FOZZY guitarist Rich Ward recently spoke with Scott Bowling of the Good Company with Bowling show on YouTube. Ward talked about a variety of topics including the physical challenges he faces while on tour. Ward is 55, but he and FOZZY show no signs of slowing anytime soon.
“I still feel fantastic,” he said. “I have all those things that every person over 50 who plays an instrument deals with. I’ve got low back pain. I’ve got some arthritis in the hands, the same thing at George Lynch and Corey Taylor and everybody else who’s ever done this, Phil Anselmo. We all do that because none of us are gonna go out there and stand there and stare at our shoes. Every day is the Super Bowl, every show is the Super Bowl, and we’re all so lucky to do it that we would never punish the fans who are there that night by phoning it in. They deserve 100 percent of everything that we have, so you suck it up. You take four Advil, you drink some green tea and you go out there and you pretend like there’s nothing going on. And when the show’s over, you put some ice on your back.”
Ward went on to say that avoiding painkillers has been a big key to his longevity. He also revealed that DDPYoga is prolonging his career.
“The main thing is that my focus has been no Oxycontin, no painkillers,” Ward said. “I’ve never taken them and I won’t, because I see what’s happened to other musicians who have had back pain, other athletes who have had back pain and they start chasing that dragon. For me, the thing that saved my life has been that DDPYoga, which I do every day. I’m very light. I don’t lift weights anymore. I weigh 145 pounds. I used to weigh 205 when I was in Stuck Mojo. I was muscular and I realized that my frame can’t sustain that kind of weight. And so I eat lean, I train every day. I don’t do it for vanity reasons, although I lifted weights in the ’90s for vanity reasons, ’cause I wanted to be jacked like all my heroes. I wanted to look like Henry Rollins. I wanted to look like Glenn Danzig. These dudes, when I saw them on stage, it was like, ‘Oh.’ They looked as powerful as their music sounded. And I always thought that was incredible. When we toured with Type O Negative and Pete Steele would roll up the back of the truck and get in there and pump iron every day. I wanted to be just like Pete Steele, because I realized he looked the way he sounded. It reinforced the power of the music. Now, if I was in Dream Theater, it doesn’t need to be that because Dream Theater is beautiful. It’s a different approach. But Stuck Mojo was a jackhammer and it was something that was just rhythmically punishing you and I wanted to look that part, which is why I trained the way that I did. And luckily for me, Jericho is always gonna be the biggest guy in FOZZY, so I don’t need to compete with him. I can be his skinny little partner. He can be the Skipper, and I can be Gilligan, and we can have a great relationship.”
Ward also said the music business is “populated by broken people … It’s just because the business is tough, but these people have already experienced tough; they’ve had tough lives,” Rich explained. “They’ve dealt with abuse and worse. I didn’t deal with abuse, but I did live what I now would, if you looked at it through the prism of today, I lived in a fairly lower middle-class household. But I didn’t think of it at the time, if that makes sense. I had friends that were rich, but I just thought they were rich. I didn’t think that that meant that I was poor. So I think that’s a good thing, that people who grow up with stories to tell and not ideal childhoods, they make for interesting artists. And it doesn’t matter who it is — look at all of them. They’re all a little broken, or the clocks don’t exactly run on time. And I’m a proud part of that community. I’m glad music was there for me. It saved my life.”
Watch Ward’s full interview below.
