Open Up And Bleed
On Transcendence & Blood On The Strings
‘You’ve gotta love the strings as they’re bloodying your fingers’ *
I achieved a kind of perverse rock’n’roll fantasy moment on the tour we just finished, where I played my guitar with enough abandon to draw blood. Stage adrenalin must have kicked in, or maybe I was high on the music, but I couldn’t even feel it.
It wasn’t until an hour or so after the gig that my raw fingers began hurting. A Saltbush Negroni took care of that.
At our gig the next night, I pretty quickly ripped them open again - probably while playing our new single ‘Half Girl Half Beast’ - and by the end of the show my fret board was covered in blood spatter, of which I felt strangely proud. A rock’n’roll rite of passage.
As some random dude on Reddit stated about Jack White’s guitar: ‘I have to admit that his white guitar covered in blood is a damn cool look.’ Jack told Rolling Stone “Sometimes onstage I’m like, ‘Why the fuck am I bothering? Why am I pushing myself so hard?’ The next act on the festival is playing the same set they played the night before in the same way and having a blast. And I’m sweating bullets and bleeding all over the stage. It’s hard to know if it’s worth it.”
Of course its worth it. There’s something about the transcendence of pain, crossing that threshold between performance and just giving over to the command of the music, channelling some pure strain of rock’n’roll spirit. It’s the rock’n’roll equivalent of transcendental meditation or maybe speaking in tongues.
Kurt Cobain’s unforgettable performance at Readings Festival in 1992 - a kind of fuck you to the sensationalist media feeding frenzy that surrounded him at that moment - left his Strat a mess and his audience delivered to another stratosphere. He was delivered to the waiting stage in a wheelchair and hospital gown by his friend Everett True, apparently comatose, as Krist Novoselic spoke to the crowd “I can’t – it’s too painful, it’s too painful. You're gonna make it, man. With the help of his friends and family, he's gonna make it.” Kurt dramatically parodied the death scene in ‘The Rose’ a la Bette Midler before jumping up and launching into a blistering set.
First known sighting of Iggy shedding blood onstage occurred in 1969. He picked up a drumstick and dragged it across his chest until it began to leave welts, before digging deep enough to draw lines of blood. In fervid acts of almost self flagellation, a metaphorical kneeling at the altar of the music gods, the legend of Iggy Pop was partly built on his ability to literally crawl across cut glass and open up and bleed, like he did at Max’s Kansas City, whether accidentally or on purpose no-one is sure, becoming beatific in the process. Deified. At his first solo concert , in LA 1974, he asked the audience if they would like to see him bleed. They would. He had Ron Asheton whip him before carving an X into his own chest.
In 1997, The Beasts of Bourbon launched into their show at the Lava Bar. Tex Perkins describes the band as being ‘ a special kind of drunk where anything can happen’ after getting on the sake at dinner before the the gig and an adversarial vibe builds between band and audience, who start chucking beer bottles at the band, mainly landing on bass player Brian Hooper, who was not happy about it. Tex yells at the crowd "Don't throw bottles at the band — throw them at me!". They do. Almost immediately someone hurls one that smashes him right in the middle of the forehead. Blood gushes everywhere, and bottles keep coming as Tex goads the audience, but Tex keeps going, making it to the end of the electrically charged set before heading to Emergency drenched in blood. My buddy Renato filmed that now legendary gig in a state of complete horror at what was unfolding, but as far as I know the footage has never emerged.
AC/DC’s Angus Young reminisced about playing a show where “the front row was all bikers. I said, ‘They just want blood!’ You looked out and it was just like murderers’ row, and the look on their faces is like, ‘Send us the little guy in the shorts!’ …You put your head down and hope a bottle doesn’t come your way. That became part of my stage act. I learnt to duck and keep moving,”
Sometimes an audience is just hungry for something explosive to happen, dancing a very thin line between love and hate. Brendan Urie from Panic At The Disco! was greeted by a bottle to the head at their Reading Festival performance in 2007, briefly knocking him unconscious. He told NME “When I got back up we just got on with …I guess we were sending a message to whoever threw the bottle, you can’t stop us!”
James Brown would famously drop to his knees and ‘collapse’ onstage during ‘Please Please Please’, overcome with exhaustion or intense emotion, over and over his ‘valet’ MC Danny Ray would cover him in his cape and attempt to walk him off stage before James would throw off the cape and return to complete the song in an impassioned theatrical blaze of glory. He did it for us. He pushed himself beyond and we loved him for it.
Heavy metal guitar god Zak Wylde gave the crowd what they wanted in this extraordinary insane performance where you can almost see the blood spurting from his fingers as he plays an intense, intricate solo.
Lucinda Williams captured that moving dedication to sacrifice at the ever demanding altar of rock in her potent ode to Paul Westerberg of The Replacements, ‘Real Live Bleeding Fingers’.
The Who’s Pete Townshend, known for his incendiary guitar playing, complete with his famous windmills, says “I break my nails, I tear flesh from my fingers. I make minor cuts. Then I swing my arm at high speed, and all the blood rushes to the tips of my fingers and pours out profusely under the centrifugal force. My hand always bleeds, even today..”. Pete once impaled his own hand on the whammy bar, but kept playing.
When I was a little girl, my big brother Josh was obsessed with Pete Townshend, practising the windmill obsessively in his bedroom, and practising til his fingers bled. In awe, I would collect the blood soaked tissues from his bin. Creepy, I know, but even then I thought bleeding for your art was cool. When he began playing gigs, I would always race to check his fingers for blood post show. He never let me down.
Nureyev, often considered the greatest ballet dancer of all time, perfectly explained that overwhelming desire to push through and transcend pain in service of creating something great, something beyond the ordinary, declaring “Every day, I woke up and all I could think about was that moment when I would put my feet inside my slippers again. When I would savor the moment with my entire body on fire…”
When he defiantly continued to dance despite calls for his retirement as he noticeably struggled with the weakness caused by AIDS related illness - he stated “For me, dance and life are one. I will dance to the last drop of blood.”
Bring it on.
*(Lyric from my song ‘Born Funky Born Free’)
Read More:
How Nirvana's 1992 Reading Set Went From Disaster to Beautiful |
Very interesting article, Lo. I've nicked my fingers once in a blue moon, but my fingertips would usually be too sore to play way before I would do any damage. Maybe I'm just not that committed lol