Here's an interesting Def Leppard parody. I got this one from my friend Mark too. If you think the lyrics are funny, you should hear it performed. I've got it on tape courtesy of Mark. Thanks Mark!

LET'S GET SPOCK

It was - Tribbles, Klingons, Romulans
Sulu's at the wheel
Kirk had sex with aliens
Turn on - his deflector shield
Now Dr. McCoy is startin' to panic
Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a mechanic

Beam me up Scotty
To the Enterprise
Hey everybody,
Energize!
Warp drive power,
Phasers on stun,
It'll just take an hour
Rerun, rerun, rerun
Let's get, let's get, let's get
Let's get Spock
Let's get, let's get, let's get
Let's get Spock
He's had pointy ears
For thirty years
C'mon
Let's get, let's get, let's get
Let's get Spock

Let's get, let's get, let's get
Let's get Spock
(repeat till end)

And now, here is a review of Def Leppard's Chicago concert-July 5,1996 taken from the Chicago Tribune. Yes, it's not the best of reviews, but there are one or two nice things said. Of course, in my opinion (and I should know-I was there), the concert ROCKED!!!! Hmm....maybe I should write my own review...

Def Leppard lingers in the sounds of its past
by Dean Golemis
Tribune Staff Writer

What worked for many bands of that era seemed to work especially for Def Leppard- a catchy hook here, a heart-bleeding ballad there and a plenty of finger-trilling guitar solos to sell the millions of sleekly produced albums that these boys from Sheffield, England, have done through most of their long career.

But from the first riff they laid down Friday at the New World Music Theatre in Tinley Park it was clear that the sound which catapulted them to worldwide acclaim smelled as dated as curddled milk.

Even the quintet's effort to modernize their style- as they tried to do in their new album, "Slang"-revealed the tired formula that has given their records little distinction from each other. If anything, the new stuff smacks more of bubble-gum appeal.

While plucking roses from a crowd of yelping female admirers, singer Joe Elliot wailed away above the backing vocals of guitarists Vivian Campbell and Phil Collen and bassist Rick Savage. In songs such as "Foolin'" and "Rocket" their fist-pumping chants sounded bombastic and overimposing- a staple of '80s grown pop metal.

With new tunes "Slang" and "Work It Out," Def Leppard's attempt at a sound steeped in a more modern, inner-city groove- a la hip-hop- faltered with a flimsy, watered-down texture that would fit better under a disco ball than in an alleyway.

Slow ballads are more of a Def Leppard speciality. Among these, "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad" and the new "All I Want Is Everything" reeked with the kind of generic sentiments that made Bon Jovi famous. The band, however, treated other heart-tuggers with more feeling in acoustic guitar versions of "Two Steps Behind" and "Where Does Love Go When It Dies" in which Elliot's voice blended better with the hollow wood.

In a brief jamming spree in which Campbell and Collen resorted to the usual I'm-a-rock-star-type of rapid riffing, one-armed drummer Rick Allen banged away on his new acoustic skins with full fury and precision and revealed a sound fuller than that of the synthesized drums.

Opening band Tripping Daisy packed strong songwriting and offbeat lyrics in a set that artfully blended punk, '70s hard rock and drops of psychedelia. Singer Tim DeLaughter and his turquoise hair was all the rage as his cracked corny jokes between full-bodied rockers such as "Lost and Found" and "Trip Along."

And now here's an article from People Magazine's May 20, 1996 issue. Hmm...the day after my birthday. Coincidence?

The Leppard Changes Its Spots

Tastes have changed since 1992's Adrenalize. How do you keep pace?

I don't think there's ever been such a wealth of music as there is at the moment. Some bands I don't think are that great, and others I think are fantastic. So what we've always tried to do is take a bit from everything. A bit of Salt-N-Pepa. A bit of Boyz II Men. A bit of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Just mix it all up. That's kind of what we did here [with Slang]. It's one thing to copy something that's contemporary. It's another thing to actually understand it. That's what we've done. We try to understand the new music and get to like it. How has Def Leppard maintained such a low profile?

We've been lucky. You see a band like Motley Crue, and to a lesser extent Kiss, and all the makeup definitely puts a stamp on it. It says, "I'm from nineteen eighty-whatever." We transcend that because we're ordinary and normal. We try to avoid limos when we can. Some people know our drummer has only got one arm, but apart from that it's just, like, five guys.

