FOR JUDAS PRIEST guitarist Richie Faulkner, September 26, 2021, started out like any other gig day. The band was scheduled to play support to Metallica on the fourth and final night of the Louder Than Life Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. Faulkner was a little tired, but after two and a half weeks on tour, that was hardly unusual.
He poured himself a vodka and Red Bull and downed it. Combined with the adrenaline of playing to a sold-out crowd, he soon perked up and was excited to take the stage dressed in trademark studded black leather vest and black leather pants, and wielding a trademark Gibson Flying V. Judas Priest opened with “One Shot at Glory” from 1990’s Painkiller, then launched into “Lightning Strike” from 2018’s Firepower. By the third song, the 1982 anthem “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’,” they were locked in and celebrating career-spanning songs on their long-delayed (due to Covid) 50th Anniversary tour.
The hour-long set flew by, and as Judas Priest played the last song of the night, the hyper-charged “Painkiller,” Faulkner continued rocking out, shaking his leonine locks and alternating between joyful smiles and metal grimaces. Halfway through the song, the grimaces became real. Faulkner felt his chest tighten. Moderate pain and pressure swept through his midsection. He felt disoriented and short of breath. Even so, he was driven by devotion and managed to play a dextrous whammy bar-enhanced solo and even raised his guitar to the sky. As vocalist Rob Halford delivered the final vocal salvo, Faulkner exited the stage and collapsed into a chair.
“I needed to finish the song, but I had the presence of mind to come back from the edge of the stage just in case I passed out from fatigue,” Faulkner says in a Zoom interview six months after the Louisville show. “Luckily, Metallica was headlining that night or we would have played a full set and I probably would have dropped dead onstage.”
Paramedics urged Faulkner to go to the hospital. But the guitarist felt constricted in his tight leather and wanted to remove his stage clothes before figuring out what to do next.
“If I had known my heart had split open and I was bleeding into my chest cavity, I might have handled it a bit differently. But I had no idea,” Faulkner says. “I got my jeans and T-shirt on. I didn’t think it was anything really serious and I didn’t
