Transcribed by the talented Bets!

CONCERT PREVIEW, Indianapolis Star; Friday June 28, 1996.
DEF LEPPARD HOPES NEW SOUND STANDS TEST OF TIME by Marc D. Allan (staff writer)

The world changed when Def Leppard wasn't looking. In the four years between its album Adrenalize and its new one, Slang, the band's candy-coated pop metal totally fell out of fashion in favor of basic rock with an angry edge.

But whatever you want to say about Def Leppard--and, as singer Joe Elliott admits, there's been plenty of criticism--the band knew it was time to change.

So it did, Slang is part of a deliberate restructuring of Def Leppard. The layered, labored record production? Gone. Anthemic party rock? Relegated mostly to history. Big light shows and '70s/'80s concert spectacle? Nah, nah, nah, nah . . . hey, hey . . . goodbye.

When the band returns to central Indiana on Saturday at Deer Creek Music Center, its first show here in nearly four years, fans will hear stripped-down, straight-forward Leppard. Elliot says by phone from Hiroshima, Japan.

"It's like, 'Listen to us,'" he says. "Listen to the drummer. Don't admire the drum riser. Any bozo with a few dollars can get a drum riser that spins. Rick Allen, who's only a three-limbed individual" -- he lost an arm in a car accident in 1984 -- "can play the living crap out of his drum kit, which doesn't do anything except sit on a one-foot drum riser.

"I think that's a very cool statement to make in this day and age. That's the whole thing we're basing this show on: We have the songs, we don't need the toys. Watch, listen, go home happy."

How happy? That's the $25 question ($19.50 for the lawn). Elliott boasts that when a radio station played the new Leppard song Work It Out, more than 100 listeners called in before someone could identify the band.

But Def Leppard fans are accustomed to spectacle and excess, to headbanging fluff like Photograph, Pour Some Sugar on Me, Rock of Ages. How will the audience react when Elliott and Co. launch into new songs virtually unrecognizable as Def Leppard?

Then there's a more practical question: When you're the only band in history to have two albums that sold more than 9 million copies each (1983's Pyromania and 1987's Hysteria), why change at all?

"The reason (Slang) turned out different is that, purely and simply, we wanted it to." Elliott says. "We didn't want to stick with the same format. The words 'format' and 'corporate' are something that's been hung around our neck like and 'unclean' sign when the plague was around.

"We wanted to get away from that kind of thing. Not that I think we have anything to prove, but just to reiterate that we aren't REO Speedwagon or Foreigner or Journey. I think we're a little bit more valid than that."

Validity, or lack thereof, may be the principal reason for Leppard's switch. For one thing, the band would like to sustain its career, and that can be difficult when audiences have turned away from the style of music you make.

Time to grow up.

Also, Elliott is 36 and going through a divorce (sorry, girls, he has a girlfriend). After 17 years of Def Leppard "being about as important as yesterday's leftover dinner," he would like to be something more than a member of adolescent rock's monarchy.

And Def Leppard would rather be associated with bands it cites as influences--the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin and the Kinks, not to mention TLC and Boyz II Men. Unlike most bands, who pretend to be originals, Leppard willingly points out its references.

"Every song we've ever done has had a reference point in some classic," Elliott says. "When we did Sugar, it was inspired by Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith's Walk This Way. But, at the same time, the reference was to try to get the sexiness across of (the Stones) Satisfaction.

"When we did Armageddon It, the basis of that song was Get It On by T. Rex.... We've always used the classic Ray Davies song or the classic Jagger-Richards songs or the classic Page-Plant songs or Lennon-McCartney songs as blueprints. Even if we've never sounded like any of those bands, they've been the blueprints."

For Slang, when guitarist Vivian Campbel brought in the song Work It Out, the band suggested that Elliott sing it in a David Bowie/Iggy Pop-style lower register. "It added a whole dimension we've never had before," Elliott says. "We thought it was exciting."

In fact, this time out, the band's standard close harmonies are all but absent. Elliott is singing lower and, often, alone.

"The barking-dog syndrome of your AC/DC records or early Leppard records, where I'm screaming in high registers, just isn't in vogue right now," he says. "I happen to have a very natural voice in a lower register."

Elliott is philosophical. He figures the new disc is "the most important record we've ever made because it's made a statement that we aren't stuck in an '80s thing."