Def Leppard: Slang Talk & All Action
by Paul Gargano

In a phone interview from Nagoya, Japan, where Def Leppard were kicking off their current world tour, lead singer Joe Elliot talked about the factors contributing to Slang, the developing mechanics within the band, and Vivian Campbell's first album as a writing member of the rock brigade. Through the magic of time zones, the conversation couldn't have started in a more confusing manner. It was morning in America, evening in Japan, and afternoon in England, where the European Soccer Championships were underway. While the band's manager looked for a late night satellite hook-up so the Leps could watch the game, Joe and I talked while I nursed my morning coffee.

Is it a totally different environment over there in Asia as opposed to America?

Joe: Every country is different. When you start the tour off, you lump it as Southeast Asia, but some countries are five hours apart by plane, which is as far as New York is from L.A. The cultures are all slightly different, they're just all of an oriental nature. You have semi-language barrier problems to negotiate, which is not that much of a problem, I'm sure politicians have a much harder job than we do. Generally it's been very, very good. Singapore was a bit more reserved than Bangkok, and in Seoul, where you'd think they were more reserved, they were completely nuts.

Are you looking forward to getting back to America?

Joe: I have to admit, I really am. I've loved it down here, but I love touring the States. You can't beat the sheds in the summer, we haven't been there since '93.

How has the reaction to Slang been so far?

Joe: The reception has been pretty good so far. A lot of the European reviews have been stunning, which has surprised me. Some of the Scandinavian reporters are saying it's the rock album of the 90's, which you can take with a pinch of salt, but it's still good to hear. It's going to be a very difficult album for us, because we're at that period of the wheel where it's got to rotate back up again. We've been out for a while, new movements come and go, and we're still around. People need to make a judgment on their perception of what we are, whether we're stupid and old, or whether we're very cool. I think we'll become very cool later on, but maybe not right now. It's like Aerosmith, they're great right now, but there was a period from '79 onwards where they were so uncool it was ridiculous, yet they came back. We just made our first '90s record in the second half of the decade, and that in itself is a bit slow on our part, but given the circumstances the band has always found itself in, we have no option but to be that way. We've forever been accused of doing an album every five years, but we've always been on tour for two and a half. You can't make an album in the first week the tour is finished, you need a bit of time off, then it takes a year, year and a half, to make the record, so you're looking at four years straight away.

You guys have been plagued by problems while recording albums. How did things go while you were recording this one?

Joe: Well, we're not playing it anymore, so we weren't worried at all. We weren't going to go in there and make another Adrenalize. The whole idea was to go in there and make a whole new album that was from the heart, instead of another one of those big-production records. When we were making those big-production records, they were great and valid for their time, but they aren't great and valid anymore. You have to adapt, or you die, and we weren't prepared to die, so we tried to adapt. We put a lot more authentic sounds down, a lot more organic arrangements, and just a lot more natural songwriting with less emphasis on being the kings of adolescent rock, or whatever. Hey, listen, I'm 36, I'm not going to write "Let's Get Rocked," anymore. Those days are gone. Check out "Pearl of Euphoria," "Gift of Flesh," and "All I Want Is Everything," they're just things that are a lot more human, we wanted to make a human record.

The material on Slang is very diverse. Was that difficult for you guys to accomplish when you set out to write the album?

Joe: No, you know what, it was the easiest record we've written since Pyromania, which we wrote in a month. This album was easy because a lot of the songs were already written when we turned up to record. If you look at the writing credits, there are about five or six songs that were written individually. On the record, it was just a case of finding an arrangement style that we thought was valid for now. Things like "Gift of Flesh," "Turn to Dust," and "Breathe a Sigh," which were all written by Phil, "All I Want Is Everything," which I wrote, and "Work It Out," which was written by Vivian, were all finished songs. Maybe in vastly different forms than how they're finished now, but the chord sequences, the lyrics and the melodies were all there, it was just a case of honing in on arrangements. The hardest thing we had to do on the record was find an arrangement for "Breathe a Sigh," and we ended up going with an R&B arrangement because it felt the most natural way to go. On this record, we indulged each other. In the past, if somebody made a suggestion for a specific instrument, we quite possibly said no before we gave it a chance. On this record we actually did it, then said no if it didn't work. If it worked, it was like "Wow, I didn't think that was going to work, but it sounds really cool." The dulcimers and mandolins on "Turn to Dust," the almost, dare I say it, Nine Inch Nails-ish kind of sounds on things like "Truth," we just thought, why not, no one owns a copyright for any one particular thing. We just felt that if that was the direction the song felt comfortable going in, and none of us felt stupid doing it, then that's what we did.

