiful thing about my story,
this overcoming story. I got to become the very thing
that I never had. I never had a loving father
who mentored me, supported me, did anything for me in
any way, or she performed. But I got to become
(18:58):
a father to my children. The most important kind of success,
the one that really matters when you're on your deathbed.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And a special thanks to Zorrow the Drummer. His book
is called Maria's Scarf and by the way, as a
final note, Tsorrow the Drummer still wears a scarf to
this very day when he plays an homage to his mom.
The story of Zorrow the Drummer an overcoming story of
epic proportions. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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