Def Leppard

We saw them again in concert, on tour for their newest album, self-titled.  It sounds almost exactly like Songs From The Sparkle Lounge, the prior album.   I’ve addressed them in a paragraph in an earlier blog, New Wave of British Heavy Metal.  Here’s more than a paragraph, as the band deserves it.

The NWOBHM was a…new wave of heavy metal…from Britain.  The time period was the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I suppose the first wave was Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, with Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and UFO as mid-70s additions.  The late 70s saw punk and new wave take a major role in British music.  Deep Purple had split up in 1976, Led Zeppelin were touring less and strung out in the late 70s, and Black Sabbath ended in 1978 with Ozzy’s departure.  These new bands, who finally broke out by sheer force of numbers, gave us three major survivors:  Iron Maiden, Saxon, and Def Leppard.

Of the three, Def Leppard quickly switched to a more commercial style.  Unlike Diamond Head, who tried doing the same thing (only to crash and burn), DL pulled it off.  Good writing, catchy songs, excellent production, and photogenic band members could share the blame for this success.

Joe Elliott.   The singer.  He has a good voice and stage presence, enough wit and charm to impress the audience and possibly the ladies. 

Rick Savage.  The bassist.  Did he pull all the birds?  Well, given that the bassist is usually a band’s most homely and least charismatic memer – aside from exceptions like Paul McCartney and Gene Simmons – this guy made the band more attractive to females, a necessary ingredient if you’re going to go commercial.

Rick Allen.   The drummer.  After Pyromania went big, he bought a Corvette and flipped it over on the local roads near Sheffield, which cost him his arm.  Initially despondent – how can you drum with only one arm? – he found someone to rig a drumset which would allow him to hit drums with an extra foot pedal.  Voila, problem solved.  Good enough to get the job done, and an inspiration to the rest of us.

Phil Collen.   Guitarist #1.  Not to be confused with Phil Collins.  PC replaced prior guitarist Pete Willis, who apparently didn’t get along with the rest of the band.  He likes to play without a shirt, but hits the gym often enough to make it work for him.  He’s buffer than Vladimir Putin and well ahead of Randy from Trailer Park Boys (to my knowledge neither of them play guitar).  He prefers Strat-type guitars.  Flashy?  Sure.  But he’s good enough.

Vivian Campbell.  Guitarist #2.  From Northern Ireland.  He used to be in Sweet Savage, another NWOBHM band, and also played with Ronnie James Snake and WhiteDio.  He was already well known from those bands when he replaced Steve Clark, who drank himself to death.  VC has been fighting cancer recently but seems to be on top of it.  It looks like he’s taking 60% of the solos.

Honorable mention: Steve Clark.   Long blonde hair, low slung Les Paul or Firebird, almost like a guitar version of Duff McKagan.  He played well and was well-liked, but couldn’t avoid drinking himself to death (1991). 

Dishonorable mention:  Pete Willis.  Despite writing and playing on the first three albums, he pissed everyone off and got fired.  If it was just the band, he’d have resurfaced, but his musical career died when he was canned. 

Early material.   On Through The Night (1980) was the first album.  It’s not memorable enough to even merit a single tune in the set, and it’s hardly distinguishable from the other NWOBHM material out there dating from the same period.  The term “Rock Brigade” which appears on much of the band’s merchandise seems to be its only legacy.  It went platinum, but my guess is that most of those sales probably date from after Pyromania broke big and fans decided to buy the prior albums.

High’N’Dry (1981).   The second album.  Produced by John “Mutt” Lange, who gave us the killer trilogy of Highway to Hell, Back In Black, and For Those About To Rock (AC/DC).  Awesome from start to finish, including the duo of “Bringing On The Heartbreak” >> “Switch 625”.  Mandatory inclusion in every rock fan’s collection.  This went double platinum, possibly after Pyromania. 

