Please now wash your hands.

An old six string devil botherer I know of the dreaded BLooZ persuation would always avoid washing his hands before doing a gig (even if he had just had a fierce steaming, copious and satisfying doo doo before hand). I won’t name him for obvious reasons like not embarrassing his friends and family but ihis monika was actually Graham Foster http://www.grahamfoster.net/en/biography.htm
(not the rapist in Eastenders ten years ago- that was just a character)…anyway he said he liked the patina of the day on his hands to assist his playing.
I always like nice newly Imperial Leathered hands.

Does anyone here (especially six string devil botherers and other fretted doodah holders and I suppose amateur fiddle enthusiasts) have an opinion or observation about this hand washing business?

wat

A potential libel?

I have a deep-seated handwash habit, but if I have dry, rough, cracked and itchy hands crying out for lubrication, I leave it until I have finished playing for the day.
And yes, yer Irish Spring is not a patch on Imperial Leather.

I am more in sympathy with the late, great Glenn Gould. He would hold his hands under the hottest water he could stand for minutes before coming on stage for concerts, his hands glowing lobster red as he approached the piano. This was mainly for dexterity, although I am certain that soap was employed too, hypochondriac that he was.

As a flute player, it helps a great deal to hold my hands under running warm water for a minute or so before picking up the flute, especially at this time of year, or after a lengthy bicycle to the pub for a session. I don’t know about dexterity, but my fingers surely seal the holes nicely.

As a Fiddler I could wash my hands, go to a session,rosin the bow , and oh sh*t.. Sticky Fingers,and I don’t mean The Stones
Album - lol..
Hate it when that happen’s !
jim,,,

My hands get washed in assorted solutions many times a day as I wash other stuff. that’s enough

Around here we use paper.

>would get Jeremy-ed
I liked that bit Yhaal. You have created a new verb. Raised a smile.

Oh, and I meant to say, his less than hygienic habits would certainly deter other wannabe’s from picking up his axe while he was resting. I bloody hate it when someone just picks up any of my kit without asking. I don’t even really like it if they ask, unless of course it is another proper flute/box/whistle enthusiast trying out my yoke in comparison to their own, amidst a conversation about respective yokes.

It’s because the water softens the ends of your fingers. It’s nothing to do with hygiene or ‘patina’.

Box players have a similar problem…sticky fingers, and I don’t mean ‘nickin’. In the days when I used Valentine hair tonic a quick flip through the hair with the fingers worked and allowed the fingers to glide over the buttons. A banjo playing friend introduced me to ‘french chalk”. It worked for him so I kept a little chalk sprinkled on some cotton wool in an old cigarette tin and that worked well. Nowadays I play slower and depend on the natural oils in my hair, thankfully I still have a full mop.

‘tis true- guitar requires a tougher kind of callus on the left hand than even, say, fiddle, which requires only enough toughness to keep the finger tips from getting sore while maintaining enough softness to create a supple pad where the note is, plus, a goodly part of playing fiddle is being able to feel where your fingers are.

Not so with guitar, which requires steel-tough calluses, and water is definitely not conducive to maintaining these.

Still rather disgusting as Yhaalhouse described it, though.

Maybe there’ll be a discussion Re foot odors at a session at some point….or, how about sharing pints?

Sara -

< how about sharing pints >

This will not apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland - lol..

jim,,, : )

I use one of those gel things when I remember - mostly because if I’m setting up equipment (particularly for a gig) my hands get so filthy just carting stuff back and forth. It’s not always convenient to find somewhere where the hot water is actually working so the hand gel is really useful and stops my harp strings getting mucky.

EEUURRGGH !!

How often have I taken my time to transfer somebody’s guitar from one seat to another, as carefully and gently as possible, never knowing it was probably giving me worms.

It would have been a better idea to drag it into the yard with a gaff and incinerate it.

Hey, makes gigging in England sound like the third world, but it is often like that!

JIm - I meant from the same glass, which, depending on the time of night and how much has already been consumed, happens around here.

But last night when I was offered a pint, and knowing I had had enough, said - how about we split one? - you’da thought I was asking for his first-born. didn’t need that lousy half-a pint anyway. 🙂

Reminds me of some blues band leader (Willie Dixon? Howlin
Wolf?) who said he wouldn’t let his band wash before a performance because their music sounded rawer.

Raw sound or not, I wash my hands before playing to avoid getting grime and oils on the strings — they’re expensive and I’d like em to last as long as possible — build up deadens the tone too. I wipe them off when I’m done. Plus I can feel just a touch of drag when my hands are dirty. It’s hard enough to play smoothly with clean hands.

I usually use the facilities and wash my hands as soon as I arrive. Itives them a chance to dry properly while I’m and the bar, getting settled etc. But once my fiddle is out of its case I won’r wash my hands again, even if I use the loo again, because those stupid hot air driers don’t do the job, and I don’t like to touch my fiddle with wet hands.

anyway, those hot-air dryers are evil - all they do is recirculate the germs in the bathroom and blow them onto your hands.

A large percentage of men never wash their hands after going to the loo, there have been numerous studies done with hidden cameras and the like in public toilets, so I always assume that anything touched by anyone is probably disgusting with germs and trust my immune system to bear up.

