Waking up to Tinnitus

The affliction we don't talk about. But that too many of us hear.

Almost everyone reading this will have had the experience. Waking up the morning after that loud event the night before with ears ringing. The realization, “That was great last night, but this is probably not so good.” The ringing gradually dissipating and fading. Wearing the experience as a badge of honor. Rinse and repeat. Music is meant to be loud, right?

But a significant number of people reading this will also have had the experience I endured this past May (just as I was starting to come back from my fractured patella): Waking up with ears ringing when there was no loud event the night before. The realization, “This is probably not good, period.” Waiting for the ringing to gradually dissipate and fade. Except it doesn’t. The ringing is there the next day. And the next. Despite staying home from gigs, despite avoiding loud music, the high-pitched ringing sticks around in the ears. 

And with it comes a new realization. I have just woken up to tinnitus.

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Tinnitus (pronounced either of two ways, which is the least of your worries) is the unspoken disease. So many of us have it: estimates range from 10-40% of the adult population.¹ Yet so few of us ever talk about it, which itself explains the discrepancy in numbers. Our reticence, private and public, to discuss tinnitus might be because we feel ashamed about having “caught” it, or because we know others have it too and if none of them want to talk about it, who are we to complain? But it also might be because it’s so difficult to define.

…And that’s because tinnitus, first and foremost, is not a disease. It’s not an ailment. It’s not an illness. In 99% of cases, it’s a phantom that exists only in your head (the American Tinnitus Association defines Tinnitus as “the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present”), where it serves notice that it’s a symptom of something. In most cases, that something is hearing loss, plain and simple, manifested via the destruction of hair cells in the inner ear, per diagram below. While tinnitus can also be a symptom of impacted earwax, middle ear problems, or Meniere’s disease, for the majority of sufferers the “perception of sound” is the brain sending out a signal to the ear, to compensate for a lack of frequency range. In my case, my brain is saying “hey, you’ve suffered a significant loss of hearing in the 5000-6000hz range, so to compensate for that, I am going to send you a pure tone signal in that range… forever. Enjoy the rest of your life.” To paraphrase Yossarian in Catch 22, couldn’t my brain just have sent me an e-mail?

But that wouldn’t have worked, because we don’t heed the warning signs, most of us, do we? It’s a human instinct to feel invincible until one is proven perfectly vincible. And so some of us chose to ignore all those mornings we woke up with ringing ears as an obvious warning sign, because the ringing always went away. Until this past year, for me at least, tinnitus was something that happened to other people - people like my idol Pete Townshend, perhaps the first rock musician to publicly admit to it, the first to compensate onstage for it (the infamous 1989 Who reunion tour where Pete played acoustic guitar, and on a “quiet” side of the stage, much to chagrin of fans), but also someone who can now laugh it off, per this wonderful interview with David Letterman, who also has tinnitus, on the subject. (Spoiler alert: Pete blames his tinnitus on Keith Moon back at the Smothers Brothers Show in 1967. A number of people in the comments blame their own tinnitus on Pete.)

So. I have tinnitus now, and unlike Pete Townshend, at least until he shares the name of his homeopath, and perhaps offers to pay the costs, I expect to battle it for the rest of my life. Never again will I enjoy the moment I captured for the first season of my One Step Beyond podcast, when I recorded and broadcast the sound of silence on a Catskills mountain hike. If silence is golden, consider me a pauper.

Tinnitus sucks, it’s annoying, it’s been affecting my quality of life this past year, especially my enjoyment of music, the most important thing in my life - and in a Part 2 of this conversation, I will discuss the process of confirming and analyzing it through audiology, and about addressing it, containing it, hoping to cure it, but essentially living with it. Because while this has been with me since before I launched my Substack, I wanted to wait until I was more comfortable with tinnitus – or less uncomfortable with it – before writing about it.  

Indeed, I’m aware that other people have had it longer, and some have it much worse than I. There are many people have to deal with deep rumbling bass, or the sound of aircraft taking off, or swooshing sounds so pervasive, so debilitating, that they have gone on record as considering death to be preferable (see some of the comments below the Pete Townshend video on YouTube). My friend David Watts Barton, who mentioned in a comment here on my Substack that he has it, wrote the following in response to my e-mail enquiring after more details:

“I FUCKING HATE IT. I honestly thought, after it happened, "If this lasts much longer, I AM going to kill myself." It was that bad.” 

