Def Leppard
It must be difficult to be a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. The entire rest of the world knows you’re not going to repeat your success and it’s only downhill from here, but you have to pretend that’s not the situation. You’re a bunch of guys in your 40s at least, trying to pretend you’re still the wild, hedonistic youths you became famous as. There may be groupies at your concerts, but that doesn’t even do you any good because you’re married and have kids. The worst part is, the groupies suffer from the same problem as you: they’re in their 40s and failing miserably to be 20 years old again.
I have to say, it’s also difficult to be fan of a band who peaked in the 1980s, in 2009. You have to constantly worry that the band’s lead singer is going to fall over and break a hip on stage, or otherwise make some other embarrassing concession to his advanced age. You feel slightly embarrassed for their antics: they’re close to half a century old and they’re still running around on stage wearing ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and asking the audience to pour some sugar on them. One might say their refusal to succumb to the boring, humdrum life of most midlifers makes them brave or even heroic, but to me it looks self-delusional. Worst of all, when you go to their concerts (which you are pretty much obliged to do — when you’re dealing with this kind of band, any tour could be their last, and as a fan, no matter how embarrassingly old the band has become, it’s still a thrill to see them live), you have to deal with the other fans. The aforementioned groupies are among them: women who are in their 40s and who have apparently not been informed that they are no longer 19 and as such they should not attempt to dress like the hot, skinny 19-year-old they may once have been. There are also the male partners of said groupies: generally dudes in their 40s or 50s wearing mullets and ridiculous moustaches, with bad teeth and grating voices. Aging metalheads like this fill me with a mixture of fear and pity for some reason.
That said, the fellow-concert-goer situation wasn’t all bad. I saw a surprising number of people wearing Rush t-shirts; I’d always thought the fanbases of Def Leppard and Rush were disjoint sets except for me. I also saw Metallica, AC/DC, Dream Theater and Queensrÿche shirts. And my seat was on the end of a row, so I was only next to one person, who was not a scary aging metalhead but an unusually attractive girl in her 20s. Her boyfriend, next to her, distinguished himself by acting like a spectacular ass (mainly shouting and waving his arms around in something with only a passing resemblance to rhythm) but the girl did not, acting more like me instead (mainly swaying and foot-tapping most of the time, in rhythm, with occasionally more pronounced rocking-out during higher-energy moments, and only singing along when appropriate*). She also exchanged judgmental quips with me when, between Poison’s and Def Leppard’s sets, an extravagantly drunk Scary Aging Metalhead lady stumbled up to me, grabbed my leg and asked if the seat next to me was taken (which it clearly was). After Scary Aging Metalhead left, Unusually Attractive Girl said to me, “She just wants to sneak into a better seat! I thought you were going to get lucky!” I raised an eyebrow, glanced at Scary Aging Metalhead’s departing figure and said, “Well…” Unusually Attractive Girl looked too, curled her lip and said, “I guess that wouldn’t really have been lucky, huh?” See? Reasonable people can go to Def Leppard concerts too.
Regardless, it is still difficult to be a fan of an ’80s band. Which makes my life rather a series of difficulties, since essentially all of the bands I like saw their greatest success before I was born (in the ’80s). Hell, the next concert I’m going to is by a band in exactly the same stage of downfall as Def Leppard: Metallica.
And you may be thinking, based on the preceding griping, that I did not enjoy the Def Leppard show. On the contrary, it was great. I was just musing on how much better of a person I am than everyone else there.
As I mentioned in my post about the Rush concert I went to, Shoreline Amphitheatre is a very pleasant concert venue; in fact, it’s probably the best concert venue I’ve been to. It’s arrestingly attractive in the evenings, and there’s something about its grand scale and park-like atmosphere that makes rock music seem that much better. I think Def Leppard are more of an arena band, though. The amphitheatre setting suits Rush to a tee, and probably other progressive, wanky bands like Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, but a band more focused on the rocking than the artistry is really more suited to the arena.
Poison and Cheap Trick were OK. I wasn’t there to see them, though. (I’ve already written about the trials of being an opener for a much more popular act, so I won’t do it again.) They were largely unremarkable, except that I have to say that Poison’s guitarist C.C. DeVille has a lot of talent that is being put to waste. He did an improvised solo that sounded an awful lot like Yngwie Malmsteen. The general sense that I got was that he pretty much carries Poison.
Now finally, let’s talk about Def Leppard. Not only do they have to deal with the difficulty of being an ’80s band in 2009, but they are also a band who produced three astronomically popular songs and a huge quantity of other material that almost nobody cares about. So most of the audience is just going to be bored until they play “Photograph”, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” or “Rock of Ages”. They did play all of those, in a row, and in that order. “Rock of Ages” was the last song before the encore. If you ask me, they should have played “Sugar” as the encore. This is classic psychological manipulation. Everyone knows that at some point in the concert, they must play that song. So by leaving it till the very end, they’d have been building anticipation for it all along, and they could walk off the stage with the audience shrieking in joy. Rush did this: they played “YYZ” as the encore.
To be honest, there were parts of the concert where I got bored. Def Leppard’s hard-rocking songs are hit-or-miss. They tend to be either fantastic (“Rock of Ages”, “Gods of War”) or completely forgettable filler. They played some of the filler-y ones towards the beginning. They have two other general types of songs: medium-speed power ballads (“Hysteria”) or full-on slow acoustic songs (“Two Steps Behind”). Both of the latter types can be OK, and they generally played good ones. Part of Def Leppard’s distinctiveness comes from their unusually strong ability to do those types of songs, so it makes sense that they devoted about a third of the show to those.
And when it comes to pure hard-rocking fun, few bands do it better than Def Leppard, however old they may be. They can make a crowd sound as if they earnestly want Def Leppard to pour some sugar on them.
It occurs to me that Def Leppard is the first British band I’ve seen live. All the rest are American or Rush. And Def Leppard is almost amusingly British. Rick Savage had a bass with the Union Jack on the body. Phil Collen had a guitar with the English flag on it. The giant video screen behind them occasionally flashed images of Britishness. I don’t know if all British bands do this, but it definitely stood out. “By Jove, we are British and we think that is capital, old chap” was the impression I got. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them bust out a pot of tea onstage.
A couple last musical things to call out. You do have to give Rick Allen a lot of credit for not reducing the complexity of Def Leppard’s drum parts after losing his arm. Plus in live shows he has to play pre-amputation drum parts anyway, so it’s moot. Def Leppard’s drum parts are definitely of nontrivial complexity, and he plays them adroitly. (If you’re an etymology aficionado like me, you’ll see the pun there.)
Until now I’d always wondered why neither of Def Leppard’s guitarists seemed to be more famous than the other, or at least famous in a different way. Turns out it’s because they alternate lead and rhythm roles. They do have slightly different soloing styles (Collen’s solos are more shreddy) but neither of them takes any kind of primacy over the other. It’s interesting. Most of the other bands I like have either (a) one guitarist or (b) one clear lead guitarist and one clear rhythm. Then there’s Iron “the more the merrier” Maiden, whose three guitarists are knocking on redundancy’s door.
I’m glad I saw Def Leppard. I wouldn’t have lost any sleep if I hadn’t seen them (if, for example, I’d gone to the AC/DC show happening in San Jose at the same time) but I’m glad I did before they, and their groupies, get any older. It was a good show, but it’ll probably only be downhill from here (in their shows, and their albums). But they’ll always have Hysteria, one of the best albums of the ’80s as far as I’m concerned, and they’ll always be British. Good enough for me.
* ROCKET! YEAH!
