Leapin' Leppards! They're Back At Last

"... We ought to call the album Halley's Comet because they come out about as often!" —Joe Elliott

Leapin' Leppards! They're Back At Last

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Toby Goldstein

Go ahead, call them names. They’ve heard ’em all before. At least the kind of names that depict Def Leppard as “heavy metal’s Boston,” referring to the four-year gap between 1983’s supersmash Pyromania and its just-released followup, Hysteria. Joe Elliott, the band’s tousle-haired lead singer, isn’t at all upset by the comparison. In fact, he lets fly a warm, northern British chuckle and contributes one of his own. “We had people in Sheffield saying we ought to call the album Halley’s Comet, because they come out about as often!

“We did have a lot of difficulties,” he confesses, suddenly becoming a lot more serious. “We did a lot of screwing up ourselves. I’d be the first to admit it, we weren’t blameless for the lengthy hiatus we had.”

Well, perhaps partially. Hysteria is only the fourth album to be issued by the explosive British quintet, even though they’ve been together for almost a decade. But it’s one which has been awaited for more than the usual reasons. Def Leppard were among the hottest newcomers in the late 1970s wave of British metal bands, which also brought other all-star lineups, such as Iron Maiden, into prominence. Leppard, however, relied more on high energy than gothic storytelling, and—let’s not be modest here—they were also more than a little assisted by their boyish good looks.

Because of that, Def Leppard forged the pathway which Bon Jovi, for instance, has come along to continue. The music was supercharged enough to get the guys headbanging, but the faces were fresh enough to swell the audience ranks with nubile females. And, as Joe does not deny, the assistance of MTV helped his band a hell of a lot.

“We didn’t know why Pyromania was so big and, for instance, Uriah Heep’s comeback album wasn’t. We knew it was good, but you can’t always pinpoint why. A lot of it was down to timing, and with us, obviously a lot of it was MTV.

“I don’t think it was the videos themselves, because if you look back, although they were OK at the time, they’re very much dated now. But then again, they did set a trend. (It was) the timing of MTV coming into its own, that we just happened to be on it when it was watched by everybody under the age of 21.1 don’t believe it’s lost any of its popularity or appeal, but it’s like anything else—it’s now taken for granted. Whereas in 1982-83, it was wonderful to have 24-hour video, now it’s part of your life.”

Though High ’n’ Dry, the group’s second album, had been a million seller, few could have predicted just how enormous Pyromania was going to be. To this date, not another metal/hard rock band has come close to matching Pyromania’s two years on the charts, with six million copies sold, and smash singles of “Photograph” and “Foolin’,” among others. Were it not for the unstoppable endurance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Pyromania would certainly have gone to #1 as well.

Def Leppard were being compared to bands like Led Zeppelin and the Who in terms of their potential clout and permanence. It seemed that Elliott, bassist Rick Savage, drummer Rick Allen and guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen were leading charmed lives. But then came a series of reverses that would have destroyed lesser men and ended lesser bands. It was a time about which Joe recalls, “if we can live through this, survive the crap we’ve gone through for the last three years—which, in fairness, was about due because we had seven years of total good fortune—we can survive through anything.” Their trials were devastating one-two punches both professional and personal, and seemed to tumble on top of one another without relief.

When the group decided to start work on their new album, back in 1984, it seemed natural that they’d again be using Mutt Lange as their producer. Lange is known as a meticulous worker whose diligence fits in neatly with Leppard’s personal recording style. They go against the typical rock ’n’ roll expectations by putting a premium on turning up on time and not wasting their money or their energies. At the same time the group believes that what Elliott calls a “musical” producer, which Lange is, can satisfactorily discuss why things ought to be done a certain way, rather than simply gripe, “I don’t like it but I don’t know why.”

Unfortunately, Mutt was delayed by other projects when Def Leppard began working on Hysteria, and the search for a substitute was not easy. “I find it fascinating that a band supposedly as big as we were couldn’t find a producer when Mutt couldn’t do it,” says Elliott, the slightest edge to his voice. “People were actually saying, ‘No, we don’t want to do it.’ We couldn’t figure it out.” When pressed for reasons, Joe says candidly, “They didn’t like the band, or they weren’t set to do the album outside England,” a situation incompatible with Leppard’s status following Pyromania. The band earned so much money that they were forced to become tax exiles, relocating to places like Ireland, where Elliott now lives. “And certain American producers, who shall remain nameless, wanted a king’s ransom and our firstborn child. We told them to take a hike.”

Eventually, the band settled on former Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman, in part because they thought that, as a songwriter himself, Steinman would be qualified to make certain musical judgements. However, Elliott explains, it didn’t turn out that way. “Jim wasn’t as experienced as we thought he was. Neither were we, to be fair about it; we were just a bunch of rock ’n’ rollers.”

But they were rock ’n’ rollers who believed in getting into the studio by 10:20 if the call was for 10:30. “If we set up at 12 o’clock, we expect our producer to be up at 12 and not at 3:30. Because we get annoyed if the producer of our album is up all night writing material for future selfprojects, thus disabling him from our project by keeping him in bed, because he didn’t actually go to sleep until nine in the morning. If a producer does that, I think it’s bad news. And we weren’t prepared to put up with it, as I don’t really think any band should. We’ve read the stories about the Rolling Stones spending a year trying to make an album, and 111/2 months of that was trying to get all five of them in one room. We’re the opposite. Sometimes we have to kick each other out of the studio because we’re in there so often. You have to have that self-discipline at getting places,” he firmly concludes, an attitude the group learned and internalized while on the world-wide Pyromania tour.