Pyromania (1983).  The third album, which catapulted the band to stardom.  Phil Collen took over from Pete Willis.  Really this could be considered their finest moment, though I prefer the prior one.  Lange continued his work on this one, and the band really fine-tuned the sound.  10x platinum sales, or 5 times the sales of High’n’Dry.  While I consider it more commercial than High’N’Dry, it’s not nearly as commercial as Hysteria.

Hysteria (1987).  A big delay because of Rick Allen’s accident, but everyone was glad to see him back.  It’s also the last album with Steve Clark.  Lange produced this one too.  They made it a bit more commercial and slick, and got 12x platinum sales, the highest selling DL album.  This album essentially finalized the DL sound from here on out.

Subsequent albums:  Adrenalize (1992) (last album produced by Lange, also last album to sell at platinum level), Slang (1996), Euphoria (1999), X (2002), Songs From the Sparkle Lounge (2008), and Def Leppard (2015).   Of these, I only have the two most recent.  They both sound the same, and my impression is that they’re all somewhat substandard copies of Hysteria, a formula which they found works for them.  The more recent albums haven’t sold very well, probably because we already had Hysteria.

Retro-Active and Yeah!  The former is a collection of out-takes and b-sides, the latter is a covers album.  None of the covers are metal songs, or anything that Iron Maiden or Saxon would consider an influence.

Union Jack.  It’s funny that more British bands don’t use that, as the flag is distinctive.  For a while the band was waving it around and putting it on all the merchandise (they still do, but less prominently than before), and Joe Elliott was prancing around in Union Jack boxers.  They also make it a point to remind everyone they’re from Sheffield, basically the Pittsburgh of England.  And finally they are avid soccer fans, a trait shared with Iron Maiden.   I believe their team is Sheffield United, whereas the Irons (or at least, Steve Harris) are big West Ham fans. 

Notwithstanding the highly commercial sound, the band still has lots of energy and dynamism on stage, and Joe Elliott is an excellent frontman.   Like AC/DC, they’ve had a consistent run of mediocre albums long after their peak but still put on a good show live – plus they’re aware of what the fans want and give it to us: “Switch 625”.  

The Producers

No, I’m not referring to the Gene Wilder film, or its more recent remake with Matthew Broderick in the main role (though both films were fine).   I’m talking about the studio geniuses responsible for making rock albums sound the way they do.

It initially escaped my attention that Now What ?!, the new Deep Purple album, had a famous producer behind the scenes, but I certainly noticed the album’s massive improvement in quality over the prior 4 albums with Steve Morse.  The producer?  Bob Ezrin, whose prior work included Kiss Destroyer, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and numerous Alice Cooper albums, among many others.   I don’t recall Deep Purple ever trusting a high profile producer to handle the job: Purpendicular and Abandon, the first two albums with Steve Morse, were “self-produced”, meaning Roger Glover (the bassist) handled this.  Bananas and Rapture of the Deep were produced by Michael Bradford, whoever he is.  Neither of those two albums differed appreciably from the two prior ones.

 

Similarly, Black Sabbath originally had Rodger Bain produce its first three albums with Ozzy, then Tony Iommi took over.  As Tony explained, the rest of the band didn’t want to hire a producer but had no clue how to do it themselves, so he was forced to take the job by default.   Martin Birch – most often associated with Iron Maiden - produced Heaven & Hell and The Mob Rules, then Tony took over again.  But 13 was produced by Rick Rubin.  Birch can also take credit for Stormbringer & Come Taste the Band by Deep Purple, engineering earlier DP albums such as In Rock, Machine Head, and Made in Japan, engineering on the earliest Wishbone Ash albums, producing Cultosaurus Erectus and Fire of Unknown Origin by Blue Oyster Cult, and producing the Rainbow albums with Ronnie James Dio.   But in his case, he’s so thoroughly entwined with those bands that it’s hard to notice the difference.  He seems to bring out more of consistent, solid quality, than any immensely superlative albums; but I can’t identify any album he’s done that is less than excellent. 

