Guitarist Uniquely Strums to the Rhythm of His Heart

Diners at Cha Cha Cha on Ventura Boulevard in Encino are in for the usual double entrancement tonight. While Caribbean-style food hypnotizes their palates with spice, the soft reggae of Fire & Brimstone, pulsing like a heartbeat through the restaurant’s clang and chatter, will set their non-digestive inner places throbbing with well-being.

In their debilitated state, few will look up and notice something extraordinary:

Fire & Brimstone lead guitarist Paul Gunby is working his share of the mesmerization without the benefit of a left arm.

And in that fact lie some truths about fortitude, talent, optimism and, if you’re inclined toward the spiritual, about grace. By comparison with these truths, a second arm can seem a poor, unnecessary thing.

“Really, it’s been a gift,” he says. “It’s taught me to learn rather quickly. Shooting a bow and arrow--I haven’t figured that out yet. But presented with a two-handed object, I can usually figure out how to adapt to it.”

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Gunby was born without the arm. He was the youngest of seven children in a Pentecostal family then living in Granite City, Ill. His mother was a church organist, and genetics preordained he would be musical.

At first, Gunby confined himself to drums and piano, instruments a one-handed person reasonably could play. But as a teenager, he began to crave the flagship instrument of rock ‘n’ roll, the guitar.

“It was frustrating at first,” he says. “I mean, strumming the strings with one hand, and looking at all the possibilities on the fingerboard and not having any idea about how to open them all up. But my mother always encouraged me, and I finally landed on a method, and I went for it.”

His method consists of the following:

He tunes his guitar to an open D-minor chord. Then, reaching across the body of the instrument, he can create other minor chords by using his forefinger to hold down all six strings in any fret. These chords he picks and strums with his three remaining fingers.

To create major chords, he holds down all six strings in one fret with his forefinger, and one of the strings in a different fret with his middle finger, striking the strings with his remaining two. For more complicated chords, he adds his ring finger to the configuration, and picks and strums with his pinkie.

“There’s definitely a practical limit to my method because for a lot of chords you need to hold down strings in even more places. Also I’m at a disadvantage as far as volume goes, so I play electric guitar and compensate by turning it up a little higher if I have to. But in one way it’s easier: Right hand-left hand coordination just isn’t a factor.”

Some of what he’s learned about playing over the years transcends how he plays. He finds he easily conveys a can-do attitude to discouraged players. “Sometimes someone will say, ‘I broke my finger a year ago and I haven’t played since,’ and I say, ‘Aw, man, that’s nothing.’ ”

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At 35, Gunby is a serious guitarist, singer and songwriter, one small break away from being able to support himself through his music. He performs not only relaxed restaurant gigs with Fire & Brimstone, but more challenging original music with a band called Redemption Sevenfold.

The latter group has recorded with such reggae heavyweights as Steel Pulse, and the sainted Bob Marley’s own Wailers. Redemption Sevenfold’s first CD will be issued around year’s end and could prove Gunby’s breakthrough to a full-time music career.

For now, he works days as a graphic designer at Honda’s U.S. headquarters in Torrance. On the corporate campus, his eccentric clothes and heavy sheaf of blondish, 18-inch-long dreadlocks add a definite flatted 13th note to the major chord of white shirts and neckties that surround him.

Gunby believes his condition resulted from his mother’s having been affected by toxic substances in the ground and water around industrial Granite City. This has helped him deal, he says, with people who see him play and are curious about him.

“I always kind of expect the question--’How did you lose your arm?’--and it’s never other than awkward. But sometimes it’s a chance to tell people about environmentalism, which I feel strongly about.”

Gunby describes himself as a “spiritual Christian.” He lives on a former mink ranch in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. He and his fiancee, singer-songwriter Kimberley Corliss, plan to marry in May. They met while attending a nondenominational church in Los Angeles.

Although he writes and plays in a variety of styles ranging from jazz to gospel, Gunby finds that reggae feels most like spiritual home. It’s a style of music in which outward things (extremities, for example) are less important than what is at the human core.

“All music can be spiritual, but I think reggae has special credibility because it’s really from the heart. I mean, it has the heart’s own rhythm, and for some cosmic reason, that makes it easier to sing from the heart. Like Bob Marley says, we should give up our greed and our ego and work for people as a whole. I think that legacy is really the cornerstone of reggae, and I can really resonate with that.”