I always wash my hands when using the facilities. But I do admit, epecially in winter, sometimes my fingers get too dry to slide between accordion buttons, so I rub my fingertips on on my nose (the outside!) to moisturize them a bit. Skin oils on the old nose never seem to dry out…

Sometime in, I suppose (?) the 1920’s, in the gents in the Commons, Winston Churchill had just finished, buttoning up and plainly preparing to just walk out, when, over his shoulder, still at the urinal, one of his friends, a member of the opposition, said, ‘At Eton they taught us to wash our hands after going to the toilet!’, and Winston replied, ‘At Harrow they taught us not to p i s s on our hands!’

Men should wash their hands before going to the urinal. The hands have been handling coins/pushing supermarket trolleys/ picking noses/getting licked by dogs all day. Meanwhile, the wedding tackle, on the other hand (stop that smirking over there!), has been safely wrapped up in (hopefully) clean underpants. It is utterly illogical to wash hands *after* going for a wee.

And, of course, what anyone should do after a No.2 is wash their hands BEFORE pulling up and buttoning trousers, etc.
But wouldn’t people look at you if you did that in the public facilities ?

The whole stupid obsession with hyper-cleanliness is plainly bollox.
It’s just a tradition or, maybe, a convention…And very much younger than the musical tradition we study and love…
Afterall, old fashioned wig glue was made from stewed moths, dog urine and handfuls of that stringy grey stuff that forms in out flows and sink outlet plumbing with a touch of tramp phlegm (drunk dirty old men in UK, sluttish girl in US)

"Winston replied, ‘At Harrow they taught us not to p i s s on our hands!"

Tells you something about those boys, that you have to teach them not to pee on their hands.

FWIW I remember reading somewhere that one of the old classical violin masters (Heiftiz maybe?) would wash his hands at the beginning of the day of a performance but then not for the rest of the day - even avoiding using the left hand so he didn’t have to wash it…..you need a certain amount of oils on the fingers to slide on the strings I guess. Some classical violinists I know also run their fingers through their hair before playing to get some oils on it. Dry fingers (just post washing) are harder to slide when getting up in to higher positions…..

Anyway there’s one position in favor of your unsanitary friend….

When I do wash my hands (often when there are old ladies there to see me come out past the sink—amazingly, no one had to teach me not to pee on my hands, and yet I still manage not to), and only the hot-blower is available for drying them, I mainly just dry my hands in my hair. Hair is absorbent and works great. Gotta have a mane of it, though, I think. Might not work for folks with short hair.

"I always assume that anything touched by anyone is probably disgusting with germs and trust my immune system to bear up."

I agree with Red Menace on this, and it’s served me well for 45 years now. (‘Course some folks do have compromised immune systems for various reasons, so as with everything, to each his own.)

"Wedding tackle.." Teehee.

Once I touched a girl (too much information not forthcoming) when I was about 17 and I swore to myself I would never wash that hand again. But I seriously let myself down. I washed it when I was 43.

Why couldn’t she have washed her OWN hand? 🙂

What bugs me more than anything (double meaning fully intended) is when you have to come out of a public boggatorium, having carefully cleansed and blow-dried your hands (using your elbow to operate the hand-dryer button of course), only to be confronted with a bloody great big door handle that you have to grasp with your painstakingly-washed hand and pull open. Hands up all those who either (a) wait for someone to come into the boggatorium so that you can squeeze niftily out without touching the handle, (b) desperately try to pull the door open by its top or edge, anything other than that suspect handle, or (c), as a last resort, use your becrook’d pinkie to pull the thing open, having considered that, at least, one contaminated finger is ten times better than ten. You lot don’t realise how crucial this matter is to a harmonica player just returning from the pub lavvy to resume playing, his besmirched fingers, then harmonicas, destined to be intimately connected to that major germ portal, the gob. With sucking to follow.

She washed hers in 1994. I have it in a letter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdmq557ZGEs

play video

This is a pic of Yhaalhouse in a public urinal in the Khan Market Old Delhi Nov 2010 (I’m the gingery sort of European bloke heading for the left of the vile tiled monstosity as we view it), - no hand washing.
By the way the music track is all me doing one of the other musics I do (a sort of Bo Diddley whole tone scale meandering dirge)

Reminds me of "Poppy" on Seinfeld ….

Steve Shaw, that made me laugh. And yes, I’ve done the "opening the door with the pinkie" technique. I guess a variant of that might be the "do the final rinse and blow-dry your hands while holding the door open with one foot" technique - if you can reach all the required fixtures from one place. I’ve never seen an automatic door on a washroom but there’s probably a gap in the market (maybe just automatic for those going out?).

I’m also of the opinion that anything I have to touch in a public bathroom in order to wash my hands is certainly dirtier than anything I have touched on my own body.

ps - when faced with those bloody hot air driers, I grab a big wad of toilet paper for drying my hands, which also doubles as a door-handle-grabber.

There’s automatic loo doors on trains. British train companies have got one thing right.

Yes sara, I forgot the wad-of-paper technique, so oft-employed by me. And what about the latest generation of hand-dryers, those Dysonesque gismos with a narrow slot you put your hands in that blast air at supersonic speeds against your poor delicate skin? Next time you use one of those, thinking naively how quick and hygienic they are, just look deeper, right into the bottom of the trough you put your hands in. There you will find a small but deadly reservoir of festering slime, replete with unspecified fungal and bacterial growth, that is beyond the reach of those air jets. Don’t penetrate too deeply is my advice.