..........While driving up the Pacific Coast Highway near his home in Laguna Beach, California, recently, Def Leppard's Phil Collen was accosted by a burly man in a pickup truck. "He was yelling and waving his arms," says the guitarist. "I thought he was cursing me out. I was afraid it was road rage or something. But after a while I realised he was yelling, 'Def Leppard rules, man!' That kind of thing didn't happen to me a year ago. But now it's starting up again."

..........Def Leppard was one of may Eighties pop metal bands who saw their career go down in flames when the grunge revolution took over rock in the Nineties. But now that grunge has moved into the past tense, the men of Def Leppard find they're on an upswing once again. A recent Def Leppard installment of VH-1's Behind the Music did much to spark new interest in the band, dramatically increasing sales of their 1995 greatest-hits compilation, Vault. And now Def Leppard have a brand new album, Euphoria. The project reunited the band with Robert John "Mutt" Lange, their longtime producer, who co-wrote some of the material, a role he last played on 1992's Adrenalize. Euphoria marks an unabashed return to the lavish production vaules of Leppard's Eighties glory days, with towering walls of guitar, sky-high vocal harmonies and hook-heavy songcraft.
.........."Back in Your Face," a snotty, Gary Glitter-esque, highly infectious three-chord romp from Euphoria, sums up the situation pretty well. Singer Joe Elliott speaks for all his bandmates--Collen, co-guitarsist Vivian Campbell, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen--when he sneers the song's title hock line. Like it or not, for better or worse, Def Leppard are indubitably back in yor face.
.........."This one is recognizable as Def Leppard," Vivian Campbell says of Euphoria. "When our last album, Slang, came out [1996], Def Leppard had to do soemthing different. If we had released this new record back then, we would have been crucified. It was right in the middle of the alternative era. Def Leppard was a bad word--or two bad words, actually."
..........A valiant effort to go with the flow, Slang found the group abandoning their notoriously mericulous studiocraft and pop songwriting orientation in the favor of a more raw, live-in-the-studio attempt at material with obvious Pearl Jam, STP and U2-ish overtones. Phil Collen describes it as an interesting exercise for the band, adding that he still likes Slang quite a bit and wishes it had sold better. But right now, the Leps have returned to their tried-and-true way of making records.
.........."We've gone back to the sequenced stuff, the drum sounds and everything," he says. "Every part was recorded separatly. Slang we actually played as a band. That's what we really sound like. But all the big [pre-Slang] hits were done with everything recorded absolutely separately. And we've gone back to that: The Formula."
.........."The blueprints were Pyromania and Hysteria," Campbell adds. "Some people may say, 'Well, there's not alot of growth in that.' But what a band like Def Leppard does is not necessarily artisitc. There's a bit of art in it. And there's a huge amount of crass commercialism in it. You're trying to sell millions of records. That is the point. So when you're talking about a band like Def Leppard, artisitc growth is measured in very, very small increments."
..........If Def Leppard is indeed on the rise again, it is only the most recent reversal of fortune ina career that has been notably filled with ups and downs. The band came out of the grimy, working-class English town of Sheffield at the dawn of the Eighties as part of the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" movement. By their second album, 1981's High 'N' Dry, they'd hooked up with Mutt Lange and started to target the American market--a move with alienated many of the band's original fans. Not long after High 'N' Dry came out, Def Leppard underwent a personnel change rooted in personal crisis. Original guitarist Pete Willis' alcohol problems had become so severe he was forced to leave the group. His replacement was Phil Collen, an affable Londoner for the glam rock band Girl. Meshing with remaining Leppard guitarist Steve Clark, Collen joined just in time to play on what would become Def Leppard's huge commercial breakthrough: Pyromania.
.........."The album was already written and the backing tracks had mostly been done," Collen recalls. "I just came in to play solos. It was pure fun. And then we did some more backing vocals and stuff like that. So it was a complete no-brainer for me. Just come in and play."
..........On the road touring behind Pyromania, Phil Collen came to that classic Eighties metal epiphany--the girls in that audience were starting to outnumber the boys: "In the States we were still an opening set, still playing half empty theaters. But once Pyromania really started kicking in, the girls really started to dig it. I mean, we were a bunch of young guys who weren't all greasy, with leather jackets. We weren't trying to look like every other rock band during that era. We were more Duran Duran in our looks than, say, Motorhead. I'm sure that had something to do with it."
