“I looked down and could see the bone of my pointer finger”: how a grisly accident and nerve damage transformed former Megadeth man Chris Poland’s guitar style

Ever wondered how to replicate Chris Poland signature playing style? Well, according to the former Megadeth guitarist, all you need is a 200lb oak door and some perseverance.

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Poland recalls a particularly gruesome injury during the recording of 1985’s Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! “I cut my hand on the glass of a 200lb oak door coming at me,” he says. “I put both my hands up, my hand hit the glass, and it broke. My hand got totally trashed.”

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It was no light sprain – the injury would impact Poland’s guitar ability forever. “I looked down and could see the bone of my pointer finger,” he says. “I lost the ability to bend [it], and I can’t feel my pinky from nerve damage. It drove me to play how I play.”

Broken tendons wouldn’t get in the way of Poland’s thrash metal ambitions, though. He found ways to circumvent his less nimble finger, leading to his signature legato technique and thick, overdriven tone. He notes that cuts like Rattlehead would sound completely different, had it not been for his injury.

As Yamaha explains on Poland’s artist page: “His unique style can be partially attributed to an injury to his index finger on his fret hand. This injury forced him to develop a style that includes smoothly phrased passages and wide intervallic leaps.”

Poland isn’t the only metal guitarist who has soldiered on in spite of a hand injury. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi infamously sliced off the tips of his middle and ring fingers at the age of 17.

The guitarist reflected on the event back in 2020 during Gibson TV’s Icons series. While working his final day in a factory welding job, Iommi had an unfortunate mishap with a guillotine press.

“As I’m pushing the metal through into the press, the machine came down on my hand,” he recalled. “In the action of pulling my hand back quickly, I pulled the ends of my fingers off. I couldn’t believe it, you know. The last day.”

“While the bandages were on, I was learning to play with my two fingers and it seemed like forever”, he said. “I went to see various specialists and they said, ‘You might as well pack up. You’re never going to play’, which was really depressing but I wouldn’t accept that.”

He would go on to create his own artificial fingertips, working his way through a series of plastic models before landing on the perfect leather tips.