Michigan metal drummer recovers from 2015 Texas bus crash

HOLT, Mich.—It’s a Saturday morning in June, and the sound of loud, rhythmic drumming echoes off the basement walls of Andrew Tkaczyk’s house in Holt.

Tkaczyk, 30, nods his head to the beat, keeping time as his arms, one of which is covered in tattoos, move, sticks in hand, from the cymbals to the drums. His right leg ends at the knee, his thigh resting on a pad that quickly moves with it, up and down, keeping time with the beat he’s setting.

Tkaczyk’s at home in his new digs after spending just over two years at his parent’s house in Charlotte, where he adjusted to life as an amputee and worked to recover from multiple bone fractures and myriad other injuries.

A horrific collision between his band’s tour bus and a semi outside El Paso, Texas, in November 2015 left Tkaczyk’s body broken. In the aftermath, his and his bandmates’ music careers with globally-known metal core band The Ghost Inside have been in limbo.

The drivers of both vehicles were killed in the crash. Four members of The Ghost Inside sustained injuries.

Tkaczyk lost his right leg from the knee down. He spent more than a year healing from rib and hip fractures, multiple vertebrae fractures and a minor head injury, as well as a torn rotator cuff and damaged ligaments and nerves in his right shoulder and right hand.

Doctors told Tkaczyk about all the things he’d never be able to do again. Playing drums was just one of them.

Today he’s a living contradiction to those predictions.

A drive to overcome his physical injuries and find his way back to music and his band, coupled with an invention his father crafted in his garage to help Tkacyzk drum again, is making that possible.

From his living room coach, amid boxes he was still unpacking, Tkaczyk had a hard time describing what it felt like to see his band’s momentum halted.

Before the crash The Ghost Inside was selling out venues all over the world, playing at events with bands like Kiss and Motley Crew in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators.

The Ghost Inside had a strong following, and a successful metal music career. Known world-wide for their aggressive sound and inspiring lyrics, their 2014 album “Dear Youth” reached number 63 on the American Billboard 200 chart.

“We were at the tippy-top of that world,” Tkaczyk told the Lansing State Journal . “It had definitely gotten to a point, I’d say, in the two years before our accident where we were like, ‘Man, this is going somewhere.’ We were all making enough money to live because of the band. We were only just going up, up, up.”

The band’s biggest tour yet, in Australia, was just weeks away when their tour bus crashed.

“It came to a screeching halt,” Tkaczyk said.

Band members Zach Johnson, Jonathan Vigil, Jim Riley and Tkaczyk were all hospitalized and, within a few months, scattered to their home states to recover.

Tkaczyk spent a month at a hospital in El Paso before transferring to Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids. A month later, he moved into his parent’s home in Charlotte, where he grew up. There the family dining room doubled as his bedroom because of its location on the first floor.

What followed was close to two years of physical therapy. He learned to walk with a prosthetic leg, to extend his upper body’s range of motion.

“I love my family, and I’m glad I had them,” Tkaczyk said. “They helped in ways I can’t even begin to describe, but I’m 30 years old. Now that I have my own space, it’s huge.”

He lost independence “to extreme levels” during the two years following the crash, Tkaczyk said. Although he approached the challenge of recovering tenaciously, there were low moments. He struggled with a bout of depression and anxiety.

Band members were going through some of the same struggles.

Jonathan Vigil, The Ghost Inside’s lead singer, suffered a traumatic brain injury and broke his back and both ankles in the crash.

The roadblock the physical injuries created for The Ghost Inside was, at times, devastating, Vigil said.

“We poured our hearts and souls into it,” he said, from his home in California. “I think, for me, it took an emotional toll. It was a dream and a goal to play music for a living. We were making a living off music. The hardest part for me was knowing where we could have been. Me personally, for a long time, I didn’t want to do it ever again.”

Tkaczyk said band members focused on their own injuries and watched as bands they knew and had played shows with kept performing and recording.

“It’s really tough to see,” he said. “I look at it and think, ‘That should be me, right there.’ It’s hard to even see my good friends play when they’re around.”

Tkaczyk’s return to drumming, and the reunion of The Ghost Inside in April, wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a device that’s allowed him to play percussion without wearing his prosthetic. It was crafted and created not by a prosthetist.

The three-foot high, 20-pound creation connects a raised lever to the percussion set’s drum pedal via a bar connecting them. With it Tkaczyk uses his right thigh without the prosthetic to keep the beat while he plays.

In true metal fashion, it’s called “the hammer.”