For anyone who doubts how important a producer can be, consider these examples:

1.         The Beatles & George Martin.  They never would have been as innovative and influential as they were if they didn’t have a producer who understood them as well as he did. 

2.         AC/DC’s top three albums, Highway to Hell, Back In Black, and For Those About To Rock, were all produced by John Mutt Lange; while I like Let There Be Rock and Powerage, Vanda & Young also have Blow Up Your Video and Fly On the Wall to answer for.  High’N’Dry and Pyromania (Def Leppard) were also Lange’s work.  Although he’s still working, unfortunately these days – after a few years producing his (now ex-) wife Shania Twain’s material – he’s producing such heavyweights as Nickelback and Maroon 5.  If AC/DC had any remaining brain cells they’d hire him for their next album, which at this rate is likely to be their last.  Black Ice (which Brendan O’Brien produced) was mediocre at best.

Rubin is most closely identified with Slayer and Danzig, though he also produced the Cult’s Electric.  He has an odd, idiosyncratic style which doesn’t always work.  From what I understand, he simply lounges on a couch in a corner of the studio and grunts approval or disapproval of the band’s material and guides them in a very vague, non-technical, subjective fashion.  Most other producers take a much more active role.  Bob Rock even played bass on Metallica’s self-titled Black Album, the first album for that band where they brought in an outside producer.

Similarly, many bands wind up closely associated with particular producers.  Rush & Terry Brown (aka “Broon”); Van Halen and Ted Templeman; Aerosmith and Jack Douglas.

I’m not aware of any material Jimmy Page has released that he didn’t produce himself, though In Through The Out Door has more of John Paul Jones’ stamp on it.  I can see the bands’ reluctance to allow an outsider to control the process, but as Ian Paice noted, sometimes it comes in handy.  In addition to being able to mediate disputes between band members (Paice said Ezrin was able to reach decisions in minutes which would take the band days squabbling amongst themselves) he’s also able to offer a more distant, objective perspective and give marching orders to the band member who would otherwise be producing.  Band members often have less of an ego issue obeying commands or taking suggestions from an outside producer than they do from fellow band members.  As competent as Roger Glover seems to be – he even presided over all the remastering of their CDs, and remixing much of the material – Ezrin really knocked it out of the ballpark on Now What ?!.  He even got Don Airey to sound like Ray Manzarek on a few songs, pushing Airey well out of “I’m replacing Jon Lord, I’ll just copy him” into “well, I can do whatever I want.”  Ezrin was like a Gandalf, pushing the hobbitish band members out of the Shire, off to Mordor, which they would never have done left to their own devices, producing their own albums themselves. 

Manager-Producers.  Apparently there’s something to be said for both managing a band and producing its albums. Sandy Pearlman handled both duties for Blue Oyster Cult (except for the above-mentioned albums); Gerry Bron did so with Uriah Heep; and Terry Knight handled the same double-hat duty for Grand Funk Railroad.

Artist-Producers.  Although producers generally start off as lowly studio engineers and work their way up to producer, some started as musicians and learned enough in the studio to be able to handle it themselves (much like actors become directors).  Roger Glover produced Sin After Sin (Judas Priest), David Gilmour produced Astouding Sounds, Amazing Music (Hawkwind), but Todd Rundgren is probably the best known of these producers.   Alan Parsons seems to have gone the other direction:  from engineering Let It Be, Abbey Road, and then Dark Side of the Moon to developing his own Project.  Generally, though, the artist-producers are more apt to focus on producing their own bands (e.g. Glover & Page) than going off and producing others’. 

The best producers somehow manage to get the musicians to outdo themselves.  Ezrin did it with Deep Purple, Lange did it with AC/DC and Def Leppard, Martin did it with the Beatles.  I’ll have to pay more attention to the top producers’ next projects in the future.