Having dropped their producer, Leppard weren't about to drop their momentum, even if it meant producing the album themselves, a scheme they eventually realized was not in their best interests. Still, the band had been writing songs for Hysteria as soon as they came off the road (parts of “Animal” and “Love Bites,” for instance, go back several years), and had no intention of giving up on the LP.

Then came a New Year’s Eve in 1984 that Def Leppard would give anything to erase. As Joe remembers it, his phone rang at 4:10 in the morning, and he was told about the car crash that nearly took Rick Allen’s life. Allen hovered between life and death for three days, in critical condition, before his family and friends learned that he would survive. But as a result of his injuries, Rick lost his left arm. Def Leppard’s millions of fans wondered whether this marked the end of the group, or if the other four members would find another drummer and continue.

Probably 99 out of 100 other bands would have taken that latter course and carried on with a replacement. Rick Allen, though, is not an ordinary person, nor did Def Leppard prove to be an ordinary band. When asked why the group didn’t opt for a substitute, Joe Elliott’s reply is instantaneous and strong.

“If I had a brother who lost his arm, I wouldn 7 kick him out of my family, so why should I kick my drummer out of my band?” —Joe Elliott

“It would be a lie to say that we never thought, Christ, he’ll never be able to play the drums again. That’s the first thing that goes through your mind after the initial shock of the phone call. But at the same time, you don’t actually think, well, what happens if the guy lives and says, ‘I can play the drums again.’ You think about the guy’s life. And Rick pulled through because he’s a very strong-minded individual.

“Once that initial feeling was over, we never once said. ‘We’ve gotta get somebody else.’ We all said, ‘Well, let’s see what he can do. Let Rick be the one to decide if he’s the drummer in Def Leppard or not.’ That’s exactly what we did, and that is why he’s in the band now. And the guy is as good a drummer as he was before, if not better. You could play tapes of us live to someone who’s never heard us before, and they wouldn’t even contemplate thinking of a one-armed drummer. They wouldn’t know the difference.” Elliott uses the word “family” often in speaking of the group's relationship to one another. “If I had a brother who lost his arm, I wouldn’t kick him out of my family, so why should I kick my drummer out of my band?"

Allen is thought by many to be the most skilled musician in Def Leppard, and he’s mastered a special drum kit tailored to his needs. Through this electronic masterpiece, Rick will achieve a sound that’s identical night after night, not subject to the varying acoustics of arenas around the country. Listening to the tracks on Hysteria, there’s no denying that—with Mutt Lange safely back on board as producer—Leppard made considerable use of the latest technological advances. Sounds that are definitely not “natural” pervade the record, a situation which might trouble some listeners but which Elliott vociferously defends.

“You’ve heard ‘Tear It Down’ (a Pyromania-like raver which is the B-side of Hysteria's first single, “Women”). There’s a total of 24 hours work in that songtwo eight-hour sessions recording and one eight-hour session mixing it, and it sounds like a song to me. But with the actual album, it had to be a big WOW because we’ve been a long time away. And I suppose we did maybe go through a little bit of that paranoia: how the hell do you follow up Pyromania? I think the little doubts came out in the fact that we spent so long making sure that we did an album that justified the wait. We’d have loved to have done the album in 10 days. But the thing is, you can hear all the studio techniques, because we used them. We used overdubs, we used 72-track digital recording.

“When we started, two years after Pyromania was recorded, studio equipment was two years further down the line. We didn’t want to just go in and make an album and not even notice the fact that there’s now a digital toaster or whatever, if we can use it. And sometimes we can’t, and sometimes, yes, we can. So that’s why you can hear it, because we wanted to experiment a lot. At the same time, we’re still playing Gibson Les Pauls, and screaming our balls out down a microphone. That side of it never changed.”

Consequently, when Def Leppard take to the road later this year for their longawaited international tour, they’ll be using the latest audio technology, but not allowing it to dominate their rawness and vigor. “There will be no hidden drummers under the stage or emulators full of opera singers in the background,” Elliott promises. “It will be Def Leppard with a few bits of technology involved in it. It’s no big deal.”

We beg to differ with that last remark, Joe. This Def Leppard tour is a very big deal, just as the 63-minute long Hysteria is the band’s way of saying thanks to all their followers who’ve lasted the wait. Elliott recognizes that, in the past three years, certain other rockers have come along who appear to have put some of Def Leppard’s tricks into their own repertoires. It s jar for the Ct_ je acknowledges, adding that it doesn’t bother him—at least, not most of the time.

"If we can live through this—survive the crap we’ve gone through for the last three years—we can survive through anything. ” —Joe Elliott

“Without being cruel, and without naming names, we did notice that many records which have come out since about 1984 onwards seem to be very much Pyroman/'a-type records. Far be it from me to accuse them of copying us, but maybe they did. We decided that we didn’t want to sound like a copy of ourselves, and we didn’t want people saying that we sound like such and such a band, when actually they might have taken the idea from us in the first place. So before we started writing, we wanted to make an album to be as far from Pyromania as Pyromania was from High ’n’ Dry.

“I actually find it a compliment that people copy us. It could be frustrating, but —"'onally, it doesn’t bother me because J . ~ such a good band that it shouldn’t bother me. The only frustration is, if Def Leppard broke Europe really big this time round, there’s a chance that people are gonna think that we sound like Bon Jovi, because they’re so big in Europe. I don’t think we do, because I honestly believe they’re a good band in their own right. Maybe there is a bit of Pyromania in their stuff, but there’s definitely no Hysteria in Bon Jovi, and no Bon Jovi in Hysteria either.

“The only other frustrating thing is to be accused of being Joey Tempest!” And with that, Joe Elliott laughs—long, hard, and very freely.