Def Leppard.
The boys from Sheffield had experienced their meteoric rise during the years I was a young parent and still in the church – isolated, more or less, from both rock radio and MTV. I’m sure I’d heard “Photograph” and “Rock of Ages” at some point, but not in any context where I would have been paying attention.
But I remember being in Mom’s Music, a gear store in Louisville, and overhearing a discussion about how Leppard’s drummer had lost his arm. That got my attention, and I bought a magazine and read about it. That’s the end of that, I thought at the time.
Two years later, I was a rock music critic at the Courier, and Hysteria drifted across my transom. It was my job to check it out and review it.
I scarcely have to break it down. That album did what Van Halen, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi combined couldn’t: it generated as many hit singles as Thriller, and solidified pop metal as a genre.
Produced by Mutt Lange and featuring strong songwriting from the entire band, Hysteria was a juggernaut. It chunked out hit after hit after hit: “Animal”. “Rocket”. “Love Bites”. The title track. “Armageddon It”. And – of course! - “Pour Some Sugar on Me”.
It was unstoppable. The band circled the planet, then circled it again, and MTV became the Def Leppard Channel.
And I wrote about it, of course.
A side note here about my music critic routine. The albums I reviewed would accumulate in my In box at the newspaper’s Features desk, and I would make a weekly visit to see what I had. I’d dub the worthy albums to cassette tape so I could study them while driving. And often, as mentioned above in “Born in the USA”, my young son Steve would be in his car seat behind me. He got to hear more music in that car seat than most young children hear in their first 10 years.
So I put on Hysteria. And I turn around and he’s headbanging like Wayne and Garth. From that day forth, it was nothing but Hysteria in the car for him. Woe to me if I ever forgot and had Van Halen on.
Flash-forward five years, we’re in Lexington visiting my mother and Steve is 10 years old now and needed a haircut. Leppard hasn’t released anything in the interim. But as he sits there in the chair, a new song comes on the mall sound system:
“Do ya wanna get rocked?”
It’s Leppard. “Let’s Get Rocked”, from Adrenalize, a full five years after Hysteria.
“Sir! Sir!”
It’s the barber, talking to me.
“Sir, you need to get control of your son. I don’t want to hurt him!”
Steve had been headbanging there in the barber’s chair, with a pair of scissors an inch from his head.
Leppard remains his favorite band. I still love them; I saw them two summers ago, and they’re better than ever. And I’ve written not one but two books about them...
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