Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, who has been reading lips for 20 years after losing most of his hearing from being around high decibels of rock music, said face masks have made it near impossible to communicate.
“That’s the worst thing about this pandemic s***. It’s, like, people wearing masks,” the rocker told Howard Stern last week on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show. “I’ve been reading lips for, like, 20 years, so when someone comes up to me … I’m like, ‘I’m a rock musician. I’m f***ing deaf. I can’t hear what you’re saying.'”
Grohl has not had his ears tested in “a long time” but expects doctors would tell him he has hearing damage — “’tinnitus in your left ear, more so than your right ear.’”
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The rock musician said he can still hear certain frequencies of music but that conversations are very difficult to carry on without the ability to read someone’s lips.
“If I hear something that’s slightly out of tune, or a cymbal that’s not bright enough or something like that … in the mix, I can f***ing hear the minutiae of everything that we have done to that song. I really can,” Grohl said. “That being said, like, if you were sitting next to me right here at dinner, I wouldn’t understand a f***ing word you were saying to me the whole f***ing time. There’s no way. In a crowded restaurant, that’s worse.”
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Grohl said in-ear monitors that can protect musicians’ ears during performances have never worked for him, noting that they took him out of the “natural atmosphere sound.”
