SPOT CHECKING DEF LEPPARD

LONDON—Directly or indirectly, Eric Clapton is responsible for my being here.

Eric Clapton—who left the Yardbirds and left John Mayall to form the inescapable '60s monolith of rock bands, the one that begat a music form that not only outlived the group, but the entire decade, and the next and possibly the ’80s as well.

We are talking about Cream.

Wheels Of Fire says it all: one studio disc, one live. For 15 years Heavy Metal bands have spent entire careers trying to reproduce the second half of Wheels Of Fire. “Crossroads”—the o/’ blues, nothing works like ’em. Robert Johnson. “Spoonful”— oooh, them ol’ blues, let’s stick in a 16-minute-44-second-guitar solo and influence the entire course of rock music for the next 10 years/ “Traintime”—here’s where you’ll do your harmonica bit, Jack, you’ll have them eating out of your hand! “Toad”—OK, Ginger, you get your chance, too! For over 15 minutes!

Consider, instead, what might have happened if every band that followed Cream tried their hardest to beat out that other half of Wheels Of Fire. Sides One and Two—“As You Said,” “Those Were The Days,” “Passing The Time” and short, proper versions of “White Room,” or “Politician.” No 18-minute guitar solos. No riffs to hang titles on and call songs. No guys who can’t sing but what the hey, we’ll play so loud no one’ll notice. Guitar, bass and drums or cellos—what the hell—if we need ’em. We’ll see.

Consider: what if, in 1968, they had a vinyl shortage—and Wheels Of Fire could only be one record instead of two? Then what would it sound like?

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Probably not like Def Leppard, because bands like Cream have something that Def Leppard, try as they might, never will. Cream was there first—and now it’s 1983.

But, theoretically at least, Def Leppard are righting those grievous wrongs perpetrated by the second-stringers of the ’70s. They have come to realize that, above all in rock music, it is the song that counts— not the soloist and certainly not the singer, despite what Mick J. once sang. And when genuine talents like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and, of course, Clapton have been imitated so often and so poorly, and then those imitators are imitated and on down the line until you end up with April Wine— hey, maybe it’s time to take a break. Def Leppard thought that in 1978, think that in 1983, are doing their best to make you think the same with their new album, Pyromania. It may not top Disraeli Gears, but it sure as hell beats out anything I’ve ever heard with a drum solo.

So I’m in London to witness Def Leppard, the crowned heads of Heavy Metal’s New Wave, perform at no less a venue than the Marquee, a club at which bands such as the Stones, Who, Yardbirds, Animals and many more began long ago.

"Def Leppard were the chicken that laid the egg that was The New Wave Of Heavy Metal. --Joe Elliott"

And as I roam around the Marquee, my mental image of the club is getting drastically shaken. Haven’t been to one in a while, but the last HM concert I saw in the States—Van Halen? Michael Schenker Group?— was packed to the brim with tshirted, CAT-capped young humans who fell over one another regularly but otherwise looked happy, healthy and well-fedmenaces to no one but themselves and the people their cars passed on the way home.

At the Marquee, though, there’s a visible commitment to a style of dress that borders somewhere between Eric Von Zipper and Billy Jack: black leathers left ’n’ right, hair so long and greasy even Motorhead would cringe, denim jackets, denim pants and probably denim underwear if anyone looked. Stranger still was the patch phenomenon: these Brits were walking billboards —KISS, AC/DC, SCORPIONS, JUDAS PRIEST, all sewn into their denim uniforms. It was enough to make you wish Van Halen would change their name to Kick Me.

These were Leppard fans, too: the gig had been advertised only as SPECIAL MYSTERY GUESTS, yet word had spread and the place was packed. Reason for the secrecy? The band was playing its first live show in over a year and simultaneously breaking in new guitarist Phil Collen, formerly of Girl, who replaced original Leppard Pete Willis midway through recording Pyromania. They didn’t want any rough spots and figured the Marquee “secret” gig would smooth any out.

If there were any rough spots, I didn’t notice them. Maybe when lead singer Joe Elliott tried to make half the audience clap their hands and then complained they weren’t clapping loud enough; stadium antics work great at stadiums, but not anywhere else. “The only thing I could do,” Elliott explained to me later, “was think back to the last gigs we did—in front of lots of people—and do the same thing.”

After the final encore—there were a few—the band was presented a few gold record awards in front of several Brit journalists. This, I’m told, took place at the rear of the stage; I was too busy getting flattened against the wall by an angry stream of British thugs who wanted to leave the Marquee by walking on as many horizontal bodies as possible. So this is where the Who started, I mused.