..........It went beyond looks. Def Leppard were one of the first metal bands to open up their ears to the other side of Eighties rock culture: new wave and synth pop. Collen says that the clean, chorused guitar sound on Pyromania's big hit, "Photograph," was an attempt to "sound like the Police or the Fixx or something like that. All the metal bands had kind of edgy guitar back then. We went completely clean. The Police was a big-time influence. I totally loved Missing Persons, too. But the Police was the main band, I think. And that was something that no other hard rock band was adding to their sound. It was all rock with them. But the pop element made it easier to digest for some people, I suppose."
..........But the mammoth commercial success of Pyromania brought complications in the wake. For one, Def Leppard became tax exiles in 1984. "There were a lot of tax incentives not to be in England," says Collen. "Me and Steve moved to Paris, Rick moved to Amsterdam and Joe and Sav moved to Dublin, where they still live."
..........In Dublin, the band began a series of unsuccessful attempts to record a follow-up to Pyromania without Mutt Lange, whose schedule had committed him to other projects. Against this backdrop, a nightmarish auot accident occurred on December 31st, 1984. Rick Allen's arm was severed at the shoulder when his car went off the road near his mother's home in England. Showing remarkable determination, Allen vowed to continue as Def Leppard's drummer; adopting a Simmons electric drum kit and traning his left foot to play parts that his missing arm once would have played. Allen rejoined the sessions for what would become Hysteria. Mutt Lange also came back into the fold and the project finally started to gel.
..........In a perverse way, Allen's accident and subsequent move to the Simmons kit helped serve Lange's plan for applying Eighties high-tech production techniques to hard rock music. "It started because of Rick's Simmions pads," explains current Def Leppard co-producer/engineer Pete Woodroffe. "When you hit a pad, you get a MIDI note. And once you've got all those MIDI notes in a computer, it just becomes so easy to more things around."
..........So Def Leppard made a heavy commitment to the same kind of sequencer programed drum techniques used by techno pop acts of the day. And while Phil Collen had played through his old Girl-era 50-watt Marshall on Pyromania, he and co-guitarist Steve Clark both went direct on Hysteria. "All of Hysteria was pretty much done with a Rockman," Collen discloses. "That's the guitar sound for that album."
..........Hysteria also marked Collen's arrival as a member of the Def Leppard songwriting team. His influence is felt on numbers like "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Armageddon It." Coming from a full-on glam background, Collen interjected a not of bright, trashy melodicism in the manner of early Seventies power-pop glamsters Sweet.
.........."The hardest thing to write are Rock songs that are convincing," Collen says. "Ballads are easier to write in that you don't have to sound like you're kicking ass. 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' was terribly hard to write. It would have been so easy to make that one a terrible cliche. 'Animal' was another one like that. It's hard to get those songs to click so that people will like them."
..........Another key glam-era influence on Def Leppard was the heavily layered vocal harmony sound of Queen. "We used the Queen thing as a blueprint," Collen admits. "Big vocals, pop harmonies, good songs, tons of hooks--that's what it comes down to."
..........Like most aspects of Def Leppard record making, a ton of work goes into those massive vocal harmonies. "There are 16 tracks for each part," Collen explains. "Whoever is singing the part has to sing it 16 times, and sing it perfectly." Typically, Rick Savage takes the low part. Collen, Savage and--int he current Def Leppard line up--Campbell often record 16 tracks each of teh two middle parts, in a four-part harmony: a staggering 96 tracks! On Pyromania and Hysteria, Mutt Lange sang the high parts, a job that has been taken over by Viv Campbell on latter-day Leppard recordings, although Lange sang some high parts and other harmonies on "Promises" and "All Night," from Euphoria.
.........."We've actually got it down to an art," says Collen. "It may seem mathmatical, but it really starts sounding like Def Leppards when you've got that many tracks of backing vocals. And I know some people reading this will say, 'Oh great, 16 tracks each. That's how you do it.' But it;s not just that. You've got to have the right kind of swells and phrasing."
..........Lange became infamous for working the Leps nearly to death in the studio during the Eighties, making them redo instrumental and vocal takes thousands of times in search of just the right performance. On refection, however; Collen defends the producers monumental fussiness: "Mutt's not a perfectionist--really. He just knows what he wants. It doesn't have to be in tune or in time. It's not about prefection. Just having the right ingredients. Mutt's parameters are different form other people's. He's got great ears for melody. He listens to every little thing."