Did you worry that Def Leppard fans might have a problem with that?

Joe: Not really, we never took it into consideration. When you're making a record, you're making a record that you want to make. You don't paint a painting for a specific person, you paint a painting that comes out of your head or your heart and hope that somebody likes it. It's the same thing when you make a record.

You wrote "All I Want Is Everything," as well as Def Leppard's last big hit, "Two Steps Behind." Are ballads something you feel particularly comfortable writing?

Joe: Actually, me and Sav wrote "When Love and Hate Collide," and I've always co-written just about everything we've ever done, but musically the ballads in the past have basically come from Steve or Phil. "Two Steps Behind," is one of mine, but when I originally did it- if you listen to the Retroactive album, track 11 is an electric version and that's my demo- I did it as a mid-tempo rock song. It was Phil's suggestion that we do it acoustically, because it was initially a b-side and because we had one day left before we had to do a gig or something, it was the only way that we were going to get this song recorded, and we desperately needed it recorded for the European formats. So we just went in and did it, we did it in my house, and it cost like $100 to record. A year later, it became one of the biggest hits we've ever had, thanks to the Last Action Hero soundtrack, so that became a ballad by accident, really, but we like these accidents! Half of the things our career has been based on have been accidental. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" wouldn't have made the Hysteria album, it wasn't a planned song for the record, it came as an accident towards the end of the project and became the most important song on the record. So things like that are pretty cool.

Are there any songs like that on Slang?

Joe: Yeah, some of the songs are actually demos, because we recorded the album on the same equipment that we actually did the demos on. Anything we did that was of master quality from a performer's point of view was a keeper if you wanted it to be. So consequently, on "Pearl of Euphoria," all the guitars and bassline is me playing on my demo, and Phil and Viv added to my guitars and Rick played drums over the top of my drum machine, that was one song we pieced together. Most of the songs we played on the record were played live, "Deliver Me," was a first take, "Gift of Flesh" was a live performance, just the whole band playing. A couple of the songs we used sequencing on, the song "Slang," the majority of the verse there is my guide vocal that we did on the night we wrote it. When I came around to singing the real vocal, it was toward the end of the project and I sounded pedestrian, I sounded like I was trying too hard to do what I'd already done. There was a lot of spontaneity. The rain storm at the beginning of "Turn to Dust" is a real rain storm, we were in Spain for nine months and it only rained three times. The second time it rained was four and a half months after the first time. It was such an event to rain, that we actually stuck the mic out the window and recorded the rainstorm. On "Where Does Love Go When It Dies," a lot of the acoustic guitars were recorded outside- we just went out on the patio, took the mics out there, lit some incense, candles and mosquito repellent, and if you listen to the multi-tracks, there are crickets, dogs barking, and cars driving by, it's all on tape. We wanted that Zeppelin-esque, early Bowie feel. If you listen to [Bowie's] "Life on Mars," at the end of it you can hear a phone ring. On Zeppelin songs, you can hear a plane fly over, it was great for them. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us.

Was that natural feeling the overriding concept behind the album?

Joe: The concept here was just to get away from what we've done in the past. I honestly don't believe that after selling 40 million records, we need to prove anything to anybody, but it was an exercise to ourselves that we can make a great record where we didn't have to fall into all the corporate trappings. There weren't corporate trappings when we did the other records, but if we did it again, we'd all be trying to emulate past successes. We didn't want to do Bat Out of Hell II, we didn't want to do Hysteria II. We wanted to do something that was progress for us. Irrelevant from what anyone else thinks, for us it was a massive step from the previous record, what you can never expect from an artist, to try and further themselves as best they can. Bands like U2 and REM do 360s all the time and they don't get branded '80s bands, even though they are, because of the way that they are perceived. The perception of us as an '80s band I think is a little unfair, so we have to push our way towards REM and U2 and get away from, not that we ever were, but people lump us with Warrant and Poison, and I think it's a very unfair thing to do to a band of our stature, because they were on our coattails, it was never the other way around.