My friend Steve Garvey – yes, he of Buzzcocks – describes a deafened left ear that has “an immense amount of white noise and banshees in there. It’s Horrific. And playing in a band is the worst for it.” (Steve, who lives in the PA town where I got married coincidentally, still plays in a band all the same.)

Mine is not on their level. And much like David, I made to my late fifties before it kicked in, which is likely to minimize your sympathy if - per some of my friends who I contacted for the purposes of this article – you have had it since your teen years.

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After all, it’s not like I didn’t earn it. In fact, when I went to the doctor’s office last May to get it “checked out,” something very few people seem to do (hence, again, the discrepancy in number of alleged sufferers), I found myself almost immediately laughing about it.

-Have you been exposed to much loud music in your life? The doctor asked.

“All of it.”

-Since when?

“I attended the loudest concert on record when I was twelve,” I replied.

-You saw Blue Cheer? Asked the doctor.

Being raised in the UK, I didn’t know much about Blue Cheer. I did not know that they were the first American band to use Marshall amps, that Billy Altman wrote of people fleeing their shows all the way back in 1968, that they were forced to record outside at one point given that no studio could apparently contain them, that they were apparently the first Loudest Group to be cited in the Guinness Book of Records, and that their 1986 compilation awarded itself the Spinal Tap-like title Louder than God.

What I did know is that I saw the first British group to use Marshall amps, at least at a volume that made them (Marshall and the band) famous.

“No, but I saw The Who at Charlton Athletic Football Ground in 1976. It was the loudest show ever. Did I tell you I was twelve?”

The doctor reached for his phone.

-Let’s check the record books, shall we? I liked this guy immediately.

Sure enough, The Who at Charlton had been listed in the Guinness Book of Records, measured at 126dB.²

“Fortunately, I was the width of the football pitch away,” I said, figuring I’d let the doctor know about my noisy life in increments.

-It says here the measurement was taken at 32 meters from the speakers.

“Oh, that’s pretty much where I was standing.”

In 1994, recognizing that updating this “award” was not good for our communal health, the Guinness Book of Records stopped citing the Loudest Group or Concert. Which is  not to say that concerts haven’t still been measured for their volume or that acts haven’t still competed for a title. Let’s have a quick look at this list of “the Loudest Bands in History: 10 Ear-Splitting Acts who’ll Batter your Brain with Sound.” From the top of the volume charts on down…

1)     Motörhead. I once stood on stage with Motorhead, at the Hammersmith Odeon. It was almost certainly Sep 22, 1986, and we were filming them for a short piece on Rapido. They seemed to have no problems with us taking the cameras on stage, and while it wasn’t my job to get in Lemmy’s way, I did stand in front of his bass amps, and then in front of Phil Campbell’s guitar amps - which meant also standing by their monitors - just long enough to know I wouldn’t want to make it my full-time job. And no, I was not wearing earplugs.

2)     Leftfield. At Brixton Academy in June 1986, “their concert was measured at 137 decibels and the brutally loud beats tore chunks off the building.” Guess what? Just like James Murphy in “Losing My Hearing Edge,” I was there, too. I don’t remember plaster falling on the audience; what I do recall, vividly, is that the bass was so thunderous it made me feel sick. I loved Leftfield’s debut album Leftism, I was happy to “see” them, but I had no warning it was going to be so loud, so deep, so thunderous. (I also did not know until sitting down to write this article that the concert was in the record books, though it was most certainly in my record books.) At this stage of life, I often did wear earplugs, but only of the primitive variety – rolled up and chewed upon (unused, I assure you!) toilet paper/tissues. I doubt they were effective.

3)     My Bloody Valentine. Well, duh. Apparently, many years after battering early audiences into submission, MBV handed out “proper” earplugs at their concerts, at least according to this pissed-off blogger who attended their 2008 “we got round to finishing another album at last” tour. But back at the Ritz on 54^th Street in 1992, I remember no such peace offering. Everyone simply expected MBV to be painfully loud and in that sense, we were not disappointed. For the record, though, the uptown Ritz (at the old Studio 54) was famously voluminous, and I would add Bob Mould’s Sugar and, oddly perhaps but it’s a firm memory all the same, Lush to my list of ear-splitting bands of the time.

4)     The Who at Charlton. Did I tell you I was only 12? Have I earned anyone’s sympathy yet? No, thought not.

Above clip of My Bloody Valentine NOT recommended for anyone with sensitive hearing - but it does get the point across.

