“My hearing is terrible” – Vinny Appice shares his troubles on listening to everything (except music)

Being a drummer in hard rock bands since the mid-1970s, Vinny Appice can attest to the fact that loud music can cause deafness. He has played in bands such as Dio, Heaven & Hell, and Black Sabbath during the Ronnie James Dio era. When asked if he wears earplugs when playing, Appice recently gave an interview for the Drum Syndicate Podcast. It seems that he doesn’t wear as much protection as he should given the loudness of the music he plays:

I wear little swimming plugs that cut out the top end, and that’s it. And my hearing sucks. The TVs in this house are all closed captioned. And I’m always asking my beautiful girlfriend Leslie, ‘What? What did he say?’ So, yeah, my hearing is terrible. I wore ’em — probably first started with Sabbath, ’cause it was so loud. We played with monitors, the first Sabbath tour, ‘Mob Rules’. There were fucking refrigerator-sized cabinets, two of ’em, behind me, just cranked. But you can’t play that stuff through in-ears. It’s Black Sabbath and [Ronnie James] Dio, and you’ve gotta feel the power. Unfortunately, it takes a toll on your ears. It’s funny. I don’t hear great — like on the TV, if they’re talking, I’m better off with the closed captions, or in a room with a lot of noise, forget it. It’s hard to hear anything. But I can hear bad tuning, wrong notes, wrong key, wrong movements, whatever, timing and music while we’re on stage. I’ll be playing, it’s loud. ‘What the fuck? That’s the wrong note.’ And somebody’s hitting the wrong note and stuff like that. I could hear that, like, perfect. But everything else is screwed up.