Does the binary coding in the album art tie into the making of the album at all?

Joe: Basically, what we were trying to do, was represent the old and the new. Binary code is computer speak. As much as we've gone to a much more organic sound, we're still very aware of technology, we have used it at every given opportunity, but we used the technology to make things sound more organic, rather than sound like Star Wars, like we've done in the past. The other side of the artwork, the Buddha stuff and the very rustic colors, was supposed to represent a much more organic approach to what we're doing. The crowd that did the album sleeve for us is a bunch of guys in Vermont. They asked for a tape of what we were doing so they could listen to the album while they were coming up with ideas. One of the guys happened to fall in love with "Turn to Dust," hence that track probably led the way to the kind of mystical Indian theme that goes with the sleeve. One of them just had a boner on for "Turn to Dust," and he just kept playing it eight hours at a time, probably driving everyone else mad. The whole idea of the sleeve is to represent the old and the new, the binary code is computer speak, and everything else represents that we've recorded an album the way people used to record albums in 1972. Yet without the technology, we wouldn't have been able to do the album that we tried to make sound like something that happened 20 years ago.

This was Vivian's first album writing with Def Leppard and I was very curious to see what his influence would be on the band. I was expecting a sound similar to his Riverdogs album to shine through, but instead he wrote "Work It Out."

Joe: Yeah, he wrote "Work It Out," his original demo of that sounded like a cross between Crowded House and the Rembrandts. It's exactly the same chords, same melody, same lyrics, but he sang it in a higher register. We took it down to the Iggy Pop, Bowie-esque thing. Any song that came in got changed vastly from the original demo, because people individually aren't Def Leppard, and specifically, not Vivian- having never written for us before- was very much not Def Leppard. A lot of his things we needed to Leppardize, but we weren't Leppardizing them in a way that we were trying to get them to sound like Adrenalize. We were Leppardizing them in a way that the band gravitated towards a different area of music, all five of us, and obviously Vivian was a little bit alienated from that because he hadn't been with the band for 16 years. So we all sat down and said this is a great song, but it doesn't sound like Def Leppard and it's too alien for us to play the way it is- it's going to sound like people will hear it and go, "Def Leppard are trying to sound like Crowded House," which would be ridiculous, so we have to find an area and rock it up a little bit more, so that's why we went with the whole staccato guitar thing. We took the whole Bowie/Eno late '70s period and bit of Roxy Music and gave Rick the opportunity to beat the living shit out of his kit, and I get to do my Brian Ferry, Iggy Pop, David Bowie kind of voice, which is something that I've always had a voice for, but we've never had a vehicle for. With the song Vivian came in with, for the first time, because he was the new boy and was coming in with a fresh way of writing, all of a sudden we had a vehicle for the voice that I've been craving to use for years. He also co-wrote "Truth," the first track and industrial-type sounding thing, he co-wrote on that one and came up with a lot of the lyrics on it. Vivian joined us, we didn't join Viv, so the thing is, he knows he has to adapt a lot more than we have to adapt, even though on this record, everyone adapted. He's not going to come in with "The Last in Line Pt.2" riff and expect us to sound like Dio. For starters, he hates all that stuff anyway(laughing). He was joining a pop-rock band at the time when he joined this band, he's very into melody and tunes, and just pop, he's a big pop fan. Of everyone in this band, Vivian is the one that's the fan of pop music, believe it or not, even though he's been in Dio and Whitesnake, so he always comes in with excellent melody ideas. But his contributions been more than that- his guitar playing on this record is stunning, he's added a dimension to the backing vocals. In the past we've had a reputation for backing vocals, but he adds a dimension to this band that's been missing for so long.

So it' been a comfortable fit for Vivian?

