via Variety
It shouldn’t be hard for anyone to accept the idea that Def Leppard is getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Oct. 9 alongside other showbiz legends. After all, the band has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and set an untold number of heads bobbing and fists a-pumping with undeniably catchy anthems like “Photograph,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and last year’s glam rock callback “Just Like 73.”
And yet…
“You’re immensely proud of it, but to be a part of it is a little strange, to be perfectly honest, because we’ve always been fans of musical icons and film icons,” says the band’s bass player, Rick Savage, known to friends as “Sav.” “It’s almost like you’re talking and thinking and acting in the third party, so it’s still taking a little bit of time to sink in.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Savage’s comments as false modesty, given the flash and sparkle of the band’s music and image, along with the massive sales and their 2019 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But Def Leppard is, at its core, a brotherhood of working-class kids from the British Isles, raised by parents who lived through the deprivations of World War II. And work they do: they’ve played 2,700-plus shows across six decades and as many continents, carrying on in the face of personal tragedies as they’ve navigated career peaks and valleys, from stadiums to state fairs and back to stadiums again.
Next year, the band will settle down briefly for a Las Vegas residency — its third — at the Colosseum Theater at Caesars Palace from Feb. 3-28. In the meantime, they’re working on a batch of new recordings they hope to release next year.
“It’s a very different situation to touring,” says lead singer Joe Elliott of the Vegas residency. “You’ve got people coming from all over the world, not just all over the country, to come see us, so we try to put on a different show. The first residency in 2013, we opened for ourselves as a fake band called Ded Flatbird, and we did all the really deep stuff for 45 minutes, and then we went off and came back on and did ‘Hysteria’ and [other] stuff. Then the residency in 2019, I generally — ”
Elliott pivots mid-thought, without taking a pause.
“It’s funny, the closer things are to me, the less I can remember them,” he muses. “But ask me about 1980, I’ll tell you everything.”
Nineteen eighty was a milestone year for Def Leppard. Not only did it mark the release of their debut album, “On Through the Night,” in March, it brought them to Hollywood for the first time. Their plane touched down at LAX on May 18, and they checked into the historic Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip. Band members had a day or so to do a few touristy things, like pay a visit to the Rainbow Bar & Grill, famous as a hangout for British rock stars like Led Zeppelin and Keith Moon of the Who, and get scammed by a shop that sold them overpriced, faulty cameras. Then it was time for their show, opening for the Pat Travers Band at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on May 20 — the first concert on their first-ever U.S. tour.
The band moved “Hello America,” the second track from “On Through the Night,” to the front of the setlist, introducing themselves to the audience with lyrics seemingly made for the moment:
Well, I’m taking me a trip,
I’m going down to California
Yeah, I’m going to try
Hollywood and San Pedro Bay
Elliott had composed the words the previous year in his windowless six-by-six-foot basement office at Osborn-Mushet Tools in the band’s hometown of Sheffield, an industrial city 160 miles northwest of London known as a steel production hub. Never having been to the Golden State, he used an atlas to pinpoint the locales he namechecked, unaware that San Pedro Bay, the busiest seaport in the U.S., is hardly a picturesque tourist destination.
“I had a cassette playing all day, just listening to Alice Cooper, Mott the Hoople, all those kinds of [things],” recalls Elliott, who had risen from an £8-a-week apprentice to chief buyer at the company, purchasing everything from stationery to overalls. “But we had the band together by then, and I would have backing tracks to the songs that we’d worked on two days previously and be writing lyrics. And maybe last night I was watching some show that had the beach in Santa Monica on it — the palm trees and the guy roller-skating up and down the path, blah, blah blah — and I’m thinking, ‘God, get me out of here.’ And so all that was kind of a metaphorical ladder out of this factory.”
As the lights went down at the Santa Monica Civic that night and Def Leppard took to the stage, the band was relieved to hear some polite applause.
“They weren’t screaming for us, but it wasn’t total silence,” recalls Elliott. “We could just hear three or four kids shouting, ‘Wasted!’ [their debut album’s first single]. And I remember turning around to one of the guys and going, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve actually heard of us!’”
Variety’s review of the show by the late Cynthia Kirk noted the “respectable response” from the crowd and a “‘long live rock’ anthem or two that suggest the early potency of Foghat,” then zeroed on the band’s youth — at the time, they ranged in age from 20 (Elliott and original guitarists Steve Clark and Pete Willis) to 16 (drummer Rick Allen) — and Elliott’s “apple-cheeked good looks [which] offer more femme appeal than is typical for this mucho macho genre.”
Unlike the Foghats of the world, they weren’t scruffy men pushing middle age who looked like they stank of stale beer and cigarettes — they were as young or younger than many in the audience. They also weren’t pouty New Romantics sporting makeup and frilly shirts like other emerging British acts of the moment, such as fellow Sheffield natives the Human League and Heaven 17. They were pretty, but undeniably masculine, and they didn’t stand stock still, poking out one-finger parts on a synth. They could play, sing, shake, prance and pose with the best of them, as evidenced by a bootleg video of their second show on the tour the following night in Fresno that has surfaced on YouTube.