…So, I have collected all four of the top four. I should probably have “earned” my “reward” long before now – especially considering that these historically recorded examples are hardly the full extent of it. For example, I wrote in Boy About Town of playing the first Clash album on my brother’s stereo so incredibly loud that he heard it while walking home through the local comprehensive school’s playground approximately 100 yards away, and cut the power off to the house when he got there. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that even adult author me felt proud of this achievement.

Fast forward barely just a dozen years from 1977, past hundreds if not thousands of shows in the front rows of pubs, clubs and concert halls, many of which I participated in as performer or promoter, to the period between 1990 and 1993 when, between letting the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Sugar pummel my years, I DJ’d every week, for up to six hours per night, at the Limelight in Manhattan – a club whose PA system was so loud that my DJ booth monitor was a JBL front-of-house speaker!

I also DJ’d elsewhere, and often. Occasionally, I played loud enough to blow a speaker. I took it as a badge of pride. At one outdoor party in New Jersey, the cops were called. Another badge of pride. Posie and I used to throw parties, a lot of them, and usually I would dee jay those too: first in Manhattan, then in Brooklyn, and when we moved to the Catskills, we fulfilled a life’s dream of mine and built an open-plan living room with not just the potential to DJ, but a permanent live band set-up, the lack of neighbors allowing me to experiment with guitar feedback to my heart’s content, if not that of my ears. Our parties with my band The Catskill 45s were the stuff of legend. They were also, as you will glean from this compilation clip below of our “1969” show (which we performed in 2014, i.e. 45 years later), rather loud.

In more recent times, I have resumed my involvement with music-making in a massive way. First, directing at the Rock Academy, where the rehearsal room does not have great acoustics, and teenage guitar Gods, believing themselves invincible as I did at twice their age, play at ear-splitting volume and everyone else turns up to compensate. The Jimi Hendrix show I directed was a particular problem in this regard – I woke up with headaches from the noise - and probably one of the final straws that broke this camel’s inner hearing. Then again, teaching guitar and bass there, in small rooms with two amps - plus speakers for the song we are trying to learn - was probably not helpful either. (My fellow male show directors have also admitted to some degree of tinnitus, though all of it acquired many years ago.)

Allowing that my own tinnitus simply came on one day, there’s no way of proving it wasn’t also my own return to recording that put my ears over the edge. In the last year-plus, I have found myself back in the studio after years away, recording with the Dear Boys, most notably in a very small garden shed set-up in Sidley, Sussex, where the amps are so tightly packed next to each other – and to the drums – that the individual separate monitor mixes in the headphones are largely ineffective. Better just to play live, as if on stage – i.e. loud - and trust the engineer to do his job.

I’ve done a lot of home recording this last couple of years, too, not just demoing music and recording Hudson Palace but also producing podcasts. All these endeavors have either involved sitting in front of my desk speakers (Tannoy Reveals, which are clean as they come, and also powerful) for hours, working on that perfect mix, using headphones either for clarity or when it gets late in the evening. The warning signs were there when mixing and mastering ‘Blink of An I’ by The Dear Boys and a forthcoming single by Hudson Palace: in each case, I noticed a certain frequency was hurting my ears – but not those of Noel (who was the chief mixing engineer) or my musical partners. I was concerned for myself. But I also had to finish the mixes. I persevered, in pain. To breaking point? Perhaps.

And then, there is life. Back in our Manhattan days, Posie and I lived on 1^st Avenue, what we called “hospital row.” To paraphrase, this time, Dan Aykroyd from The Blues Brothers, you got used to the sound of ambulance sirens screaming outside your window all night long after a while. That New York remains an especially loud city was confirmed when I took the lads down over the recent holidays – except that when you have tinnitus, harsh noises are suddenly all the more harsh and abrasive. The screech of the NYC subway becomes utterly unbearable, a form of physical torture that MBV’s Kevin Shields himself no doubt wishes he had invented. Ditto, the siren from a fire truck stuck in midtown traffic, which forced me into a doorway, holding my fingers in my ears.

You could argue that we are better off these days than when Alexander de Torqueville visited Manchester in the 1830s, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and wrote of

“the footsteps of a busy crowd, the crunching of wheels of machinery, the shriek of steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms, the heavy rumble of carts, these are the noises from which you can never escape in the sombre half-light of these streets.”

But there’s no doubt that the world is getting louder still – and by choice. Restaurants, for example, don’t have to be loud – they used to pride themselves on starch-shirted formality - but the popularity of industrial-style craft breweries, and open kitchens, and a new conventional wisdom that a noisy bar or restaurant is clearly a good bar or restaurant, means that most of them are unbearable, and that goes for just about every place in my hometown of Kingston, NY, that has opened in the last couple of years. Indeed, restaurants are some of the noisiest of all work environments and cause many a case of tinnitus, as discussed on this episode of the podcast “How I Got Tinnitus.”

