The band that Joe Elliott called a musical “soap opera”
Any long-lasting rock and roll band tends to feel like a marriage after a while. Even though it might be hard trying to be in the company of the same people day after day on the road, it’s important to realise that everyone brings a particular spice to the music that makes the band come back together again and again. Although Def Leppard always had a band of brothers mentality, frontman Joe Elliott admitted that one band had a story ripped out of daytime dramas.
That said, it’s not like Def Leppard wasn’t safe from their own bouts with drama. Right as the band were about to reach their creative pinnacle on albums like Pyromania and Hysteria, they would let go of longtime guitarist Pete Willis, being kicked to the curb and replaced with Phil Collen after one too many days showing up to the studio wasted.
By the time the band got the pressure to follow up their first blockbuster album, they had dealt another body blow when drummer Rick Allen suffered a tragic car accident, leaving him without one of his arms. While the band continued to soldier on as one of the dominant forces, with Allen using the one good arm he had left, Steve Clark would also have his personal battles, passing away from years of drug abuse in 1990.
Although Leppard may have been one of the kings of hair metal in the 1980s, another band was coming out of Los Angeles to claim rock’s crown. Amid all of the giant hair strutting across MTV and the Sunset Strip, Guns N’ Roses looked like they had crawled out of the gutter, making songs that had more to do with the grimy side of Hollywood than anything glamorous.
Despite many rock fans claiming that grunge music killed hair metal, Guns N’ Roses drove the first stake into the genre’s heart. Since the band wore all their credentials on their sleeve, many of the prospective pretty boys on Sunset were starting to look too manufactured by comparison, leading to many adopting their own rootsy style.
Then again, Guns N’ Roses would eventually concave in on themselves due to their personality differences. As Axl Rose proceeded with his career, he began to rule the band with little regard for what everyone else wanted, including forcing his bandmates to sign over the rights to the band name so he could tour if everyone left.
Once everyone had enough of Rose’s demands, the frontman reassembled the band in his own image, drafting in everyone he could find for the new vision for the band. As the group continued to swap out members, Elliott remembered how entertaining it was seeing them try to hold on to musicians.
When discussing the dynamic of rock bands, Elliott thought that most new bands were far from the drama that he saw with Guns N’ Roses, saying, “As good as Train and Matchbox 20 are, they’re not the kind of artists that you end up talking about like we did with Axl [Rose] and Slash, that dysfunctional soap opera that Guns N’ Roses are. But there was substance behind it. They had it all, the attitude and the songs. We never had the attitude that Guns N’ Roses had”.
While the band earned their place amongst the most drama-filled rock bands of all time, they eventually got a happy ending, with guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan returning to the group for a run of shows in the 2010s. After years of being at each other’s throats, the walking soap opera may have finally been able to settle their differences.
