Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesGuitar virtuoso Buckethead, best known for his work in Guns N’ Roses, has revealed that he’s suffering from a life-threatening heart condition.
In an interview with the health podcast Coming Alive, the 48-year-old musician, born Brian Carroll, explained he has a condition where his heart “beats out of rhythm,” which has recently become more “intense.”
“I really didn’t know what was going on, and I just tried to deal with it, and let it do what it did, and then eventually it would stop, but it got really intense,” Buckethead says. “So I went to the doctor and they said, ‘Oh, you’re on the verge of having a stroke,’ and I’m like, ‘Whoa.’ Because I felt so good prior to having it, I was just doing pretty well.”
The guitarist says that he went under a procedure to fix the problem, but it didn’t take. He now takes medication, which has helped, but he finds even walking across a room to be difficult.
Buckethead played guitar in Guns N’ Roses from 2000 to 2004, as well as on the band’s notoriously delayed album, Chinese Democracy. He’s also recorded hundreds — yes, hundreds — of solo albums, and has worked with Iggy Pop, System of a Down‘s Serj Tankian, and Faith No More‘s Mike Patton.
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