In a deeply personal and candid new interview, former Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler has revealed that winning a Grammy Award for his work on Megadeth‘s 2016 album, Dystopia, “meant more” to him than winning with his own band would have. He explained that the victory was the ultimate validation of a journey that began as a 14-year-old fan who saw Megadeth as the very “point on my horizon.”
Speaking with the Chris Akin Presents… podcast, Adler recounted the incredible full-circle story, which started on a skate ramp in the 1980s.
“When I was 14 years old, I was on a skate ramp, and… somebody had put a Megadeth song on one of these cassettes, and I was, like, ‘Who is this?'” he recalled (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And that one song, and then my finding out more about the band… that band singularly put a point on my horizon, which was, ‘That is what I want to do with my life.’ Megadeth defined everything about what I wanted to do and be a musician.”
Decades later, that teenage dream became a reality when he received a 5 AM phone call from Dave Mustaine while in a Los Angeles hotel room recording a Lamb of God album. Mustaine had a specific mission for him. After the disappointing reception to 2013’s more rock-oriented Super Collider, he wanted to get back to basics. “He’s, like, ‘Hey, I remember hanging out with you and you’re cool… and I was wondering if you’d like to make a thrash record with me,'” Adler said. “I was jumping up and down… I was, like, ‘Yes, I wanna get you back on track.'”
What followed was an intimate, months-long writing process in Nashville where, as Adler tells it, “basically Dave [Mustaine] and I wrote that entire record.”
This deep personal investment and lifelong fandom is why, he explained, the 2017 Grammy win for the song “Dystopia” was so profound. He contrasted his elation with the more dismissive, “punk rock” attitude his own band, Lamb of God, had towards the awards, recalling how frontman Randy Blythe would boycott the ceremony, calling it “bulls**t.”
Adler admitted that even when Lamb of God was nominated in the same category as Megadeth, his loyalty was with his childhood heroes. “I would sit there and hope that Megadeth won it, because they had been nominated, like, 12 times, and in my mind they deserved all 12,” he confessed.
“So for me to be a part of it and to get it actually probably meant more than if we had gotten one in Lamb of God, because the mindset within that project [Lamb of God] was, ‘This [Grammy stuff] is all kind of B.S.'”