Joe: No. It's been very comfortable for me, you know? "Vivian, there's a high harmony that needs doing," and he can hit anything, this is amazing. But it was very difficult for him. If we had made another Adrenalize or Hysteria it would have been a lot easier for him because the four of us would have been making the same record again, and he'd have jumped onboard a lot quicker. But the four of us, other than Viv, were feeling our way around for a while, as to what kind of record we wanted to make, and he had to deal with being the new boy. Being with us on the Adrenalize tour was very comfortable, we rehearsed the songs, he knew what he had to play and he knew what he had to sing. When it came time to make an album that was going to be a statement that this band was making with its release in 1996, we all had to feel our way, but he had to feel more than us, and I think he's going to be a lot more comfortable on the next album. He never moaned, he never bitched, sometimes he just got a little quiet because he was confused and we changed track every five minutes- "Let's rerecord this song, it's in the wrong key, it's the wrong speed, I don't like this, the arrangement sounds too much like such and such a song, let's go for it again." We'd never really done that before, we all did something on the record that we're capable of doing, and we've been craving for, but never actually been afforded the opportunity in the past.

In that same vein, can you compare this tour to the others in terms of presentation?

Joe: You won't believe the difference, gone are all the toys. We got to the point where we had some festivals to do in Europe in the summer of '93 where we couldn't do anything but put the minimum of backlight up and go out there and play. We headlined this one festival in Germany, it was like 60,000 people, and we felt naked when we first went on because we had nothing but us. By the time we came off, anybody that was there from our record company, or our road crew- that had already seen us like a dozen times- said it was the best they've ever seen us because they saw us instead of a bunch of toys. We were well aware that the show we put on for Adrenalize and Hysteria was very much like a Broadway show, in the round, things moving, this, that and the other, we were just part of the overall picture. All of a sudden, we realized that we're better than that and we wanted people to remember the band. If you can afford it, anybody can have a drum riser that goes up and spins, it doesn't make you a great person or a great musician, it just means you can afford it. When we made the record, we made a conscious effort to have a production that allows people to hear the group, rather than the production, we got a little bit pissed at hearing that the production is always so great. What about the songs? What about the performance? We wanted people to hear the band on this record, and not the production. It's the same when we go out live, we want people to remember the five of us on stage, not the pods that moved or the drum riser that went up and down, blah, blah, blah. So we're going out with the most basic stage we've used since Pyromania- us and nothing else. A lot of sweat, a lot of energy, a lot of volume, a lot of Marshalls, a lot of Les Pauls, no toys, no explosions, no nothing. It's rock 'n' roll, that's what it is. It's like an Oasis show, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple- when they went out they had nothing, it was just the guys in the band.

You said the "Let's Get Rocked" days are gone, is that musical development reflected in your live show?

Joe: When we first did Bangkok, and then moved on to Singapore, we weren't doing any of those songs at all. Then we hit a stumbling block, which is something that you do get in areas like this. Those songs were ENORMOUS hits down here and the crowds were banging at the doors for us. We reluctantly put "Let's Get Rocked" as the last encore, so it's like a decent compromise- you want us to do it, but we don't want to play it, and doing it like that, it's not so bad, I can forgive Jeff Beck for doing "High Horse, Sliver Lining" as a last encore. The majority of our back catalog that we're doing stands up and sounds great because Rick's playing an acoustic drum kit and everybody's back on Marshalls and Les Pauls. It adds an energy that wasn't apparent before in songs like "Photograph," "Sugar," "Armageddon It," and "Rock of Ages." The new songs mix in with the old songs really well, too. There's obviously certain things that don't work, and we just don't want to do, but for Southeast Asia, we gave the people what they wanted. They demanded "Let's Get Rocked," and we had to do it, but I can't see us doing it in the States.

So in America we shouldn't be expecting a greatest hits tour?

Joe: In a live situation, familiarity is king. If I'm at a gig and somebody is playing new material for 45 minutes, I'm at the bar or buying a t-shirt, I'm bored. I like listening to the albums at home, I want to listen to something I know when I go to a gig, so we mix it. We're doing a lot of stuff off the new album, but we're doing a lot of old stuff too, but we're doing some of the album tracks that have been on the shelf for a while, so we're doing stuff off Pyromania and High 'N' Dry that we haven't played in a long time. We're mixing it up. We've been together for a long time, and you've got to remember that there are a lot of people that want to hear that stuff. Maybe right now, for a band like us to survive, that stuff's not going to get played on the radio, but people that have been following us for a while and are maybe 30 years old now, they want to hear stuff off Pyromania and Hysteria. We're not just going to go out there and play the whole new album and alienate everybody that has been with us since day one, that would be disrespectful and stupid.