The White Stripes rocker, banged up in a car crash last month, makes this perfectly clear on the band’s Website (www.whitestripes.com), posting actual footage from a surgery that inserted three screws into his broken left index finger.
Really, a note from the doctor would have sufficed…
But, no, White says he wanted fans who bought tickets to shows either canceled or postponed by the dinged digit to “better understand the complexity of the situation.”
“A bone in the index finger of my fretting hand was shattered…making it absolutely impossible to play guitar,” White writes on the Website. “I’ve been instructed by doctors that there is no way I can move my wrist until it is completely healed.”
For the non-squeamish, or the terribly curious, the video clip can be accessed at: www.whitestripes.com/finger.html.
In a series of shots, we see the rocker on a gurney, the rocker’s finger sliced open to the bone and held open with clamps (a close-up), and the rocker’s doctor poking at the sliced-open finger (all in the name of science, of course).
Three photos culled from the footage can also be had at the site, including the lovely close-up of the splayed-open index.
White suffered his injury July 9-his 28th birthday-in Detroit. He was driving in a car with lady friend Renée Zellweger when another motorist made a “horrible left turn in front of me,” he wrote on his Website last month. Zellweger was said to uninjured, White wasn’t as fortunate.
“No chance of escape, air bag, the air near my fingers, devil in my left hand,” White tapped out (with one finger) in the cybernote to fans on July 15.
In the end, White said he “made it through [the] year of rock ‘n’ roll death [and] got off with just a warning,” a reference to the music gods who have died at 27, including Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, soon to be played by Zellweger in a big-screen biopic.
While White is expected to recover, he says it’ll be “virtually impossible” to recover all the concert dates nixed by the accident.
The White Stripes, consisting of White on guitar, and ex-wife (or sister) Meg White on drums, wiped out shows from July 9 through mid-September. Lost were scheduled gigs at New York’s Central Park and Britain’s Reading Festival, among others.
The band plans to resume its tour September 13 at Los Angeles’ Greek Theater. The Whites then will head off for Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, before embarking on a series of make-good U.S. and Canadian dates in November.
The first of the rescheduled shows is set for November 10 in Milwaukee. The Stripes will make it to their Detroit hometown November 28-29. In all, 16 make-up dates are scheduled.
The White Stripes’ latest release, Elephant, went gold, selling more than 500,000 copies and giving the alt-rockers a taste of mainstream success.
White tries for mainstream movie success in the upcoming Cold Mountain, the Civil War-era drama in which he costars (and Zellweger stars). Hopefully, close-ups of sliced-open fingers will be kept to a minimum.
