I played in rock and blues bands most of my life, through college and graduate school and well into my thirties. More than once I left gigs at three or four in the morning with my ears ringing, a muffled quality to my hearing for a day or two. I didn't think much of it. I was careful to insist on a quiet stage, to carry ear-plugs in case I needed them. The ringing happened; but it always went away.
The night it all went south was when I was playing in a grungy hipper-than-thou club in the New Orleans suburbs; it was the kind of place where people get stoned outside and then come in and slouch-dance for hours. The guy running sound that night was stoned when we got there, and as we got ready for sound-check I could just feel something was wrong.
The club was a small shoe-box with twenty feet of dance-floor and cinderblock walls: we could have done the gig without mic-ing our amps or drums. There was no light except for psychedelic purple sparkles. I was standing right next to the drummer and I couldn't hear him as we played, because the guitars were so loud: I saw his cymbals shake and shimmer in the weird light, but all I could hear was blaring guitars. I said so. The sound-guy gave me a thumbs up and a wicked grin. "Oh, I gotcha covered," he said.
And he cranked the drums up.
If my fingers didn't know the songs by feel, I wouldn't have known what I played. It wasn't music. It wasn't even "noise" in the usual sense. It was like some kind of sonic hell, pressure on pressure, waves of it. For a two and half hour gig.
The ringing and the muffling were bad that night, and they didn't fade so quickly.
And from that night on, each gig got progressively worse for me until I had to quit two bands: it was too exhausting, and too frightening, the way that the recovery took longer.
Then I woke up one morning with my new best friend: 75 hundred cycles of sound every second. Forever. Till death do us part.
I began to think of it as the Silver Needles, like constant pricking in my brain. It reminds me at times of those glass-harps, the ones where you wet your fingers and slide them around the rim of a crystal goblet, except that the noise rises to a shriek of pain that you can't slide out from, and you can't shatter the crystal.
So I'm new to this forum, and joining out of a kind of tribal instinct: I say to my family and friends, "My tinnitus is really bad today," and they make sympathetic noises. But they can't know. They can't possibly know what it is to miss silence so much. Or to scour the Internet for any hope of a cure, to wade through the charlatanism and the quackery and the opportunists.
Mainly, they can't know what it's like to want to die because you can't hear silence anymore. The despair ebbs and flows, but it's particularly intense tonight; the silver disease has the upper hand on me just now.
Anyway, I guess I'm just thinking it's better to say it to people who get it.
Thanks for listening.
The night it all went south was when I was playing in a grungy hipper-than-thou club in the New Orleans suburbs; it was the kind of place where people get stoned outside and then come in and slouch-dance for hours. The guy running sound that night was stoned when we got there, and as we got ready for sound-check I could just feel something was wrong.
The club was a small shoe-box with twenty feet of dance-floor and cinderblock walls: we could have done the gig without mic-ing our amps or drums. There was no light except for psychedelic purple sparkles. I was standing right next to the drummer and I couldn't hear him as we played, because the guitars were so loud: I saw his cymbals shake and shimmer in the weird light, but all I could hear was blaring guitars. I said so. The sound-guy gave me a thumbs up and a wicked grin. "Oh, I gotcha covered," he said.
And he cranked the drums up.
If my fingers didn't know the songs by feel, I wouldn't have known what I played. It wasn't music. It wasn't even "noise" in the usual sense. It was like some kind of sonic hell, pressure on pressure, waves of it. For a two and half hour gig.
The ringing and the muffling were bad that night, and they didn't fade so quickly.
And from that night on, each gig got progressively worse for me until I had to quit two bands: it was too exhausting, and too frightening, the way that the recovery took longer.
Then I woke up one morning with my new best friend: 75 hundred cycles of sound every second. Forever. Till death do us part.
I began to think of it as the Silver Needles, like constant pricking in my brain. It reminds me at times of those glass-harps, the ones where you wet your fingers and slide them around the rim of a crystal goblet, except that the noise rises to a shriek of pain that you can't slide out from, and you can't shatter the crystal.
So I'm new to this forum, and joining out of a kind of tribal instinct: I say to my family and friends, "My tinnitus is really bad today," and they make sympathetic noises. But they can't know. They can't possibly know what it is to miss silence so much. Or to scour the Internet for any hope of a cure, to wade through the charlatanism and the quackery and the opportunists.
Mainly, they can't know what it's like to want to die because you can't hear silence anymore. The despair ebbs and flows, but it's particularly intense tonight; the silver disease has the upper hand on me just now.
Anyway, I guess I'm just thinking it's better to say it to people who get it.
Thanks for listening.
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