Aftershow, we taxied over to Pacifica’s, a Mexican restaurant where all Americans are forced to eat, and prepared for the Leppard interview proper. I’d left my cassette recorder in the back of a taxi cab earlier and the Phonogram people very nicely scared one up for me; soon enough, the boys were wheeled in. Two of them, actually—Joe Elliott, lead vocalist and lyricist, and bassist Rick Savage, who certainly wasn’t.

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“We wanted Phil’s gig—for his sake, really—to be nothing too damaging, ” said Elliott. “Know what I mean? Not a 20,000 seat arena, because, well, he could collapse. As good as he is, first gigs are definitely first gigs, I don’t care how good you are.”

So what’s up? How come it’s taken the band so long to follow up High TV’ Dry? What happened to Pete Willis?

“Pete left the band in July,” says Elliott, “for personal reasons. His reasons. Let’s just say he wasn’t doing us any favors and we weren’t doing him any favors. It had to happen—that’s just the way that it is. He’s geting his own thing together back in Sheffield, and we’re getting our own thing together, all over the world.

“We’ve known Phil for over three years, when he was with Girl. We used to slag him off purposefully, in the British press,” Elliott grins. »«t‘He used to slag us off. It was a giggle between us.

“Anyway, when Pete left, we were like, overnight, down to one guitarist.” An explanatory note: that guitarist is the heretofore unmentioned Steve Clarke, himself a founder member of the band. “That put Steve under a lot of pressure, He’d have to do 10 more solos—which he could do, but I don’t really think he wanted to.”

“That’s because we’ve never been' that type of band,” says Savage.

“Right,” says Elliott. “We’re a definite two guitar band. So Phil, being a friend— and a great guitarist, and looking good, which is important—I mean, the music comes first, but we’re conscious of the visual thing...”

“P/us he’s somebody that we all get on with, anyway,” says Savage.

“And he’s got no big ego, he’s normal,” continues Elliott. “And Girl were a two guitar band just like we were, so he was used to doing 50 percent of the solos. So it’s not like we were stealing somebody like Eddie Van Halen, who’s used to doing all of them.”

So Girl was still together?

“Yeah, Girl was still together—but they were doing about a gig every three months, where they knew they could sell tickets. They weren’t selling any records, and Phil was really pissed off, anyway. He wanted to leave.”

So how come the credits on Pyromania list both Phil and Pete on guitar?

“Well, Phil joined halfway through the album, right? We’d already finished the backing tracks when Phil joined. It was when we were about to start doing the solos that things came together, when it as decided that Pete was gonna be going his own separate way. So we all said to Phil, ‘Listen, we’re down to one guitar, we’re looking for somebody else. You’re the logical person, we actually want YOU in the band.’

“So we asked him to just hang around the studio a few days, listen to what we were doing and to tell us what he thought. We gave him the song ‘Stagefright’ to take home and we said ‘Just work a solo out— and even if you don’t join, you can do a guest solo or something.’

Punk rock was heavy metal with singers who couldn't sing and guitar players who couldn't solo. -Joe Elliott

“So he took it home and worked a solo out, and he came down to the studio the day after and said ‘Yeah, I got this solo, and I think it’s pretty good.’ And he did it, in like half and hour, didn’t he?”

Bassist Savage nods.

“And the solo in ‘Stagefright’—have you ever listened to it? It was brilliant! It was great, and we thought if he can do that for ‘Stagefright,’ then what the fuck can he do for the rest of the songs?’ ”

“And as far as Pete Willis goes,” says Savage, “we decided it was only fair to give him credit for what he deserves, really.”

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“Heavy Metal’s New Wave,” if you haven’t already figured it out, is a meaningless tag thought up by some dimwitted magazine editor that at one pointsay in ’78 and ’79—encompassed Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Saxon and anyone you can think of who looks like Rob Halford. It’s meaninglessness comes with the fact that the “wave” never left in the first place, so how can there be a new one?

Most impressive about Def Leppard is that while the British punk explosion was grabbing all the music biz headlines of the time, they grabbed their own—simply by employing punk’s Do It Yourself ethic. They pressed up a three-track EP, wrote a batch of hype and sent it and the EP off to the press and, to their surprise, press interest and sales were high indeed. The EP charted, 15,000 more were pressed up, all were sold, and the band was signed to Phonogram.

“It’s kind of the Old Wave Of Heavy Metal,” notes Joe Elliott. “I honestly think — and we’re not trying to sound big-headed, I always use this and I hate using it, but I can’t think of any other statement—I think that Def Leppard were the actual chicken that laid the egg that was the New Wave Of Heavy Metal.”

