Jesse Malin Suffered a Rare Spinal Stroke. He’s Determined to Walk and Dance Again
On the last Saturday of March at New York’s Webster Hall, Jesse Malin was doing what he’s done a thousand times before: leaping off the stage and wading through a sold-out crowd toward the back bar, which he climbed atop to lead a singalong of his song “She Don’t Love Me Now.”
Malin’s parting-the-Red-Sea bit with his microphone — he requests two 50-foot cords at every show; “the extra linguine,” he calls it — is a signature of his concerts, and it’s how he wants his fans to visualize him right now: walking, strutting, and dancing to and from the stage.
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Just a few weeks after the triumphant Webster Hall gig, a 20th-anniversary celebration of his solo debut, The Fine Art of Self Destruction, Malin suffered an exceedingly rare spinal-cord infarction — a stroke in his back — while at dinner in the East Village. Gathered with friends to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Howie Pyro, Malin’s former D Generation bandmate and best friend, he felt a burning pain in his lumbar region that slowly migrated down his hips, through his thighs, and into his heels. He collapsed onto the floor of the restaurant, unable to walk.
“Everybody was standing above me like in Rosemary’s Baby, saying all these different things, and I was there not knowing what was going on with my body,” Malin says during a phone call from his room at an NYU rehab facility.
Immobilized and numb, Malin was carried by Murphy’s Law singer Jimmy G from the Italian restaurant into the hallway of a nearby apartment, where an ambulance was called to take him uptown to Mount Sinai Hospital. That was May 4, and the notoriously physical, high-energy performer — his first public stage dive was at age 14 on national TV during a Saturday Night Live performance by Fear — has been paralyzed from the waist down since.
“This is the hardest six weeks that I’ve ever had,” he says. “I’m told that they don’t really understand it, and they’re not sure of the chances. The reports from the doctors have been tough, and there’s moments in the day where you want to cry, and where you’re scared. But I keep saying to myself that I can make this happen. I can recover my body.”
Such undeterred optimism has been Malin’s calling card. He refers to it as “P.M.A.”, or positive mental attitude, from the Bad Brains’ song “Attitude,” and he’s been preaching it onstage and in interviews for decades. But he admits the P.M.A. has been hard to summon since his freak medical emergency.
“It’s almost like a joke. Like, ‘You talk all this P.M.A.? Well, see how you deal with this,’” he says. “They took me outside for the first time the other day in a wheelchair, and I went through the lobby and I could see the sun shining through the glass, and I just started bawling. It felt like I was watching myself in this movie. I didn’t know this person. By the time I got to the corner, I got myself together and into a park, and just breathed in the air.”
After two weeks at Mount Sinai, where he underwent various spinal procedures, Malin was transferred to his current rehab center at NYU on May 18. His days consist of three rounds of physical therapy and rehabilitation, with the short-term goal of teaching him how to move his body without the use of his legs and do daily tasks. When he’s discharged later this month, he’ll be in a wheelchair and have to relocate from his current walk-up apartment to a new ADA-compliant one with an elevator. It won’t be cheap.
Malin — like so many working musicians who suffer catastrophic events — doesn’t have the finances to support his long-term care and outpatient rehab, despite years of touring and releasing albums, and having health insurance. On Wednesday, Malin’s manager David Bason and a group of friends launched a new campaign via the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund to raise money for the singer. The fully tax-deductible donations, which can be made here, will go directly to Malin’s care.
Malin has mixed feelings about it all. Over his career, he’s been a staunch supporter of New York and the rock & roll community worldwide and, as Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote in 2015, “put his money where his heart is, investing in his neighborhood’s rock & roll soul” with popular bars like Niagara and Bowery Electric. He’s produced annual benefits for The Joe Strummer Foundation and Music and Memory; performs at the Light of Day Foundation’s regular concerts; donated proceeds from his pandemic livestreams to food banks, Save Our Stages, and out-of-work bar staff; and curated benefits for friends in need (he threw a series of all-star shows when Pyro was battling liver disease). But he’s reluctant, if not embarrassed, to ask for help himself.
“I always felt that we have a voice with these microphones and with these guitars and with these venues to help each other out. But it’s very hard for me to take back and be that person,” he says. “I don’t want to be a burden, but I’m learning. Just laying here and not being able to walk, it’s very humbling.”
Malin is also losing money from a planned summer tour he had to cancel after his stroke. At the time, he told fans on social media that he had suffered a serious back injury but declined to say more.
“I didn’t want to get into the extremity of it. And now it’s just time to let people know. Even though I really believe it’s a temporary state, I’m not going to walk out of here tomorrow with a leather jacket and a cane and go hang out at the bar. It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of being in a wheelchair,” he says. “There’s something liberating about the truth, that this is what’s happening to me right now.”
Ironically, Malin’s also having some of his most recognized creative success at the moment — with a song that sums up the hoped-for outcome of his situation. “New York Comeback,” a song he co-wrote with Lucinda Williams, who suffered her own stroke in 2020, was Number One at Americana radio last week.
“Even though this has been the hardest time of my life, there’s been some gifts,” Malin says. “I knew I had some great friends and great fans and people in this world, and I’m getting to see a lot of that — though I would have really preferred a birthday party than to find out this way.”
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