Maiming is the Mother of Invention
I think Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said that music was a far superior art form to writing. I can accomplish with a lot of effort in five-hundred pages what someone can accomplish in three minutes of tickling the ivory or blowing their horn.
Chief among my regrets is that I never really learned an instrument. I tried with the drums, and even got good enough to keep time and do drumrolls, but something happened that derailed my ambition and I was the first to drop out of a long-since disbanded high-school band that wasn’t that serious. And since I’m partially and permanently injured after my time in the army, I’m not about to pick up some drumsticks and bang those skins again any time soon.
I had a friend in the army who was a very good guitarist, whose taste skewed toward heavy metal, though he kept an open mind about all kinds of music. I told him I liked Black Sabbath alright, and after he sort of waved them off as “proto-metal” (you can hear the words Ozzy’s singing, for instance), he mentioned that Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, got the tips of his fingers cut off while working in a factory as a young man.
The injury would have put the kibosh on a lesser man’s musical career, but being forced to compensate for the injury and find a workaround caused Iommi to choose a slower, more riff-oriented style to his playing, one that had a sludgy sound to it that drove aesthetes crazy. I think the rock critic Lester Bangs said Black Sabbath made music that sounded like what one would expect to hear if they were to go back in time and give troglodytes electric instruments and just let the cavemen jam.
But that heavy, hypnotic drone is critic-proof, and can still make heads nod to this day, while technically more virtuoso neoclassical metal just fades into the background like so much white noise. Henry Rollins once analogized Sabbath as the AK-47 of rock music; it’s durable enough to weather any abuse, especially the cruelest: the test of time. Some kids may not know Iommi’s name, and they may only know his guitar through hip-hop samples and videogames like Rock Band with its phony Fender Stratocaster, but they know his songs just the same. Who hasn’t hummed Iron Man’s pulverizing riff, the one that lead singer Ozzy Osbourne said sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”?
When my friend told me about Sabbath’s guitarist losing the tips of his fingers and perhaps improving because of his horrible accident, I thought of the boxer Howard Winstone. I know quite a bit more about boxing than I do about heavy metal, and I remembered reading about how Howard Winstone was a hot prospect in the Great Britain boxing scene as a young man. This was the old days, though, and most boxers had day jobs, even the topflight ones, and Mr. Winstone worked in a toy factory between fights.
One day laboring at his station in the factory “the Welsh Wizard” felt an agonizing, sharp pain in his right hand and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was missing the tips of the fingers on his right hand, which was covered in a blood-soaked cocoon of gauze and tape after emergency surgery. Some kind of machine press had given him a brutal manicure. As Henry Chinaski says in Barfly, of his own stint working in a toy factory, “You don’t know how men suffer for children.”
One of the things most people who don’t follow boxing don’t know about the game is that the majority of boxers don’t close their fists until right before they throw a punch (in order to conserve energy); that said, losing the tips of one’s fingers, especially on their dominant hand, should be the death knell for any pro boxer’s career.
Mr. Winstone, however, was not any old boxer. He hailed from the same Welsh coalmining town as another great fighter, Johnny “the Matchstick Man” Owen, who tragically died in the ring. In a book about the latter boxer (one of the best boxer bios I’ve read) there is a scene in which a gas explosion in the local colliery not only caved in the mine and killed the men trapped inside, but ventilated a fireball that reached to the local school, where the windows were shattered and the kids flew across the room like ragdolls, cast beneath their desks in some mockery of the Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
Life in Merthyr Tydfil was old stone castle ruins aboveground, and bituminous ancient rocks hidden beneath the ground, which men had to chisel out with iron at the peril of their own lives. I imagine even the cloud formations in the sky looked like snowy quartzite massifs to those young boys who had the inclination to look up and daydream. Hard times make hard people, and Howard Winstone decided that, having lost pieces of three fingers in his dominant hand, he should work on his jab (the straight punch executed with the non-dominant hand). Winstone developed one of the fiercest jabs in the business, and worked that left like a piston to flummox and blind opponents into submission and become maybe the best fighter to ever emerge from Wales. These days citing the flu or even a sore big toe (a la cruiserweight David Haye) is enough for a boxer to absolve themselves of any responsibility in a bad performance. I doubt Howard Winstone ever griped, post-fight, about how a lackluster performance was due to the lost of several fingertips, but then again he fought well enough and hard enough to never need alibis or rationalization, even in losses.
I’ve had two surgeries on my right shoulder, the details of which I won’t burden you with tonight. Suffice it to say, that a bad shoulder that hurts consistently is nothing compared to the loss of some fingertips, and typing is an easier way to make one’s living than punching and being punched. Besides which, I’ve noticed that my arm hurts less when I write, as if maybe the endorphins released by composing have a healing effect commensurate to or maybe greater than the two Percocet I allot myself per day.
When the pain throbs, though, I will try to remember Tony Iommi and Howard Winstone, whose own adaptations should shame me into silence and stifle any complaints before I give them voice, even to myself in something as insubstantial as a blog post.
