Legendary vocalist Lou Gramm has shared harrowing details regarding his recovery from brain surgery nearly three decades ago, revealing that he was pushed back onto the road with Foreigner long before he was medically ready.
Appearing on a recent episode of the “Rock & Roll High School” podcast with producer Pete Ganbarg, the original Foreigner frontman reflected on his diagnosis with a craniopharyngioma—a benign but aggressive tumor that wreaked havoc on his health.
Gramm described the severity of the condition in graphic detail (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“[It was] not a cancerous brain tumor, but a large brain tumor that had tentacles that were wrapped around my optic nerve and pituitary gland and made my adrenals defunct.”
While the surgery to remove the growth was successful, the recovery process was grueling. When Ganbarg heard that the singer had to re-learn how to sing, Gramm clarified, noting that his basic motor functions were compromised.
“I had to re-learn how to talk,” Gramm said.
He went on to explain that his medical team had explicitly advised him to stay off the road for at least 18 months to recover from the marathon 19-hour procedure. However, the band’s business handlers had other plans.
“My surgeon told me, he says, ‘Lou,’ he says, ‘do you know the operation took 19 hours?’ And he said, ‘Lou,’ he says, ‘I’d like you to, to take a year and a half off to make sure everything is as good as we hope it is. ‘That way,’ he says, ‘you’ll be near enough. If there’s any problems, you come back right away and we’ll work on it.'”
“So Foreigner‘s management had to cancel the first leg of our tour so that I could have my operation. Strangely enough, they rescheduled the tour about three weeks after I got outta surgery. And the doctor wanted me to not perform or travel for at least a year and a half because traveling with the air pressure in an airplane and just exerting myself when I’ve been through such a traumatic experience, he wanted to make sure everything was in order and running smoothly before I started performing again. But Foreigner‘s management had had booked the shows all over again about a month after I got outta the hospital.”
The premature return to the stage proved to be a physical and mental nightmare for the singer. Suffering from memory loss and limited mobility, Gramm had to rely on cheat sheets taped to the floor just to get through the setlist.
“Challenging? I couldn’t remember the words to the songs,” Gramm admitted. “I used to dance around a lot on stage. I planted my mic stand in one place and had the beginnings of the first three or four words of every verse written out in a semicircle around me. And we toured the world like that.”
