BODY LANGUAGE : Them Bones

Chiropractor Arlo Gordin strides through the waiting room of the Universal City Medical Group--past the magazine rack with its issues of Rolling Stone and Guitar Player--and greets a Trent Reznor look-alike and a waif-thin woman with magenta hair and two silver nose rings. He beckons the couple into a large purple and teal room, where a huge sculpture of a spine looms overhead and a purple mannequin reposes amid seven treatment tables. An uncaged parrot perches in front of a tropical mural.

OK, so this isn’t your father’s doctor’s office. But it is a musician’s mecca. Gordin, 45, is the man to whom the post-punkers, blues-belters and troubled tenors go when wrists can’t keep the beat and voices can’t sing the song. From guitarists to bass players, classical pianists to opera singers, patients come from around the world, complaining of tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, fraying voices or just plain burnout. And Gordin--who has ministered such worthies as jazz master Chick Corea and rockers Billy Sheehan, Stuart Hamm and Ginger Baker--puts them back in tune, using chiropractic care and other alternative disciplines.

“Every doctor chooses certain niches of the population they want to serve, and arts and music are the things I most love,” says the affable practitioner, whose flashy clientele is balanced by the rank and file citizens who make up more than half his business.

Gordin studied ethnomusicology, apprenticed to a Maori wood sculptor and traveled through Bali and Asia before gravitating toward a chiropractic career. After training at the renowned Palmer chiropractic college in Iowa, he hung out his shingle in L.A. in 1979. “I’ve always had friends who are artists and musicians,” Gordin says, “and naturally, as a doctor and a healer, that group would come to me with their particular problems.”

On a recent afternoon, patients were in from Pennsylvania, Japan and Chicago, while flopped belly-down on one of the seven tables was alternative rock phenom Beck, whom Gordin has been treating for years. Pains and strains may vary, but the song remains essentially the same when musicians get ailments that conventional medicine can’t treat. Says Gordin, “One guy calls me and says, ‘I can’t play my gigs. I’m losing my house. I’ve been to all the doctors, had all the tests. No one can figure out what’s wrong with me. I’m toast.’ He’s here for four days, and in the first day, he’s already 20% better.”

The secret, with apologies to Sting, is synchronicity. “When something’s wrong in one place, it’s often wrong in three places,” explains Gordin. “Most people have one or two complaints that are major, but by the time you talk to them, they really have eight or 10.”

Gordin, then, takes it as his task to restore harmony. Musicians, fret no more.