ListenIowa recently conducted an interview with former GREAT WHITE and current JACK RUSSELL’S GREAT WHITE singer Jack Russell. An excerpt from the chat follows below.
ListenIowa: You played in Des Moines with the original GREAT WHITE a few years ago and had to support yourself on stage with a cane, and you also were seated on a stool for much of the show. What was going on in your life at that time? You sounded good, but looked miserable.
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Jack: “In 2009, I had back surgery. It was my birthday. The band had convinced me that if I took my pain medication, I’d be fine. I felt horrible, I couldn’t move. But you don’t want to let your friends down, because they don’t know how to do anything else. It’s not like Mark‘s [Kendall, GREAT WHITE guitarist] going to become a diamond appraiser or a professor of physics at a local college. So I stayed on the road, ended up being on pain pills and tripped over some cords onstage and shattered my left femur. I finished the show from the stool. They rushed me to the hospital to put me back together again, but I lost two and a half inches of my femur, and I had to learn how to walk again. After that, it was a series of ridiculous things. I was on a plane at thirty-six thousand feet and my colon burst, and they were not about to stop the plane to let me off. So I flew from the East coast to the West coast screaming in pain. When I got there, my wife picked me up, took me to the nearby hospital, and I went right into surgery. They cut me open, took my intestines out, laid them onto a tray next to me, washed them out, then washed out my body cavity. They repaired the hole, but I had a colostomy bag while the other part of my colon was healing.”
ListenIowa: What were the other members of GREAT WHITE thinking about all of this? Concern?
Jack: “The thing is, nobody contacted me from the other camp.”
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ListenIowa: Why didn’t Mark contact you? You guys have history. You two started GREAT WHITE.
Jack: “He was tired of me being messed up. He had gotten sober, and I think it made him aware that he could fall, too. And when you’re sober, the last thing you want to do is be around someone who is wasted. I get that. What I don’t get was the level of hatred. I was supposed to sing at Jani Lane‘s [former WARRANT vocalist who passed away in 2011] memorial, and a friend of both of ours went to the dressing room and apparently Michael Lardie said something to the effect of [referring to Russell], ‘Why doesn’t that guy just die already?’ No one has said anything worse than that.”
Via Blabbermouth.com