A song rising out of tragedy

By SHAWN STAR

Dom Polito can remember watching his older brother play guitar in his room for his friends. He remembers thinking how cool it looked and sounded, and wanted to try too.

“They just slapped me in the back of the head and said, ‘Get out of here, squirt. You can’t play’,” he recalls, laughing at the memory. “So I just thought, well I’ll show you, and slowly I started playing his guitar.”

Two or three months later he found himself “accelerating at some unusual quick speed.”

Polito soon lapped his brother, he says, while learning more in one year than his brother had in three — and doing so mostly self-taught. His playing got more and more serious until, one day, tragedy struck.

“I had this serious accident where I lost these two digits,” he says, holding up his right hand to show that half of his pointer and middle fingers are missing.

The accident happened when Polito was working a punch press. The machine, used to make circuit boards, was about the size of a kitchen table and brought about five tons of steel together in an instant.

“I was inside, grabbing the circuit boards, up to my waist — and I heard the click,” he says, explaining that the “click” indicated the steel was about to close.

He pulled himself out of the press as quickly as possible, with barely a second to spare. He escaped certain death, but he didn’t pull his right hand away in time and the impact left the two fingers “flatter than a newspaper”.

“It completely changed my life.”

Polito says that before the accident, music was the only thing he had a whole lotta love for. Finding himself dazed and confused in the aftermath, he realized his future would be a battle of evermore.

“When I got to around the three-year mark I said to myself, ‘Okay, you’ve got to stop feeling sorry for yourself (and) this has got to end’,” he said. “You either move on, or figure out a way to play guitar.

“So I made the decision to figure out how to play guitar.”

From there, he found inspiration in a variety of guitarists, and from a variety of genres. But one really stuck out for him: Tony Iommi, guitar player for Black Sabbath. While he “always loved bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin”, Polito says he had no idea beforehand that Iommi was missing the ends of three fingers on his fretting hand.

“I thought, how can this guy play like that? His solos are so intricate, even a virtuoso has problems playing like that.”

It took more than a decade of trying different ways of holding the guitar pick before he finally found a comfortable fit: holding the pick between his thumb and severed pointer finger.

Polito, 48, who lives near Weston Road and Highway 7, now runs a fully equipped home recording studio, owns somewhere between 30 and 40 guitars and plays in three bands.

Mason Dixon, is a classic rock tribute band that he has played with for 17 years. Mama Kin is an Aerosmith tribute band he found himself joining last year after his musician friend, Alan Larocque, died in a car accident. And his main gig is as lead guitarist in a Led Zeppelin tribute band, which is part of the company Classic Albums Live.

“It’s a recital, really, about the music — in essence, recreating the record the way it was recorded,” he says about the production, which plays all over North America.

They have been picked up by a booking agency in California, and have been booked for an April 16 gig at Massey Hall. That booking is a dream come true for Polito.

“I get an email one day. ‘Massey Hall’ — that’s all it said. My jaw dropped. I spent the last 20 years of my life going to Massey Hall, watching absolutely every band that I loved, so for me it’s just a milestone now and a huge accomplishment.”

While that brought good news, it followed likely the most serious blow of Polito’s life — the passing of his father. Only one day later, Polito had to go back to doing what he does best.

“I have the best job in the world, but the last thing I wanted to do after losing my dad was play a show,” he said. “But the show must go on.”

And go on it did, though Polito says he has virtually no memory of it.

“My father — my mentor, my life — that’s what I lost July 1,” he said. “I’m sad that he (won’t) get to see Massey Hall.”

While that night will mark a major milestone in Polito’s life, an episode back in 2007 is what he describes as an unbelievable opportunity.

It was at a Black Sabbath show, in the backstage VIP section. He was talking to one of his idols, Ronnie James Dio, thinking it was the greatest moment of his life. His other idol, Tony Iommi, was there as well, but Polito knew that Iommi never came to the VIP section to meet fans.

“I’m standing there talking to Ronnie, and I knew Tony wasn’t going to come out and then I look in the distance and these two doors open,” he said, describing how about 45 people swarmed the doors. “It’s Tony Iommi — he’s coming out.”

Saying he was like a kid in a candy store, Polito figured he’d struck the jackpot. But it got better.

“I could see (Iommi’s) tech … and he’s pointing to me,” said Polito, who looked behind him thinking they must have been pointing to someone else. “Tony walked right through the crowd, walked right in front of me, talked to me for 25 minutes, left, and I never saw him again — and neither has anyone else.”

As luck would have it, Iommi’s guitar tech had overheard Polito talking to someone else earlier about how he plays with missing fingers. He is now the proud owner of pictures of himself showing Iommi how to play guitar!

While the next big thing has seemingly always risen from tragedy for Polito, he recognizes that it is really because of his own decisions made in the wake of tragedy.

“I think everybody has some sort of tragedy,” he said. “We’re all going to come across something that’s going to throw everything off.

“I think it’s how you deal with it, what you do with it and how you handle it that’s going to make the difference in your life.”