FORMER Great White vocalist Jack Russell has revealed he feared he had lost his celebrated voice during neck surgery.
Russell, 63, told Sirius XM when he awoke after going under the knife recently his voice had been severely affected. He lost several centimetres in height following surgery for scoliosis, he said – later adding he had also been diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.
“They put these rods up next to your larynx, your voicebox,” Russell told the Faction Talk station.
“And when I woke up I was, like, argh, argh, argh, argh. My voice was gone. It took several months for it to come back. It’s better now.
“I’m feeling better about my life and I thought ‘thank God you didn’t take that away’. That would have been worse than losing the best old lady – ever!”
Russell told host Eddie Trunk he was suffering a condition that affects the spine.
“I’m just recovering,” Russell told the Faction Talk station.
“When you’ve lost that much height it’s going to take a toll on your body. I guess it’s like being hit with a railroad spike hammer.
“I don’t feel bad at all. I really feel good. It’s just that scoliosis … it shrinks you. What are you going to do? You shrink along with it.”
Discussing his famous voice, he said: “Mostly I think it’s a God-given gift. I really do.
“For all intents and purposes I shouldn’t have this. I really shouldn’t be here at all.
“I smoked a million cigarettes, did tons of cocaine and just did everything I shouldn’t have been doing to take care of your voice … drank whiskey. Just horrible, horrible stuff.
“Everything I could possibly do wrong, I did. My vocal coach and my doctor were going ‘if you keep that up, you’re gonna be sorry’.
“And … I’m OK!
“I stopped all that stuff a long time ago. When they told me I had COPD, I went ‘OK, no more cigarettes’. I couldn’t do the cigarette thing anymore. I quit drinking of course. I quit doing coke years ago.
“People say ‘go back to the old days’. Talk about archaic. All that stuff seems so foreign now.
“I don’t look back on that with any fond memories or anything. It’s just really a bad place for my head to go.”
Russell recently released an album via Frontiers with LA Guns’ Tracii Guns.
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