LAFAYETTE, La. (AP) - Jamie Neil Kelly has earned the nickname “Red Zeppelin,” from rock and blues guitar skills that are as fiery as his long, red hair. Those skills have brought Kelly around the world and back.
But they’ve also left him in the hospital, facing a bleak future. Years of guitar playing, head banging, hauling heavy speakers and amplifiers resulted in two herniated discs in his lower neck.
Surgeons had to enter from the front of his throat to repair the damage. The procedure left him unable to speak for two months.
Four years later, Kelly is physically better, but has a changed outlook on life.
“My nature was never to go to the doctor a lot,” said Kelly, who is 46 and lives in Lafayette. “My shoulder kept hurting me, but I kept thinking it was for all the years of wearing a strap.
“I’ve had many years of wood and wire around my neck, also the heavy lifting. We were always our own roadies.
“To this day, it’s pretty much the same circumstance. Every now and then, I’ll pay some young person I know to help me tote the gear. I can’t rooster like I used to.”
Kelly is among the throngs of artists who are playing music until it hurts. They make it look so easy, but behind the scenes, performing is taking a toll that may be invisible to fans and observers.
For most musicians, their craft requires a lifetime of repetitive motions with the hands and arms, awkward postures and other stressful body movements that can affect their abilities to perform and lead a pain-free life.
Tamara Mitchell of Working-Well.org, which helps people avoid and manage overuse injuries, cites surveys of symphony orchestras that found as many as 76 percent of musicians experience repetitive strain injuries. The numbers don’t include the musicians who have had to stop playing because of serious injuries.
“Professional musicians rarely admit having an injury since nobody wants to hire an injured musician,” Mitchell said in her report, “A Painful Melody: Repetitive Strain Injury Among Musicians.”
A lack of health care coverage compounds the hurt. In 2013, the Future of Music Coalition polled 3,402 artists and found 42 percent didn’t have insurance.
The number is more than double the national estimate of 18 percent uninsured, as calculated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 88 percent of the uninsured respondents said they don’t have insurance because they can’t afford it.
Kelly can relate. The injury and a hot-and-cold work schedule left him without a bank account for years.
“This surgery cost a boatload of money, and they’re still trying to get money out of me,” said Kelly. “I don’t have any proof of income. It’s a catch-22 for musicians in some cases.
“I had to rebuild my voice. But I feel great. I never felt better and had less.”
Kelly is not alone. Other local artists deal with the pain and still find ways to let the music play.
Violinist Michael Blaney has a music degree from the Peabody Conservatory and two master of music degrees from the University of Michigan. But his education and performances across the country didn’t prepare him for an eight-year battle with focal dystonia, a neurological condition that causes involuntary muscle contractions and spasms, sometimes called “musician’s cramp.”
The spasms became so bad that Blaney dropped his bow three times in one concert. He had to stop playing with the Acadiana Symphony Orchestra for two years.
To add to his frustration, doctors, in the early days, knew little about his condition.
“Nobody really understood what was going on,” said Blaney, conductor of the UL Lafayette Symphony Orchestra. “It’s so bizarre that it only manifests itself when you’re doing a specific task.
“I could use my hand just fine, except when I went to hold my violin bow or held my pencil like a bow. My hand would just start to spasm and contract out of control.”
With little help from doctors, Blaney developed his own exercises to retrain his hand and brain.
“I first started out trying to do things, like hold a pencil like bow grip, which I couldn’t do. Eventually, very slowly, I managed to regain that control. I grew upon that to holding just a bow or bowing on my shoulder on open strings.
“It was just a rebuilding process. I don’t know if my brain just repaired itself or rerouted the area of the brain that controlled my right hand. Eventually, I was able to restore all my control. It’s a slow process. You have to be very patient with yourself.”
Chubby Carrier’s father, zydeco legend Roy Carrier, tried to warm him. Chubby, once a 20-year-old drummer in his father’s band, used to tease the elder Carrier about wearing back and knee braces under his clothes while he played on stage.
Roy warned Chubby that his turn was coming. When Chubby turned 40, he began to feel the aches of holding a 30-pound accordion for four-hour shows during thousands of road gigs. He now wears his own back and knee braces to relieve muscle spasms in his lower back.
Carrier, now 49, visits a chiropractor every Monday. He’s under orders to lose 50-60 pounds to relieve pressure on his lower back. When he’s a home, he maintains a daily regimen of stretching, walking and other exercises.
But the demand of road gigs alters that schedule. Between May and the end of August, Carrier will have played in 50 cities, stretching from Seattle to Pensacola.
Exercise is often put on hold. But he’s trained himself to pass up burgers and fries for salads and bottled water.
Like Kelly, he’s learned he can’t rooster like he used to, either.
“I had to cut the four-hour thing out in the ‘90s. It’s in my contract that I’m going to do a 90-minute set and an encore or two 75-minute sets with a 30-minute break.
“I have to include a break if they want me to play longer than three hours. And I’m still having problems. If I was still playing four hours, I would have had surgery by now.”
“I used to jump off stage, when I was 25, 30 years old,” said Carrier, winner of the Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album Grammy in 2010. “I’d get on my knees, bend over on my back. I was a football player, so I was flexible.
“When I was 45 years old, I was trying that with my washboard player. I went down on the floor and my back tweaked. That disc didn’t cooperate with me.
“I went down to my knees, and I didn’t get back up for another minute. That was the start of my back injuries. I was getting these sharp pains in my back.”
___
Information from: The Advertiser, https://www.theadvertiser.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.