My musician friend

Robert Burke Warren

, who was in the Catskill 45s with me, is among many I know who works in music for a living, and who has experienced what he calls “waxing-and-waning tinnitus since my early 30s,” but who allows that while loud music may be responsible to blame, it was surely not the only factor.

“When I was an East Village barman, drunken folks often shouted their orders directly into my ears over things like a Jesus & Mary Chain LP played at top volume through shitty speakers. I sometimes wonder if that's as much responsible for the tinnitus as the amplifiers and wedges and, even more treacherous, the occasional shriek through headphones.” 

All of which, from punters shouting in my one free ear while I was trying to DJ at Limelight (to which I was always tempted to reply, “Do I come to your office and shout requests at you in the middle of your workday?”), to the shrieks of sudden feedback through headphones and speakers in more recent years, sounds like a suspiciously familiar variation on several themes from my own life.

And have you ever been to Calcutta? On our first evening there, in 2016, we jumped on board a public bus. Reminding me of NYC cabbies of the 1990s, the young driver kept his hand on the steering wheel horn throughout, pumping it so often I noticed that the wheel was actually indented from his habit. A few days later, I enquired of our host where I could buy earplugs. Not unpleasantly, he smiled. “I don’t think you’ll find them in Calcutta. We Indians are just naturally noisy people.” This I can truly vouch for.

Finally, there is our modern technology, by which I don’t just mean vacuum cleaners, and kitchen blenders, and leaf blowers, and hand-driers in public bathrooms, all of which seem to be made on the understanding that consumers equate loudness with effectiveness, and none of which help. There’s also the unbearable noise from road works and construction, but at least the people employed in these labors get to wear protective headphones; those who have to walk past their pneumatic drills or live in the vicinity of the construction, as I did for six months last year, do not.

No, we live in an increasingly insular, isolated world, undoubtedly exacerbated by Covid, a world in which most of us listen to music and talk for hours a day through ear buds –  not to be confused with ear plugs - and those who don’t use earbuds most likely wear over-the-ear headphones, and many of us in confined spaces practice our instruments through headphones too, perhaps even splurging on a Mustang Micro, like I did, whereby you don’t have to move from your guitar to crank the distortion on your virtual amp to ear-damaging levels.

The earbuds, I have belatedly become aware, are possibly the biggest curse of the bunch: while scientific data is as yet hard to find, it will likely appear soon enough, and anecdotal observation alone tells you that piping music directly into your ear canal is surely worse than listening to it from a distance. It would be fair to expect a pandemic of tinnitus as the current generation comes further of age.

Or maybe not. It appears to be something of a crap shoot as to who gets tinnitus and who does not. Chris Martin, Phil Collins and Sting have all gone on record as having acquired tinnitus from playing music, to which one can almost hear Alan McGee screaming from the wings of an Oasis show, “But how? You’re all bedwetters!” On which note, Alan McGee must have tinnitus, right? So I asked him. He sent back an e-mail reply almost immediately:

I don't have it 

Don't quite know how I managed that 

Considering some of the groups I have been involved with Mary chain and MBV

Most musicians I know have it in my age group 

Gallaghers / primals / loads 

Similarly, when I wrote to my friend Mike Peters of The Alarm, whose mammoth show last summer in NYC was genuinely, uncomfortably loud (even though I was wearing earplugs throughout) he wrote back:

“Fortunately for me I don’t suffer from the condition. As I’ve spent most of my life centre stage I think I’ve been protected somewhat from direct volume as generated by Amps etc. I do usually have a drum kit behind me most of the time but we have always seemed to keep the volume down tending to use combos rather than big stacks etc.”

Neil Young has it from compiling the live disc Arc, a bonus live CD from 1991 compiled entirely of feedback from the previous tour with Crazy Horse (by which I don’t mean feedback in the sense of the audience reviews, I mean feedback in the sense of… well, you know exactly what I mean). But my friend Andy  Shernoff from The Dictators – the original pre-Kiss/Ramones NYC punk band  – has avoided it. “I’ve been wearing earplugs onstage for 30 years,” i.e. from when it was unfashionable to do so, he wrote to me, stating that his “last hearing test showed I lost some 10k in my right ear” which is considerably less hearing loss than most, including myself. Smart man.

