“The man didn’t tell me!”: Robert Fripp still doesn’t know why hospital staff shaved his balls when he had a heart attack
Last year, King Crimson legend Robert Fripp suffered a heart attack while travelling to Italy to attend one of his Guitar Craft courses.
While recovery involved multiple surgeries to insert stents, he’s now doing much better, and in a new interview with Uncut, reveals the impressive extent of his current physical fitness.
“Today, I look on it as a benevolent redirection of my life,” he says. “I go to the gym regularly. I’m deadlifting currently, at best, 120 kilograms, bench pressing 75 kilograms, doing squatting with weights, stretching, balancing, yoga.”
Fripp asserts: “I haven’t been this healthy or present within myself in decades, perhaps ever.”
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Shortly following the heart attack, Robert Fripp told the story – funny in the circumstances – of how a hospital orderly inexplicably shaved his testicles.
“I was in A&E not knowing what was going on – and an orderly came along and shaved my balls!” he said. Now, in the new Uncut interview, he explains further what happened…
“I was in A&E, they hooked me up to a monitor, and the next step was this dear man turned up and shaved my balls,” Fripp recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, if this is something to do with my heart, why is he shaving my balls?’”
Fripp goes on to explain his remarkably quick recovery following the surgery, which saw him back to business just days later.
“At midnight they wheeled me off, and I had an emergency operation to insert a stent. There was also a trifurcated artery, so I went back in on Monday for an additional stent, and then on Thursday, I joined the course.”
As for whether he ever found out why his balls were being shaved, Fripp says that remains shrouded in mystery.
“The man shaving my balls didn’t tell me,” he says. “Very few of the staff spoke English, which led to one or two funny moments, like me taking my pants down for inspection by a matronly nurse, who was actually asking what I wanted for lunch.”
Recently, Steve Vai recalled his difficulty in learning Robert Fripp’s guitar parts for BEAT. “Once I started putting my fingers to the actual parts, I realised that they’re booby-trapped,” he said.
“They’re Robert Fripp parts. And he has a unique technique that he developed his entire life, through vision and discipline. And I have a totally different technique.”
The post “The man didn’t tell me!”: Robert Fripp still doesn’t know why hospital staff shaved his balls when he had a heart attack appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