Tkaczyk had originally planned to play drums wearing a version of his prosthetic leg that suited his

percussion set, but it weighs 13 pounds. Repetitively lifting it up and down on the drum pedal during a four-minute song was exhausting.

“It feels like it weighs 20 (pounds),” Tkaczyk said. “For probably a solid year, I was trying to play like that. It worked, but it ended up discouraging me.”

Larry Tkaczyk saw that discouragement in his son’s eyes.

A General Motors employee at the company’s Delta Township Assembly Plant and a hobby woodworker, Larry Tkaczyk became convinced he could create something that would allow his son to play the drums without using a prosthetic.

Larry Tkaczyk conceived the concept for a stand built out of metal and wood connecting a raised lever to the drum pedal when he visited his son’s hospital bed in El Paso.

“I thought of this from day one,” he said. “I wanted our son to get back to doing what he wanted to do.”

He built the first prototype in his garage last summer.

On paper, Tkaczyk said, his father’s idea seemed “genius,” but he was shocked by how much easier it made drumming.

“It’s way more comfortable,” he said. “There’s still a little bit of a latency, but it’s not as bad. There’s no weight to lift because it’s just my limb. I feel like I have more control. It’s 100 percent in my opinion the ticket to what I needed.”

Watching his son play the drums with his invention for the first time was reassuring, Larry Tkaczyk said.

“He had a big smile on his face and, when he finished, he gave me a fist pump,” he said. “I could tell he approved of it.”

Vigil said seeing Tkaczyk play drums with “the hammer” was inspiring.

“I didn’t really understand how it worked until I saw it in person,” he said. “When I did, I thought, ‘This is the most genius thing ever invented.’”

In the year since he made the first one, Larry Tkaczyk has created several updated versions of “the hammer,” a process he calls “an evolution.”

Andrew Tkaczyk said each one has been an improvement.

“We make subtle tiny differences, but all of those end up making a huge difference in the long run.”

In February, Tkaczyk released his first solo project, an EP, or collection, of instrumental metal music entitled “Coma Visions” that he created under the name One Decade.

“From almost to the day when I first went on tour, when I was 17 years old to the time of the accident was literally a decade, almost 10 years,” Tkaczyk said. “I thought it was kind of cool, because I felt it was a representation of what I’ve picked up and learned with music over the last 10 years. It’s sort of the culmination of all that.”

The new music, at times gentle, even eerie, leads to strong, driving, rhythmic creations.

And despite very real concerns that The Ghost Inside could be finished, a fear both Tkaczyk and Vigil admit became very real for them at times during their recovery, in April the band met up at a studio in Baltimore. They played together for the first time since the crash.

The band’s members had been in constant contact with one another since the crash, maintaining a never-ending stream of text conversations and phone calls with each other.

“It helped a lot because any time any of us were having a bad day any of the guys were basically a Facetime away,” Tkaczyk said. “We talked to each other about what we were going through, mentally and physically and it totally helps. You just feel better.”

The thought of making music together again was nerve-wracking, he said.

“It was two and a half years leading up to this moment of OK. Let’s play a song together,’” Tkaczyk said. “I’m sure going into it the guys were like, ‘Here goes nothing. Let’s try.’ It’s not all about me at all, but a lot of it is riding on me. I know that they were thinking, ‘Andy doesn’t have a leg. Is he going to be able to play?’ I know that they were thinking that.”

But Vigil said he wasn’t worried.

“Andrew’s drive to play again is the biggest of anybody playing in the band” he said. “I never doubted his drive to do it or that he would.”

“We counted into a song and just ripped through it,” Tkaczyk said. “After two and a half years of not playing, we didn’t mess up a part or have to stop and restart. It was unbelievable. That muscle memory will never leave me.”

Vigil said the practice convinced him of the band’s ability to play again.

“It definitely put any doubts I had to rest,” he said. “I didn’t know for sure until we were playing and I looked back and saw Andrew and the rest of the guys and thought, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’”

During a video streamed live on The Ghost Inside’s Facebook page that same day and viewed by more than 120,000 fans, band members shared their recovery with fans and talked about the band’s future.

There is one, said Tkaczyk. What it looks like though, is uncertain. A tour may be too physically taxing.

“We used to tour 10 months out of the year,” Tkaczyk said. “Gone, on the road, flying, in vans, in buses. I don’t think that is possible for us to do anymore. That’s one of the things we had to tell our fans. We had to be real with them.”

But individual shows are a possibility and something they’ve discussed. So is another album.

“Part of that is that we still don’t really have an answer because we just started the process,” Tkaczyk said. “What we hope will happen is that we can at least play one show again. We’re not going to stop until we do. We don’t want to let this be what ended us.”