“Get your butt right out of bed!”
Stop buggin’ me
“Get up and move your sleepy head!”
Don’t shake my tree
He said, “Mow the lawn!”
Who, me?
“Walk the dog!”
Not my style, man
“Take out the trash!”
No way
“Tidy your room!”
C’mon, get real
Sorry, Dad, gotta disappear
Let’s get the rock out of here
What exactly happened here?
In the wee early 1980s, a fun gang of five banded together to form Def Leppard. You may have seen the “Behind the Music” special or the eight hundred times their made-for-TV biopic ran on VH1. A bunch of guys in England rise from nothing to have their sound tweaked by a big-dog producer and achieve fame beyond their wildest dreams. And let’s not forget: one guy gets kicked out for being an obnoxious drunk, one gets in a terrible car accident and loses an arm, another dies as the result of his alcoholism. They get mega-famous, they do mega-tours, they have girls lined up to suck them off between songs behind the stage.
Which begs the question: what about the music?
For those familiar with the band’s first effort, On Through the Night, surely nobody would believe that these guys would take off to be mega-stars. This album was 100% pure NWOBHM — New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which was the sound du jour thanks to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and scores of others from overseas who had decided to speed up Black Sabbath’s riffs and wrap themselves in leather — and it was gritty as hell. There are no trademark Joe Elliot high notes to be found. There aren’t many radio-ready riffs to be found, either. This was five guys just doing their thing.
Surprisingly, Def Leppard still has scores of fans from this period, or fans who cling to that old NWOBHM aesthetic, hoping that someday they’ll revisit the sound and do it some modern justice. Several times during fan Q&A sessions, someone will pipe up to ask if they’ll ever play the old material. Thus far, the answer has been no; since the majority of their fans are familiar with the sound that made them radio stars, that’s what they’re expecting to hear, so that’s what the band is going to give them. And that’s that.
Even into High ‘n’ Dry, when Mutt Lange took the reins and made Mr. Elliot reach for those high “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” wails, more than half of the album sticks to NWOBHM structures. These songs, like their predecessors, aren’t necessarily the pinnacle of songwriting, but they feel honest even in their occasional cheesiness.
And yet still, to hear Def Leppard live now, or even in 1987, you wouldn’t ever have guessed their roots stemmed from the exact same type of music championed by Metallica in its early days.
As Pyromania was being recorded, and as one can see in their videos from the time, the guys really did continue to personify the look and feel of NWOBHM. However, tastes of success from “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak” convinced them to work more willingly in the direction their producer was looking to take them. To hear the band’s side of the story, they detested the making of that album as it stretched them beyond their bounds of skill. But for the most part, Pyromania became a new hybrid sound that ultimately took the band to the top of the charts: the crunch, chug, and grit which garnered their original fanbase married to super-catchy hooks and slick production for consumption by the masses.
From that point forward, however, very few traces would remain of anything found on On Through the Night. One can pick apart Hysteria and find remnants, but even the least radio-ready tracks were definitely crafted with intent to find radio fame. Does this make them terrible? Obviously not, or they wouldn’t have the success that they have found. Never mind that it’s arguable whether the band ever had real “artistic” integrity of any sort. But by the time Adrenalize rolled around and the band had been through hell and back, it’s a mystery as to where exactly they were coming from. Certainly not art, definitely not their roots… what exactly was it?
The album’s first single and initial album track, “Let’s Get Rocked,” was baffling. Catchy? Sure. Slick? Probably their most obnoxiously slick production to date to the point of sounding comically fake. But the lyrics? Nobody was ever lining up at the door for Def Leppard poetry in days past to be certain, but this was… something else. Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd might have gotten away with teenage angst anthems in years past, but that’s the key — these were years past. With MTV, everyone knew these guys were in their thirties. Everyone knew they were rolling in bizillions of dollars. To sing utterly awful lyrics about the tribulations of a teenager who wants to party with his woman? Sorry, but the youth of the day wasn’t exactly looking for empathy from its fathers.
Adrenalize was a failure when standing up against Hysteria, but it also created a Def Leppard which forever tarnished their credibility: they had become minstrels of sappy ballads. Unlike “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak” or even “Love Bites,” their downtempo numbers lost all crunch and vigor, all of their dramatic build and denouement. Not that they were alone; Bon Jovi had similarly cursed themselves around this same time, and this one-two punch absolutely ruined everything they had built. Grunge stepped in to fill the void of teenage angst, and that was all she wrote.
What’s interesting is that even today, bands like Def Leppard can’t figure out where they went wrong. Their career after this point reads like schizophrenia.
