Mark McGrath Says He’s Pretty Much Deaf

Well my parents said that I would go deaf listening to Sugar Ray loud on the radio (I had terrible taste, but like “Fly” is a bop and so is “Every Morning”–fight me) when I was a kid…

Mark McGrath spoke with The Daily Mail and revealed to them that years of performing live have caught up to him, or specifically his hearing. Mark says he can’t hear shit.

51-year-old Mark said this about going deaf:

“I’m deaf now. I cannot hear any more… It’ years and years of being on the road and being two feet in front of symbols and drums. So high frequencies, I can’t hear anymore. I’ll be listening to people and they’ll tell me their names and I can’t hear anymore.”

Audiologists have been trying to get Mark to wear these “in ears” hearing aids, which help singers hear themselves performing on-stage over all the noise of the drums and guitars and orchestras and whatever else you got going on. Well Mark is a self-proclaimed “dumb” person and doesn’t like to use them:

“Fortunately for the new generation, they have in ears. I’m dumb enough not to use them though… I still need the sight sounds and smells of a concert and that includes the auditory part, but unfortunately, mine’s going.”

Smells of a Sugar Ray concert? You need the sweet scent of sweat, beer, white wine and Britney Spears’ Midnight Fantasy from the girlfriends, vomit, possible urine and marijuana tickling your nostrils?

Mark is genuinely concerned, though. Not enough to wear the in ears, it seems, but enough to say he’s concerned:

“It’s scary because my job is hearing… [The future] is absolutely a worry of mine.”

And that’s not Mark’s only health issue:

“As I get older, my health’s going, I have knee problems, back problems. So I am working on the hearing now… It’s something that recently last year my doctor said you’ve got to step back a little bit… It’s like if you start losing your hair, you’re like, ‘I’m not losing my hair.’ But hearing is the same way, but it’s something I do have to get on it…. You can’t repair your hearing… Once it goes, it goes. You can hope to stop the damage.”

Aging is a bitch and aging as a rock star is really a bitch. I blame all the 90s parents who screamed at their kids about no more Sugar Ray music. Somewhere an angry kid in wide-leg jeans and a short-sleeve shirt over a long-sleeve shirt is falling out of a time warp just to retweet this article and comment: “Y’all won.”

Pic: Wenn.com