Circus 30JUN83
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
Like a lot of rockers from England, he's got a high-pitched singing voice, a shelf full of Stones and Mott the Hoople records, and a weakness for lager beer. But Joe Elliott has three things most of his musical rivals can't boast: a pair of gold albums and six months of high-paying roadwork-in-progress with his band, Def Leppard.
Just five years ago, Elliott was a van driver whose involvement with show business was, to put it politely, marginal. Tonight, Joe can't walk two paces out of his dressing room without catching six pairs of bedroom eyes that track his every step. Several thousand pairs are bobbing strenuously outside the backstage portals.
Except for the unparalleled amount of female attention, most of the same holds true for Elliott's band-mates - Steve Clark, Richard Savage, Phil Collen and Richard Allen. Maybe Clark collects Led Zeppelin or Yardbirds, and perhaps Collen prefers Ritchie Blackmore, but the living code is the same: Look young, drink hard, make hit records (like the current Pyromania, on Mercury) and invest whatever you don't spend.
"We still want to be functioning musicians twelve years from now," explains Clark, 23. "We're all going to be 30 one day," echoes Elliott. "But if we keep writing good songs, our audience is going to grow with us."
Like a lot or rockers from New England, Billy Squier has a high-pitched singing voice, a shelf full of Stones and Yardbirds albums and a fondness for Coca-Cola. Four years ago Squier, then 29, was bandless, and scratching for a record deal. Now he has two platinum Capitol albums, Emotions in Motion and Don't Say No. This evening he's kicking off the final month of a long-awaited headline tour; his New Haven audience numbers 12,000. The knowledge that he has a steady girlfriend, Fleur Thiemeyer, doesn't keep nubile fans from tossing their bras on stage at Billy's feet.
When the show is over, Squier and his hand-picked special guest Def Leppard have played two and a half hours of what Elliott, 23, calls "commercial pop rock," and what magazine scribes refer to as heavy metal. Whatever you call it, the music sounded so consistent from opening act to headliner that the remarks of a befuddled security cop overheard in the Veterans' Memorial Coliseum corridor came as no surprise.
"Was that Billy Squier with the Union Jack on his shirt?" he asked. "It sounded like the same group coming back out after intermission, except they had keyboards. But it couldn't have been the same guys - Union Jack was standing here with a beer while they were playing."
Union Jack was, of course, Joe Elliott.
The Squier-Leppard tour, which got underway in Atlanta March 18, was months in the planning. Noted Squier: "We'd tried to get Leppard before, since we want to get the best acts we can to open for us. But they weren't ready." Like Squier himself, Leppard went into months of overtime making it's most recent album, and no North American tour could be worked out till spring.
"I don't feel any threat from the combination, Squier insisted. "Some people are afraid to let Def Lepprad open for them, but I think this arrangement makes for a great tour. The more they push me, the better I am, anyway. I want them to come on stage with their guns blazing."
Some participants at the tribal rites of the Squier-Leppard concerts have claimed that Leppard has upstaged Squier. The members of Def Leppard, thought they're as proud of their music as they are of their drinking capacity, point out that Billy's got a gun, too.
"If we do better than Billy Squier on some nights, then we'll not do as well as Billy some other night," Elliott said in Connecticut after the fourth show of the tour - and the second near Squier's New England home turf. "It's fact. We don't attempt to blow Billy off stage. It's his tour."
Adds Clark: "It's not like a football match. One band doesn't have to win. A kid might say about tonight: 'What a great package; what two great groups.'" Indeed, anyone who liked Squier's "My Kinda Lover" would probably enjoy Leppard's "Die Hard The Hunter' from Pyromania; not only do the tag lines of the two songs scan the same way, they're arranged using the same vocal harmonies built on the same five notes.
These tag-team masters-in-tandem of pop metal ravaged the country until April 21, playing 24 dates together. Business was just fine. At the new Haven Coliseum there was standing room only. The Omni in Atlanta had only 400 empty seats out of 17,000. In Charlotte, Worcester and Portland, each of the 12,000-seat halls was sold out. Even obstructed-view spots at the New Jersey Meadowlands found takers; 21,000 tickets were sold.
