In a revealing new interview with Blabbermouth, former Lamb Of God drummer Chris Adler shared the story behind his 2019 dismissal from the band and opened up about the personal and medical battles that surrounded his exit, including the painful reality that he hasn’t spoken to his brother and Lamb Of God guitarist Willie Adler since.
Reflecting on the circumstances of his departure, Adler said: “People are interested in, ‘What the fuck happened?’ There was an incident in 2018 when I had a motorcycle accident on an island outside of Thailand that really messed up my shoulder, but that was resolved quickly. I had a great surgeon who works for the Indianapolis Colts, who got me up and running. In three or four months, I had as much motion and strength as before. That wasn’t an issue.”
He added, “First of all, I’m doing great, but it took a long time to get to this point. Right around the time I left, there were a lot of things going on. My mother was very sick. She ended up passing. I was going through a really terrible divorce. If you’ve been a fan of Lamb and followed us from the beginning, there are enough stories to go around. Number one, I really put all of myself into this project. Two, we were, in general, a very dysfunctional family that was rolling around, trying to figure it out. In many ways, that worked well for us. It pushed us to push each other to be better. It wasn’t something that anybody wanted to walk away from. We knew we might not always be best friends, but in pushing each other, we made something fairly unique.”
Adler went on to disclose a deeper issue that developed over time: “Right at the same time, it was around 2003, I started noticing something with my right foot doing weird things when I didn’t want it to be doing weird things. It wasn’t too often, and it didn’t mess up anything for a long time. Slowly, it got worse. By around 2016, I was touring with Lamb and Megadeth, and it was making a difference in the show in that there were points where I felt like I couldn’t control it.”
After seeing neurologists and undergoing tests, Adler was diagnosed with musician’s dystonia, a task-specific movement disorder. “I haven’t wanted to talk about it before now. It’s really a death sentence in many ways. But Alex Webster [Cannibal Corpse] had brought it up, and I’m friends with him. I recently saw the Nickelback documentary. I’m not the biggest Nickelback fan, but it’s a great documentary. Their drummer [Daniel Adair] went through the same thing. He had the same issues as I, where it’s a death sentence. It’s called ‘task-specific focal dystonia.’ It’s on my foot in this case.”
He explained how the condition progressed: “The nerves that are telling my foot to do this are worn out. Eventually, it stops doing what you want it to do. In the case of dystonia, it causes things like depression, but the nerve gives your foot the signal. At the same time, it misfires. It uses the muscles that would go opposite to the intended motion. If I were trying to depress my right foot, often it would lift or shoot to the side or shoot back. It kept getting worse and worse.”
Adler says he presented this medical information to the band. “They knew I was in the middle of a big divorce… Like I said, we were dysfunctional. We weren’t always best friends. It was strained. Whoever was not in the room was getting picked on. I was the guy out of the room.”
He believes taking a temporary role with Megadeth added tension. “I think one of the things that, from my perspective, and I don’t mean to speak for anybody, I think when I took the Megadeth gig, that really strained things even further. Nobody said, ‘We don’t want you to do it,’ or ‘You’re cheating on us.’ That was still the vibe, then when Megadeth won a Grammy, that pushed it further. I won a [Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy] with the other band that I joined, Protest The Hero, a couple of years prior.”
As the dystonia worsened, he tried to find a solution: “I went to them and said, ‘This doesn’t happen all the time. It happens on these particular songs. Can we work around it? We have a pretty large body of work.’ Nobody wanted to do that. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.”
Losing the band he had helped build was deeply painful. “That was very difficult for me. In many ways, that band was my identity. It’s everything that I worked for. I spiraled. My mom passed, I divorce, it was a messy, messy time for me to try to pull myself up and try to feel ‘I’m going to be okay.’ It did take a while, to be honest.”
Eventually, he began retraining himself to drum using his left foot as lead: “Now, I lead with my left foot, which throws the right foot in a loop mentally. I have to build a different connection for it to work. That connection is now strong. I’m able to do it well, but not some of the things I was doing in Lamb. It’s a relief not having to do those things because I was coming offstage really depressed about the shows we were having.”
When interviewer David E. Gehlke commented that fans were shocked by his departure, Adler responded: “It was as big of a shock to me. It was, ‘I don’t know how to make this work.’ I wasn’t given much of a choice. It was one of those e-mails: ‘Services no longer required.’ It took a while to dig out of that. I’m happy I did. It could have gone a different way.”
He added, “Today, I’m grateful and happy for where I am. Like I said, my home life is awesome, and I’m looking forward to doing some shows with these guys [in the Firstborne project], having more fun and feeling a lot less pressure.”
Asked if he remains in contact with his brother Willie Adler, Chris said: “I guess the best way to put it is that I was sideswiped with the whole thing. I wish him all the best; I’m wishing them all the best, and I think about him all the time, but I would say we are estranged. Since that e-mail that I got, where he was not even willing to talk to me about it, we haven’t spoken.”
He concluded: “At this point, I’ve got to work through resentments and regrets and all that stuff. I’m happy where I’m at. I hope he’s happy where he is. Everything is cool with me.”
