All Things Considered - Perils of Guitar

Perils of Guitar

Anyone who ever picked up a guitar knew right away that they were going to get sore fingers, and as I got older, I accepted the ongoing twinges, as a kind of martyrdom owed for virgins already delivered up front. However, I wasn't ready for the unnervingly sharp pain in my forearm that suddenly showed up in the middle of some Tennessee album sessions. I immediately downed tools and demanded massage. Unfortunately, in this particular part of Tennessee, massage was probably a sin and was only available from a God-fearing chiropractor. The local righteous spine-cruncher examined me and lined me up for treatment with two women in his employ. The first was to administer ultrasound treatment and didn't believe in evolution. The second would do massage and did believe in evolution but didn't think men had done it yet. Her version of massage involved enough topically applied pepper to send any cannibal who might dine on me yelping to the water bucket. And the treatment seemed to ease things a bit, at least by giving me time out of the studio.

However, these new, elegantly defined pains didn't recede for long, and luckily the one in the left arm was clearly linked to a particular bending technique, and this helped me to understand how the injury was coming about. What was also obvious was the way a biggish guitar on my knee pushed my back over sideways and kept it under tension. I consulted with my expert and nerdy friends, and we knocked up some instruments that sat differently and whose strings could be bent more easily. And while my back straightened and some of the problems eased, the arm pains stayed.

On the advice of a guitar-playing rheumatologist at Birmingham, England, University, I went to see the aches, pains and twinges department at St. Thomas' Hospital, a place I had only previously heard of in connection with its reputedly excellent clap clinic. The expert told me I should try to regard myself as a highly tuned athlete. As I laughed, my belly jiggled, and he revised his statement to say that, well, parts of me were highly tuned anyway and invited me back the next week with my guitar to see the boss rheumatologist, who collected instruments like me.

He was an amiable chap with a piano in his consulting room and an extensive experience of musicians' worn-out bits. I played a few bars, and he poked and prodded happily. It seemed I'd already done sufficient modification to my instrument through my technique and was already getting the massage and anti-inflammatories he would recommend, and he would only otherwise advance, with little enthusiasm, an operation that might or might not solve anything.

I bumbled on for a while with occasional massage, occasional ice and pills that gave me an acid stomach. I saw a New-Agey masseuse in California who played background music that made me homicidal while she called on the assistance of the spirits of the universe. I saw a down-to-earth woman in Pennsylvania who left me cross-eyed, a masseuse in New York who left me floating three feet over her massage table and various pioneers who had their chairs out in such unlikely places as Omaha, Nebraska. I met all kinds, but most of them had good, strong thumbs and left me with musculature temporarily so stretched that my fingers landed in a different place on the guitar.

I still hoped somebody could fix it, though, and when it was suggested, duly toddled off to the British Performing Arts Medicine Trust to see if they could. Their eminent rheumatologist, presumably used to dealing with clapped-out classical musicians, was astonished that I'd never had a teacher to discuss my injuries with and pronounced that I was paying the price of an unorthodox technique. Silly me. I thought it was the price of the virgins.