..........All the hard work paid off when Hysteria took off into the multi-Platinum stratosphere--just as the money from Pyromania had all but run out. The band embarked on a celebrity tour that has earned a place in the annals of rock and roll decadence. The elaborate arena rock production included a stage in the round. During a lengthy mid-set drum and vocal turn, Clark, Collen and Savage would retreat to a hospitality area beneath the stage. Female audience members were invited, on the condition that they came bare-breasted. "Tits out" was the rule.
.........."Actually, it wasn't as sordid as a lot of people make out," Collen demurs. "We'd just go down there to meet girls...who usually had their tops off. But it seriously didn't get much further than that...well, a couple of times, I guess. The crew, on the other hand, I suppose they really took advantage. It was more the Pyromania tour where we were like little kids in a candy store. Like, 'Woooww. Chicks everywhere!' But I think the stuff in the round was pretty mild, compared to almost every other rock band out there, your Motley Crues and all."
..........Campbell, who was in Whitsnake at the time, is quick to second his colleague: "At the same time the Hysteria tour was going on, Whitesnake started a six month tour with Motley Crue. And they were at the hight of their debauchery. Believe me, Def Leppard are alter boys in comparison."
..........But the triumps and pleasures that followed in Hysteria's wake were soon tempered by tragedy. Guitarist Steve Clark's alcoholism reached the crisis stage during the making of Hysteria's follow-up, Adrenalize. On January 8, 1991, Clark was found dead of an alcohol/painkiller/antidepressant overdose. Phil Collen wound up playing both his own and Clark's guitar parts on Adrenalize, endeavoring to emulate the style of the man who'd been his closest friend in Def Leppard. For the first and only time in the band's setback-strewn history, Collen says, he felt like packing it in.
.........."That's when the famous 'I wanna be a plumber' speech took place. I remember me and Joe were talking and I said, 'This is not fun for me anymore. I'd rather do something else. Fuck, I think I'd rather be a plumber.' But it was only because of all the really horrible stuff that happened with Steve. I got over that, and it was fine."
..........It wasn't until after Adrenalize came out that the Scottish-born Vivian Campbell, a verteran of Dio and Whitsnake, was asked to become Def Leppard's new guitarist.
.........."Philosophically speaking, I've never thought too much about having replaced Steve Clark," says Campbell. "I try not to get hung up on that. When I joined Def Leppard, it was for a tour, rather than a record-making process. We did a big old 16 month tour and I basically took over playing solos that Steve would have played. Most of Steve's solos were very thematic, so I tended to stick with them for the most part; I'd say 90 percent. And in the few cases where they didn't strike me as being that memorable or melodic a solo, I'd just go off and do whatever came to me."
..........Personal problems loomed large for Def Leppard on the Adrenalize tour as well. In a much publicized incident of spousal abuse, Rick Allen reportedly used his single remaining hand to grad his wife by the throat and slap her repeatedly against a restroom wall. Citing alcohol as the catalyst for the occurrence, the drummer's wife insisted that he undergo counseling. "Rick's doing quite well now, actually," says Collen, who himself quit drinking in 1987. "He's got his kids and all."
..........Campbell and Collen have jelled into a powerhouse guitar team over the course of Def Leppard's post-Adrenalize career. But it;s only now, with Euphoria, that they say they feel sufficiently free of the grunge ethos to show what they've really got. The disc is a fairly unabashed exercise in pick harmonics, wang-bar histrionics and other moves straight out of the old shred lexicon.
.........."For the whole Nineties, we couldn't really play guitar," says Collen. "We had to hide it. We were over-qualified, to be quite honest. No one wanted to hear that kind of stuff--solos and upfront guitars. But on this album it was like, 'Fuck it, that's what we're about and that's what we're going to do.'"
..........Recording for Euphoria was done at Joe Elliott's home studio in Dublin. Except for Rick Savage, who has a house near Elliott's, the band even lived at Joe's place, Monkees style. "It's amazing what we did in only a year," Collen marvels. "This is a four year album--or atleast two year one. But at Joe's house we had an upstairs/downstairs thing going: two studios. We took over Joe's spare bedroom upstairs and made it a vocal room. So there was always something being accomplished: backing vocals upstairs while there was Pro Tools editing going on downstairs."