Lou Barlow has had it since the very earliest days of Dinosaur Jr., for which, on the show linked above, he flat out blames Jay Mascis, who also admits to it. Moby apparently has it, and I tried contacting him for confirmation, primarily because I knew Moby very well back in the day and he was the only person I ever saw on that early 1990s techno/club music scene who did wear earplugs. (I could not get hold of him.) The punter on this episode of How I Got Tinnitus blames it on a Pixies show back in the late 1980s, and is still unhappy about what he consider that band’s sonic abuse of its audience. I have been meaning to ask Charles Francis if he has tinnitus from playing all those Pixies shows, but in the meantime, I did remember to ask my friend Brett “Buddy” Ascott, one of the best and loudest drummers never to be world famous, and he wrote back that “luckily my hearing is still ridiculously good considering 45 years of crashing cymbals.”

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The Hearing Health Foundation states that “Musicians are 400% more likely to have a hearing loss and 57% more likely to have tinnitus than the general public,” but it would be remiss to focus exclusively on musicians - or kitchen workers and bartenders, or indeed the large number of musicians who have also worked in kitchens and bars to pay the rent. Actors are especially prone to tinnitus, usually from being unprotected on set around loud stunts/sound effects. William Shatner got it from filming the Star Trek episode “Arena” back on its first season in 1967, and has spoken out about it with increasing frequency in recent years.

Steve Martin pins his tinnitus on a gunfire scene from 1986’s The Three Amigos. Then again, Liza Minnelli blames hers on her father, for screaming so loudly when she won her Oscar in 1973 for Cabaret while set next to her; Barbra Steisand says she has had it since she was nine and does not know why.

My audiologist let me know that a single heavy punch in the face can be enough to cause life-long tinnitus. On the uncomfortable subject of which, Halle Berry developed tinnitus after a blow to the head by an abusive ex-partner caused her to lose 80% of her hearing in her left ear.

And talking of violence, it would be unfair to discuss career causes of tinnitus without acknowledging that soldiers suffer some of the worst rates in the world, and that a certain degree of “shell shock” from World War I was surely tinnitus by another name. The Hearing Health Foundation says that “Tinnitus repeatedly ranks as the number one disability among returning military service members, just ahead of hearing loss.”

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For all that it can be fun – or certainly good click bait – to “blame” the onset of tinnitus on a single certain incident, most of us recognize that even an eventual tipping point is surely not the original cause. Back to my friend

David Watts Barton

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“It happened one night in Rome, at Club Goa, in 2016... Went home the next am (after sunrise), napped a couple of hours before a flight out, and ears were ringing. Hasn't stopped since. Weird, because the sound was so GREAT and clear and "not loud" that I didn't even use my ear plugs. But that was the straw that broke the camel's back.”

So, from my end, trying to find that straw and blame everything on it is a fruitless and pointless task, one that the doctor and audiologists told me not to waste time upon. I have to acknowledge that I spent a significant amount of my life around loud music as part of a loud life, and that, if I did maybe calm down a little in my 40s and early 50s, I willingly and gleefully ramped it all back up in the my latter 50s. These last five years so immersed back amidst guitars and drums, and basses and keyboards, and recording studios and rehearsal rooms, have been some of the most emotionally rewarding of my entire life. Would I prefer to have got through those without acquiring tinnitus? Of course. But would I have preferred to go without those years altogether? No, that I would not.

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In Part 2, Living with Tinnitus, I’ll write about how I addressed the onset of tinnitus medically, what more the profession knows about the affliction and potential cures, and how I am coming to terms with it. Please subscribe if you haven’t already to make sure you receive this second part in your Inbox.

In the meantime, knowing perfectly well that many of you will be suffering from tinnitus, I invite you to comment. If you have it, do you know how you got it? How bad is it for you? How do you deal with it? I may include some of your responses in part 2. And if you do have it, my condolences. I joined the club.

1. The 2022 study linked here reviewed almost 100 previous journal articles and statistically concluded that, globally, 10% of young adults, 14% of middle-aged adults, and 24% of older adults have admitted to tinnitus, meaning that “tinnitus affects more than 740 million adults globally and is perceived as a major problem by more than 120 million people.” That is no small number, and again, these are just the people who have admitted to it. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2795168

2. The decibel scale is not linear. 110dB is not 10% louder than 100dB, it is  actually ten times more intense, though we perceive it as approximately twice as loud. Either way, let’s just agree that anything above 100dB – let alone 126dB – is not good for you. https://hearinglosshelp.com/blog/converting-decibels-to-sound-intensities/