The band seemed unaware that the reason why they took off at all was because up through their fourth album, their songs (in one form or another) harkened back to their earliest material and to the NWOBHM sound from whence they came. They did not succeed because of seeking to appeal to the masses; they succeeded because they created a sound all their own which made the masses salivate. Stripped of their originality and pointed directly at the bank account, it’s no wonder why their audience lost interest. Def Leppard was making fun of them, telling them that they were too stupid to know the difference between fandom and quality, and expected them to eat up anything they tossed out.
Attempting to reconnect with modern music and to reinvent themselves, Def Leppard unleashed Slang. There are two very noteable things about this album: one, it’s by and large an excellent experiment divorcing Def Leppard from the stigma of their previous sound; two, the damage was done to the point where it was embarrassing to admit you even liked Def Leppard at that point, and the album was dead in the water before it had a chance to breathe from its snorkel. Nobody bought Def Leppard as anything but hair fluff, and this was too far removed from expectations for anyone to take it seriously. Most saw it as a pathetic opportunist move, an attempt to change their sound in the sole pursuit of money and revamped fame. Any respect for the artistic merits was laughed to death.
Picking apart the disc, sure, there are some cringeworthy experiments gone awry, but mostly it’s Def Leppard doing what they do best — super-catchy hooks — combined with feelers for something, anything different. Artistically, it’s admirable rather than derivative; while a change in direction, it didn’t copycat radio. It simply had no place to fit in, and social stigma was its death knell.
From this point, it’s hard to figure out exactly what the band was thinking, because they obviously weren’t seeing what everyone else was seeing. Mimicking prior successes didn’t work. Reinventing themselves didn’t work. Anyone else would have advised them to call it a day. Instead, after a break, Def Leppard came back with Euphoria. And this is where things got really, really interesting.
While some of Euphoria is earmarked with wishy-washiness left over from their balladeering fame, the majority of the album almost sounds like a proper follow-up to High ‘n’ Dry. Def Leppard took yet another risk: to hell with radio — let’s rock like we used to. Or at least, that would seem to be the intent. Years of aiming for hits tarnished this somewhat, but looking past the obvious garbage, the guys were able to re-discover the magic that endeared them to their audience. Their first single, “Paper Sun,” blew away anything they had released in over ten years.
Artistically, it worked well. And “Paper Sun” got a respectable amount of rock radio play. Yet, Def Leppard still sounds like Def Leppard, and will always sound like Def Leppard. The wall-of-sound harmonies, the same guitar tones, the nasally wailing lead vocals — it’s as if the band was completely incapable of changing any of these trademarks. Ultimately, it may have been because the audience could immediately identify it as Def Leppard that it drove them to be far more skeptical. Unlike Bon Jovi, who around the same time managed a rather strong comeback, they neglected to notice that many old tricks had become passe. People wanted “Paper Sun,” but they wanted it back in 1991. As far as real success was concerned, it was too little, too late. But as far as the fans were concerned, Euphoria excited them. There was a spark in this effort that had been absent from the band for a long time.
And then… nothing.
The next album Def Leppard tossed out was X; not only did it have the same outdated sound, but now it seemed that the band was scrambling away from the direction of Euphoria. Somewhere, they misread the disdain for sound as being a rejection of their reversion to older song composition and structural elements. In their error, they headed full blast back into writing made-for-radio, complete with outmoded harmonies and excessively bland, completely non-adventurous songwriting. Where Euphoria had “Paper Sun” that shone a light (pardon the pun) on the band as able to conceivably make a comeback, X marked them as out-of-touch fogies who didn’t know how to set the clocks on their VCRs.
It’s been four years since X. The next planned release for Def Leppard is Yeah!, an album of covers. Done right, it could be the fun venture that Feedback was for Rush a couple of years ago. But if the band still has not figured out how to update their sound, not only will it be ignored, but it will be ridiculed.
It’s been shown repeatedly that Def Leppard can take risks and be artistically successful. So why have they not taken the risk of shedding the production they’ve been using for over twenty years? How can they be so blind to this simple element holding them back when it’s the only thing they haven’t risked changing? You don’t cast Milla Jovovich in a film and then wrap her in a potato sack, then wonder why nobody is clamoring she’s hot. Why the f*cking potato sack, guys? DEF LEPPARD, DO YOU HEAR ME?
You know what I want? I wanna rock ‘n’ roll. I’ve just told you what not to do. Can you figure out what to do?
Still rollin’, keep rollin’,
–gloomchen