Chief among my regrets is that I never really learned an instrument. I tried with the drums, and even got good enough to keep time and do drumrolls, but something happened that derailed my ambition and I was the first to drop out of a long-since disbanded high-school band that wasn’t that serious. And since I’m partially and permanently injured after my time in the army, I’m not about to pick up some drumsticks and bang those skins again any time soon.
I had a friend in the army who was a very good guitarist, whose taste skewed toward heavy metal, though he kept an open mind about all kinds of music. I told him I liked Black Sabbath alright, and after he sort of waved them off as “proto-metal” (you can hear the words Ozzy’s singing, for instance), he mentioned that Sabbath’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, got the tips of his fingers cut off while working in a factory as a young man.
The injury would have put the kibosh on a lesser man’s musical career, but being forced to compensate for the injury and find a workaround caused Iommi to choose a slower, more riff-oriented style to his playing, one that had a sludgy sound to it that drove aesthetes crazy. I think the rock critic Lester Bangs said Black Sabbath made music that sounded like what one would expect to hear if they were to go back in time and give troglodytes electric instruments and just let the cavemen jam.
But that heavy, hypnotic drone is critic-proof, and can still make heads nod to this day, while technically more virtuoso neoclassical metal just fades into the background like so much white noise. Henry Rollins once analogized Sabbath as the AK-47 of rock music; it’s durable enough to weather any abuse, especially the cruelest: the test of time. Some kids may not know Iommi’s name, and they may only know his guitar through hip-hop samples and videogames like Rock Band with its phony Fender Stratocaster, but they know his songs just the same. Who hasn’t hummed Iron Man’s pulverizing riff, the one that lead singer Ozzy Osbourne said sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”?
When my friend told me about Sabbath’s guitarist losing the tips of his fingers and perhaps improving because of his horrible accident, I thought of the boxer Howard Winstone. I know quite a bit more about boxing than I do about heavy metal, and I remembered reading about how Howard Winstone was a hot prospect in the Great Britain boxing scene as a young man. This was the old days, though, and most boxers had day jobs, even the topflight ones, and Mr. Winstone worked in a toy factory between fights.
One day laboring at his station in the factory “the Welsh Wizard” felt an agonizing, sharp pain in his right hand and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was missing the tips of the fingers on his right hand, which was covered in a blood-soaked cocoon of gauze and tape after emergency surgery. Some kind of machine press had given him a brutal manicure. As Henry Chinaski says in Barfly, of his own stint working in a toy factory, “You don’t know how men suffer for children.”
One of the things most people who don’t follow boxing don’t know about the game is that the majority of boxers don’t close their fists until right before they throw a punch (in order to conserve energy); that said, losing the tips of one’s fingers, especially on their dominant hand, should be the death knell for any pro boxer’s career.
Mr. Winstone, however, was not any old boxer. He hailed from the same Welsh coalmining town as another great fighter, Johnny “the Matchstick Man” Owen, who tragically died in the ring. In a book about the latter boxer (one of the best boxer bios I’ve read) there is a scene in which a gas explosion in the local colliery not only caved in the mine and killed the men trapped inside, but ventilated a fireball that reached to the local school, where the windows were shattered and the kids flew across the room like ragdolls, cast beneath their desks in some mockery of the Cold War duck-and-cover drills.
Life in Merthyr Tydfil was old stone castle ruins aboveground, and bituminous ancient rocks hidden beneath the ground, which men had to chisel out with iron at the peril of their own lives. I imagine even the cloud formations in the sky looked like snowy quartzite massifs to those young boys who had the inclination to look up and daydream. Hard times make hard people, and Howard Winstone decided that, having lost pieces of three fingers in his dominant hand, he should work on his jab (the straight punch executed with the non-dominant hand). Winstone developed one of the fiercest jabs in the business, and worked that left like a piston to flummox and blind opponents into submission and become maybe the best fighter to ever emerge from Wales. These days citing the flu or even a sore big toe (a la cruiserweight David Haye) is enough for a boxer to absolve themselves of any responsibility in a bad performance. I doubt Howard Winstone ever griped, post-fight, about how a lackluster performance was due to the lost of several fingertips, but then again he fought well enough and hard enough to never need alibis or rationalization, even in losses.
I’ve had two surgeries on my right shoulder, the details of which I won’t burden you with tonight. Suffice it to say, that a bad shoulder that hurts consistently is nothing compared to the loss of some fingertips, and typing is an easier way to make one’s living than punching and being punched. Besides which, I’ve noticed that my arm hurts less when I write, as if maybe the endorphins released by composing have a healing effect commensurate to or maybe greater than the two Percocet I allot myself per day.
When the pain throbs, though, I will try to remember Tony Iommi and Howard Winstone, whose own adaptations should shame me into silence and stifle any complaints before I give them voice, even to myself in something as insubstantial as a blog post.
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