Judas Priest Guitarist Richie Faulkner Casually Played A Guitar Solo While His Aorta Burst
"From what I’ve been told by my surgeon, people with this don’t usually make it to the hospital alive.”
In perhaps the most metal thing that has ever happened, the guitarist of Judas Priest, Richie Faulkner, played right through a near-fatal rupture of his aorta.
As reported by Loudwire, the long-time member of the band was onstage at Louder Than Life Festival in Kentucky, playing through the classic Judas Priest song ‘Painkiller’, when he started to feel “confusion and anguish.”
As it happened, the man’s aorta had ruptured, and blood began to fill up his chest cavity.
”I was having what my doctor called an aortic aneurysm and complete aortic dissection,” Faulkner explained later. “From what I’ve been told by my surgeon, people with this don’t usually make it to the hospital alive…The amazing Heart & Lung Center was four miles away from the gig site — if it had been further away…
“We can always drive ourselves crazy with these things but I’m still alive thankfully. Whatever the circumstances, when watching that footage, the truth is, knowing what I know now, I see a dying man.”
Faulkner required ten and a half hours of emergency heart surgery, with doctors working around the clock to replace five separate parts of his chest with artificial aids. You can watch the unbelievable footage of the moment the man started to die and still didn’t miss a single note of his guitar solo right here:
Faulkner became a member of Judas Priest in 2011, replacing the departing member K.K. Downing. He has been credited with bringing a fresh sound to the group, re-invigorating their classic blend of heavy metal riffs and clean, vicious sheen.