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Initial d street stage ost12/18/2022 ![]() The first doctor he saw told him to find another line of work. When Weinberg learned about Leon Fleisher, the classical pianist who developed a left-hand repertoire after losing the use of his right, he realized he might have a chance at recovery, too. Max Weinberg Collection/Courtesy of the artist "You would suck it up, play through the pain." "There was an obsessive prejudice on the part of musicians to hide their injuries," he says. Max Weinberg first realized his drumming style could be hurting his hands in the early '80s. "We all abuse ourselves for the sake of performance, but nobody talks about it," Ballance says. And while it's fairly well understood that music careers are an endurance sport, requiring rigorous practice and few days off, the physical consequences often go unadvertised, hidden from fans for the sake of shows that must go on. A 2017 study of more than 700 orchestral musicians in Germany found that two-thirds of them endured chronic pain, many for at least five years. Hearing loss and tinnitus, tendonitis and arthritis, mouth calluses and vocal cord nodules: These are only a sliver of the vast collection of maladies a musical life can bring. Hearing woes mean it's still hard to see bands live, hindering her ability to run Merge Records, the label she co-founded. ![]() She's been off the road nearly a decade, but the time away hasn't magically fixed her. Her full index of ailments includes COPD, bone spurs in the neck, bunions in the feet, a crooked spine and, she quips, self-diagnosed brain damage. Ballance quit touring in 2013 after dealing with hearing loss and hyperacusis, where certain sounds become incredibly grating. "I started writing down all the things wrong with me that I can attribute to playing in Superchunk," says Laura Ballance, the North Carolina band's bassist for three decades. The duo's imminent end underscores a little-publicized truth about making music - it can, and often does, wreck bodies. In mid-November, The Dodos issued the kinetic Grizzly Peak, their eighth album and, likely, their last. What's more, his decade-plus of aggressive guitar playing had, almost certainly, been quietly exacerbating the damage. It was a limitation." Back home in Oakland a month later, a blood test confirmed rheumatoid arthritis - an autoimmune condition with punishing effects on the joints. "I had experienced pain there before, but I had always forced myself through it," Long remembers. He was working on "Annie," a plaintive new number about seeking forgiveness within a doomed relationship, when his left pinky refused to stretch across the frets. He and his wife, Noela, had taken Tegra to Spain to spend the summer at his in-laws' sylvan cottage, and he'd been playing lots of guitar in the woods. Having fallen in love with fingerstyle guitar - playing the strings directly, without the aid of a pick - in his early 20s, he resolved to take it to an unconventional extreme: He wanted, as he put it before a recent weekday rehearsal, for "every string to sound like a different drum." The idea became the pair's animating mission, the spiritual center of ecstatic songs that felt too mighty to be dubbed "acoustic rock." As Long yowled quarterlife missives about sleeping in, breaking up or questioning God, he clawed and hammered the strings, with Kroeber throwing jabs at each strum like a welterweight bullying his opponent. When Long started The Dodos, his Bay Area duo with drummer Logan Kroeber, in the mid-2000s, that feeling was still driving him. ![]() ![]() "If I could walk into every socially awkward situation with a guitar," he admits, "I would." "I realized that moment is what it felt like to speak and have people value what you were saying." Even now, when he talks to other parents at the daycare of his 5-year-old daughter, Tegra, the guitar gives him something to discuss, a "cool job"-as-icebreaker. "I always thought, if I say anything, I am going to say something stupid," Long remembers with a laugh. But people listened, captivated by the sudden volubility of a 16-year-old who considered himself awkward and uneasy. He assumed he was improvising for no one. Meric Long had been playing guitar for three years when he realized the instrument could be more than his hobby - it could be his way of communicating, too, of feeling he had something important to say.Īt a high-school friend's house party, Long, then an anxious California teenager, smoked too much weed and meandered on an acoustic guitar for several uninterrupted hours. While writing the new album Grizzly Peak, he watched that ability begin to slip away. Meric Long of the Bay Area band The Dodos found his voice in a distinctive guitar style.
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