By Mike Ross
Express Writer
July 29, 1999
One innocent, little word can wound - even if you're an internationally successful rock group.
The band in this case is Def Leppard. The word is "dinosaur." It's tarred many of the acts appearing at this weekend's Rockfest '99 at Labatt Raceway.
Def Leppard performs Saturday, sharing the bill with Sammy Hagar, Loverboy, Nazareth, the Models and many other dino ... er, let's just say "classic rock" acts.
"Even Aerosmith isn't called dinosaurs," says 39-year-old Def Leppard singer Joe Elliot in a phone interview yesterday. "They've been around - what, 15, 20 years longer than we have? I think it's disrespectful, especially for a band that's done as much as we have, sold as many records as we have. I find it insulting. It's as insulting as calling my mother an old woman."
He's not angry ... just a little hurt.
Back to their roots
Supporting the new, back-to-their-slick-roots album Euphoria, Def Leppard seems to have spent much of the '90s - "a very odd period for us" - wrestling with shifting trends and the so-called "curse of Def Leppard." (Guitarist Steve Clark died during the making of Adrenalize. During work on Hysteria, drummer Rick Allen lost his arm, Elliot caught the mumps and producer Mutt Lange broke his leg. Three of the band members were going through divorces while they were making Slang. And Euphoria "was one of the few albums we've ever made where nothing's gone wrong," Elliot says happily.)
Formed in 1978 Sheffield, England, Def Leppard was the first to successfully fuse heavy metal and pop music. The birth of the "bubble-metal" sound, as it's been dubbed, could be traced to 1983's Pyromania. In addition to selling millions, the album unwittingly spawned a host of Spandexed copyists, largely from the Los Angeles area, for a glam rock trend that in the mid-'90s became as welcome as the black plague. With an audible sneer, Elliot names names: Ratt, Warrant, Dokken, Great White and so on. "We're sick of being lumped in with those bands," he says. Hence Slang. The 1996 album was a radical departure from the polished four-part harmonies, fluffy lyrics and softly head-banging beats. It was as "alternative" as Def Leppard gets. Radio loved the record, Elliot says, and radio would've played it, too - if it was from anybody but Def Leppard. He laughs mirthlessly, "That's how fashionable Def Leppard was in 1996 ...
"You start thinking conspiracies and all sorts of rubbish or you just go f--- 'em and circle your wagons and stick by your guns. Or you rethink what you did and say: It was a brave move, it was a nice try, it was the kind of thing that journalists have been dying for us to do. So we finally do it, then nobody buys it and then they wonder why we go back to something we did before (Euphoria).It's been seven years since anybody had made a record like this, including us. Thank God nobody else did either. All the bands I've moaned about that could've made our next album for us, they've gone away as well."
So let's have little sympathy here, OK? Elliot keeps insisting he doesn't mean to come off like a bitter, whiny rock star. He only talks about this sort of thing during interviews. Far be it from us to stand in the way of a good rant. "We always get lumped into that whole '80s thing," he goes on. "But we were never a part of it. For a start, we weren't even from America. And anything that those bands did, they only did because we started it off. That's the only thing that we can be attached to the blame of.
'Other bands copied'
"A lot of these other bands, they copied what we did, and when you see retrospective articles in magazines and it says, 'your Kurt Cobains and your Eddie Vedders of this world managed to get rid of your Bang Tangos and your Def Leppards.' It's like, excuse me, there wouldn't have been a Bang Tango if it hadn't been for Def Leppard.
"I don't want to sound conceited, but there was the Mersey sound and there's the Beatles. There's the British invasion and then there was the Rolling Stones. And then there's whatever they were, and there's us. We've nothing to do with it. If we gave birth to it, we did it in our sleep."
The "it" he refers to, is back now. Spandex has given way to pierced body parts, but the music is coming full circle.
Says Elliot, "Had we released Euphoria in 1996 we'd have been laughed off the planet. But three years later, things have changed."