Joe Trohman has announced that he will be out of action for the rest of the year as he faces surgery on an injured picking hand.
The Fall Out Boy guitarist admits that has been playing through the pain barrier for some time now, and taking to Instagram, he announced that it was time to go under the knife to prevent permanent damage.
“Hey everyone, after years of managing ongoing issues with my right hand, it’s become clear that I need surgery to avoid permanent damage,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, this means I’ll have to take the rest of the year off from playing with the band.”
The news is not all bad. Thankfully, Trohman’s prognosis is entirely positive, and the band is not cancelling any shows. They will be taking to the stage tonight in Calgary, Canada, and will play the US, Japan and Brazil this summer. See Fall Out Boy for dates and ticket details.
“The silver lining is that I’m on track for a full recovery,” he continued. “The band will still be playing all scheduled shows. I’m looking forward to recovering so I can get out there with the guys.”
Trohman isn’t the first pro guitarist to succumb to injury. He won’t be the last. At any level, playing the electric guitar is not without risk. Even when your technique is on point, all that repetitive movement can cause injury – and if you are a pro who hits the instrument hard, well, all bets are off.
Heck, you don’t even have to be playing hard. Any eccentric movement can remind us that we guitarists are nothing but flesh and blood – even if you are a bona-fide guitar god. See Vai, Steve.
That’s right, Steve Vai is one of the more high-profile players to have sustained a serious injury in recent years, and he really did sustain it. He was experimenting with a weird chord shape on an acoustic guitar – which with those heavier gauge strings is asking for trouble – and lo, he ended up with trigger finger so bad he needed surgery on his tendons.
“It is a lot harder to play the acoustic guitar than I thought,“ said Vai, speaking to Tyler Wilson of the Music Is Win YouTube channel, in 2021. “There is nothing virtuosic in it. But that’s how I screwed up my hand. I was doing this fun thing and I had to put my thumb in this really weird position, and I had to kind of hold this chord, really for a long time. I was meditating on it. And I knew it was a hard position, and I kept on sitting there and playing it and playing it.”
Luckily, when Vai went under the knife, he was in good hands (no pun intended). But the procedure was no cake walk.
”They did the operation, and they cut in there, and the guy is fooling around with everything in there and it’s really bizarre, but it’s all fine. It was something very simple that they can fix. But I won’t be able to play for a while.”
Trohman and Vai play very different styles but the FOB guitarist can take some inspiration from Vai’s experience. The lay-off proved fruitful. Playing one-handed, Vai invented a new technique he calls “joint-shifting” and then used it to write Candle Power, from 2022 studio album Inviolate.
Trohman’s injury sounds like it was the result of years of exertion (Vai’s was from “meditating” on the chord for 20 minutes).
Other high-profile injuries have occurred far away from the instrument, such as John Squire’s wrist break. In 2020, Squire was playing basketball with his kids one minute, then was unsure if he’d play again, with his thumb seriously damaged. “There was a question mark over whether I would get full use of it back,” he told the Guardian.
When Brian Robertson of Thin Lizzy had his hand all cut up, he was breaking up a fight. Tony Iommi’s infamous machining accident happened in the workplace.
Luckily, the more gruesome guitarist injuries don’t involve playing. But then we think of 1989 and Pete Townshend. The man drove the whammy bar from his Fender Stratocaster through the palm of his hand when playing Won’t Get Fooled Again. Miraculously, no lasting damage was done. Still, it’s a reminder.... Take care out there, people.
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