What the hell is wrong with Stephen Stills' speech? Is it false teeth?

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Rolling Stone's video interview with Stills & Richie Furay on the Buffalo Springfield reunion. My first impression is that Stills' mangled speech is because of false teeth.

I'm not posting this to ridicule him...I am a career-spanning fan...I'm asking an honest question. He's dropped a LOT of weight...which I though was great, because for a while he started to look like Brian Wilson at his worst.

I'm just wondering what's wrong with his speech in this clip. And for the record, his teeth look pretty uniform and straight, and the reason he got passed over in favor of Peter Tork for that spot on The Monkees was "bad teeth."

http://www.rollingstone.com/videos/new-and-hot/buffalo-springfield-stills-furay-onrreunion-bands-future-20110612

:shrug:

[frogmarch]

1. He sounds all right to me, but

in places it looks as if he might have a wad of Skol on the outer front portion of his lower gum.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

2. I read somewhere

he'd had a stroke............... :shrug:

[nolabear]

3. Looked it up and the best guess is a combination of dental and near deafness.

Those Rock-n-Roll boys are lucky they're not all stone deaf.

Funny thing, I was playing "magical thinking" games today because I was fixing a manuscript that had exactly 49 mistakes in it, and it got me to thinking about CSN. On the way to the grocery store I downloaded some of their old stuff and rocked out, including, of course, 49 Bye-Byes. When I got to the store, they were playing Helplessly Hoping on the sound system and when I got home there was this.

I love it when the Universe plays games with us that way.

[bluedigger]

4. He's almost completely deaf.

He has a genetic disorder, I believe. He plays by the vibrations mostly. :-(

[Amerigo Vespucci]

5. That explains it...

...I just did a little Googling and found the following in a Yahoo Group reply ("Rust: The Neil Young Community").

No way of knowing if it's 100% accurate, since there's no validating link, but this is what was posted:

Stephen's been 95% deaf for quite some time now ... the hearing aids have improved his vocals and speech over the past couple years ...It's nerve damage which is not correctable with surgery ... Mr. Stills has stated many times that they all went deaf in his family so he also believes it's partly hereditary ...

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/rust/message/222989

[HardWorkingDem]

6. He actually looks pretty good...he's lost a bunch of weight...

Last time I saw him he was pretty heavy (and I think under some booze). He looks really good.