.........."Pro Tools really helped streamline the process a lot," Campbell adds. "I didn't make Hysteria, but without Pro Tools I;m sure it was much harder."
.........."It was hell," Collen winces. "We had Fairlights and Synclaviers [early keyboard samplers--GW Ed.] for Pyromania and Hysteria. Adrenalize was all done on Akai. And that took three years. There's the difference. It's a piece of antique furniture, basically, campared to what Pro Tools can do."
..........By the time they'd gotten half way into the project, the band an co-producer Pete Woodroffe had been repeatedly told by record company execs that they were doing a great job at recaptuing the classic Pyromania/Hysteria Mutt Lange vibe. So a brilliant idea arose: Why not call Mutt himself to lend a hand? Lange--who's recently devoted much of his time to producing his wife, country megastar Shania Twain--began to collaborate with Def Leppard on songwriting. Much of the work was done over the phone and by sending tapes back and forth. "Mutt co-wrote 'Promises,''It's Only Love' and 'All Night,'" Collen specifies.
..........All three are important pieces of the album. "It's Only Love" is one of the disc's big power ballads, and "Promises" is an infectious piece of up tempo hookery that will be the first single off Euphoria. "When we played the material for people, as soon as 'Promises' comes on, they say, 'That--that's Def Leppard,'" Collen laughs. "It reminds them of 'Photograph.'"
.........."Promises" was the song that actually got Lange involved in the project. "We recorded the intired backing track and thought it was fantastic," says Woodroffe. "But there were half a dozen different ideas floating around for the melody and harmonies. After a few months it was like, 'What are we gonna do? Which idea should we go with?' That's when we said, 'Let's ring up Mutt!' We sent him the backing track and said, 'Mutt, what can you do?' At his own studio he did some backing vocals and a guide lead vocal and sent the tape back to us. We then replaced the guide lead vocal, overdubbed solos and added harmonies by Phil, Sav and Viv to the backing vocals Mutt had laid down."
..........The funk-flavored "All Night" evolved in a similar way. "That one actually went to Mutt as a backing track--a demo," says Collen. "He finished it up and played it over the phone, and I said, 'Wow, this is fucking great. Prince-esque.' Then he came over and we took it a stage further. I put a James Brown style guitar part on it. I used a G&L ASAT. Fantastic. They're like premire Teles, really."
.........."Mutt was only in the studio with us for a total of five days," says Woodroffe. "For 'All Night' he sat in the back of the control room and said, ':et's try this. Let's try that.' He was fantastic on that. Then, one morning during those five days, I played him about half the other tracks on the album and said, 'What do you think?' I got a master class. He got a lot of arrangling ideas: 'Try shortening this section. That intro's a bit long.' His advice on songs like 'Goodbye' was valuable. He said, 'This is a ballad. You have to make it concise. Don't have long indulgent sections. Try something shorter for the solo.' But that was his full extent of involvment on this album."
..........Collen and Campbell got cut loose on that all-out hot-rod guitar instrumental showpiece "Disintergrate," that band's first instrumental track since "Switch 625," from 1981's High 'N' Dry. The new Def Leppard instrumental actually grew out of a ballad called "Spanish Sky" that they'd written during the Euphoria sessions. "Our A&R man, Tom Zutaut, said it would be great if it went off into a mad instrumental at the end," says Collen. "so we adaped some of the melodies from the ballad to create this really up tempo instrumental. And we ened up not using the ballad. Just the Part II part. We figured, 'Fuck it. It'll be good to have an instrumental.' A lot of people really dug it when we did 'Switch 625' live. And Joe would get to go off stage and have a cigarette break. So that's what 'Disintergrate' is really, a cigarette break for the Nineties."
..........And there you have it: big-time production values, over-the-top guitars, Mutt-massaged melodies. But one question remains: Is the time right for all this to come back?
.........."Fuckin' 'ope so," Collen wheezes. "Otherwise we're in trouble!"
.........."I wouldn't say they world's about to embrace it they way they did in the Eighties," Campbell adds. "But I think the bands from the Eighties have served their penance. Those who deserve to make a comeback will, and those that don't, won't. There were alot of bands in the Eighties who were big on marketing nd short on talent."
.........."We got lumped in with that lot," Collen admits. "But a lot of them are gone now and we're still around. We've always been around. It's not like we've reformed or anything. We never went away. We've been chipping away all along."

-----------By Alan Di Perna------------

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