But Def Leppard - "full-time musicians and part-time businessmen," in Elliott's words - aren't content to rest with guest-star billing. From April 29 through September 10, the group heads up its own earsplitting package: Leppard, Krokus and the Jon Butcher Axis, a power trio cast in the Robin Trower mold. Considering the Troweresque style of backing track for Leppard's "Too Late the Hero," this new set of road triplets sounds like the offspring of another perfect marriage made in heavy-metal hell. By tour's end, at least four members of Def Leppard as well as road manager Robert Allen (Richard's older brother) should be able to afford a cottage in England or an apartment in Amsterdam.
The group that first scored around the world with On Through The Night (1980) may play in a style reminiscent of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC as well as Billy Squier, but it has unusual beginnings. Formed in Sheffield in later '77, the group originally included Savage, guitarist Pete Willis and drummer Tony Reuben. Along came Elliott, who admits, "I couldn't sing. I only got the job in Leppard because I was tall and had long hair." Joe chose the name Def Leppard: "We thought 'Let's just go for a name that's idiotic.'"
Six weeks later Steve Clark joined on guitar. The fledgling rockers were more a band of friends than a practiced musical unit. But the learned fast, making up their own songs. Running through a series of drummers, they settled on Richard Allen, now 19. A self-financed EP, Getcha Rocks Off, reached the 60s in the British charts. At that time, only Allen was a professional musician, but the other four quit their day jobs upon signing an international deal with PolyGram Records.
Def Leppard's recorded breakthrough came with High 'n' Dry, the album which includes the group's best-known song "Bringin' On The Heartbreak", and which has enjoyed a recent six-month stay on the LP charts two years after its release. Leppard toured behind the High 'n' Dry LP through late 1981, then returned to Sheffield and woodshedded the songs that wound up on Pyromania. That album was well underway in studios in and around London when a problem that had been festering within the group blew wide open and led to a lineup change.
"All we were when we got together," explains Elliott, "were five friends who decided, 'Lets try to be a rock band,' and it was a real shame because it was getting away from that. Enough is enough, and we arrived at that point in July '82. We'd just finished the backing tracks, and then everything started deteriorating between guitarist Pete Willis and the rest of the band.
"He wasn't as enthusiastic as he should have been, and maybe it wasn't even his fault. His family, his mother and dad and brothers and sisters, his girlfriend, and his slight drinking problem were affecting him and us. We couldn't go on any longer." Willis was asked to leave; he returned to his family in Sheffield.
Phil Collen, guitarist with the band Girl, visited Leppard in the studio the next day. "We had known Phil for a couple of years," says Steve Clark. "We asked him to join after he did a perfect solo in two takes." Collen, 25, now handles the lead work that Willis used to do on songs such as "High 'n' Dry" and "On Through the Night," while Clark takes solos like those on "Bringin' On the Heartbreak". Admits Elliott: "We still get a lot of letters saying 'Pete Willis is God, and we don't want Phil Collen." In New Haven, however, Collen's showmanship was a visual highlight of the show, yet it was only the fourth time he'd played on an American stage.
Though Def Leppard still loses money touring Britain - $900,000 ran down the drain this past February during a 10-day spin - the band is now comfortably established in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, France, Belgium and Holland, and will have conquered Canada before June is out.
Friends say the group is still having too much fun to let success change its spots. "I've seen this business change a lot of people," says production manager Phay MacMahon, "but not these guys. It'll be interesting to see how long they stay this way." Already, the promise of domesticity seems to be closing in upon Elliott, whose girlfriend Denise Dakin - a Sheffield lass working stateside as a nanny - has been his constant companion during Leppard's Northeastern swings. Rick Savage, 22, reportedly is getting serious about another Sheffield girl named Joy.
With or without female company, however, all the band members are quick to admit that working on the road will be the focus of their lives for some time to come. Even Joy and Denise aren't about to lure Savage and Elliott off to permanent English household arrangements yet. Music's still the thing.
"Whether it's Billy Squier, Def Leppard or Krokus that you're talking about," concludes Elliott, "it's all part of the hard-rock syndrome. Guitar-oriented bands are what we grew up listening to; playing that music is what we'll always try to do."