Is being part of the Old Wave any better than being part of the new wave, though? At one point I liked a lot of Heavy Metal, maybe 10 years ago. Now I don’t. What happened?

“The first and second Led Zeppelin albums are phenomenal for their time,” says Savage. "It was similar, in my opinion, to when the Beatles first came out on the scene. There was a whole ‘New Sound.’ The Beatles had a pop sound, and then Zeppelin created this whole new atmosphere—and whether that was called Heavy Metal / have no idea, I was probably only nine at the time. Anyway, when Zeppelin got big, a lot of other bands got big as well. There was Sabbath, Uriah Heep started getting big—this is in England, 1 have no idea about what was going on in America. But it was basically Heep, Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. That was in 1970, new music, post-Hendrix stuff. Then, all of a sudden, there was nothing new to add to it.

“I kind of agree with you, actually. The music wasn’t dropping off so much—the interest was. Because it needed something else. I think it’s like with any musical trend, now—the punk thing was great for two years, but then it died off. We still have the bands that carried on and came through that period, like the Clash. 1 mean the Clash was like the Number Two Sex Pistols, right? Now their technique is carried further. I don’t listen to their records, but they’re Top 10 in America.”

They’re not punk anymore,” says Elliott. “They’re just the Clash, they’ve got their own style. And whether you like it or not, when you listen to a record and don’t realize it’s the Clash, when the DJ tells you it is, you’re not particularly surprised.

“I mean, I don’t particularly get off on the Clash too much. I like some of their stuff. But I do appreciate the fact that they don’t go AAAAAARGAGARAGARAG”— here Joe plays air guitar at a pace even namesake “Fingers" Strummer couldn't match — “all the time anymore. That's what they did when they first started out. Like 'Clash City Rockers’ and 'Complete Control' were good songs when they first came out, but they couldn't p/ay 'em. Now they can play ’em —and the songs may not be so good, but they’re different at least.

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“For me, personally, I didn’t mind punk. To me, punk rock—and I’m talking about the Sex Pistols—was heavy metal with singers who couldn't sing and guitar players who couldn’t solo. The Sex Pistols album, for what it was, had a great sound. I mean, it’s really good—if you got someone else to sing over it and play solos it'd be a great album! It'd be like the first Montrose album! I mean, who knows'."

Who indeed?

“In a way,” adds Savage, “though we're not really influenced by punk, we did cut out 10 minute guitar solos.''

“Yeah,” agreed Elliott, “it did bring home 'let’s keep it to three minutes except for the odd bit.'

Even Ritchie Blackmore seems to be heading in that direction, 1 add.

“Well, he’s trying to get the Foreigner audience, isn’t he? '

“I think he’s finally coming around.” says Savage. “1 think Ritchie Blackmore is a really good guitar player. We did a European tour with Rainbow about the beginning of 1981. before we came to America for the High TV' Dry tour.

“I used to loue Deep Purple—but 1 thought he was a good guitar player, nothing more. I actually saw him play—the things he did, and the technique he used. I’ve never seen done by any other guitarist in the world. So I can understand why someone like him wants to protect himself— or used to project himself, actually—in such a way.

“But you see, the thing is, when all is said and done, 1 believe—and everybody else in the band believes—that you've basically got to have a good song.

“I mean, Ritchie Blackmore could be in a bad band —never mind if it’s Ritchie Blackmore or Mister X^but the record won’t really sell very well if you don't write good songs. That’s why we cut the guitar solos short and use them in concert. The ,most important thing is a good song, and then, maybe, it’s a good singer—then it’s maybe a steady beat, with steady guitar playing. If a solo player wants to play a guitar solo that enchances the song, and not necessarily the player, then that’s fair enough. And that’s the way we always think.”

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The bottom line, of course, is whether Def Leppard write good songs or bad songs that are merely shorter than usual. After much listening I’ve decided that a) Pyromania is the band’s best album, b) it will sell the most copies, and c) Ginger Baker will eventually join the band on drums.

Def Leppard are beginning a very large American tour as you read this, either headlining or opening for Billy Squier. Their record is jumping up the charts like nobody’s business, and Robert John “Mutt” Lange, producer of AC/DC and Foreigner, not only produced Pyromania but is taking cowriting credits for each song, apparently with the band’s best wishes. The new "Photograph" video has been completed and is being shown on MTV 3 or 4 times daily, and Def Leppard are currently much hotter in the States and in Europe than they are at home. My advice to the guys: get a new logo and try to concentrate a little more on image.and you'll have it made. No joke.

Meanwhile, have you heard Money And Cigarettes by Eric Clapton? It’s got this great new song on it called "Ain’t Going Down” that's getting lots of radio play and is real short, hardly any solos, and...