Sometimes life throws you a wild curveball, and you just have to swing and hope for the best. This is a reality that some of the world’s biggest rock stars know all too well. In some cases, injured musicians went on to forge iconic music.
Take, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine. He once found himself with nerve damage in his arm that sidelined him in the early 2000s. After intensive physical therapy, he learned to play again. The band went on to release eight more albums and has continued touring for the past two decades. Let’s look at a few more examples.
Tony Iommi
Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi is considered to be one of the godfather’s of heavy metal. But there was a time, in his younger years, when he wasn’t sure he’d ever play guitar again after suffering a gruesome hand injury.
Recalling the story to Loudwire in 2017, Iommi explained that it happened when he was working in a factory as a young man. While working on an assembly line, his hand was crushed, and he lost the skin on the tips of two of his fingers.
“I went to the hospital, and they cut the bones off, and then they said, ‘You might as well forget playing.’ God, I was just so upset,” he recalled. “I wouldn’t accept that there wasn’t some way around it, that I couldn’t be able to play.”
Iommi went on to explain that he fashioned his own prosthetic fingertips out of melted-down soap bottles and learned to play while wearing them. He also figured out a way to use old leather to held him hold his guitar better.
“It worked, but then I had to persevere for a long, long time to get used to working with them,” he said, “and it was painful.”
Liam Gallagher
The thing about Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher is that he didn’t just change the way he sang after an accident. It was actually the catalyst for him to start singing in the first place.
Essentially, though, what happened was that, as a teenager, Gallagher was not interested in music. He was more of a sports kid. Then, one day, he got hit in the head with a hammer. Yes, a HAMMER. After that, he says, music started to make sense to him.
“I just started hearing music differently,” he recalled to The Guardian. “My girlfriend at the time was really into Madonna. She’d play ‘Like a Virgin‘, and I’d say: ‘I’m not having this s***.’ Then I got hit on the head with a hammer and thought: ‘This is actually a tune.’ So whoever hit me, I’d like to meet and thank, else I’d still be on the dole.”
Jack White
In 2003, Jack White was in a freak car accident while driving through his hometown of Detroit. His then-girlfriend, actress Renée Zellweger, was in the vehicle with him. As the pair was driving through downtown Motor City, another car made a sudden turn in front of them. The collision caused the vehicle’s airbags to deploy, severely injuring White’s hand.
Ultimately, The White Stripes had to cancel some shows, and White had to undergo surgery. He later told Guitar Player that he had to “relearn how to play” with his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers. “The airbag shattered all the bones in my index finger.”
He went on to explain that this forced him to reshape the way he played guitar chords. “I used to play A minor with my first three fingers, but now I use fingers two through four,” he revealed. “My index finger hangs out doing nothing most of the time.”
“I can do barre chords with it now, but I can’t play a C or a D minor with that finger,” White added. “It’s become dead to me in a lot of ways.”
The post 3 Musicians Who Had to Change the Way They Played After Serious Accidents appeared first on VICE.
