The legendary songwriter that Def Leppard turned down
By 1985, there was no other band who could touch Def Leppard. Although the band may have only played music for a few years commercially, their third album, Pyromania, sent them into the stratosphere, creating hard rock anthems that would outlast most of their contemporaries like ‘Photograph’ and ‘Rock of Ages’. While there was a good chance that the band could follow up their masterpiece with something even better, they turned down the opportunity to work with a songwriting giant to get Hysteria off the ground.
Then again, Leppard thrived when working with producer Mutt Lange behind the board. Coming on during the sessions for High N Dry, Lange was known for working the band to their breaking point, eventually layering massive amounts of vocals and guitars on top of each other until the track became a massive wall of sound hitting the listener at once.
As the band began to settle down from the touring life, they were shocked when Lange wouldn’t be around to produce their next album. Completely mortified about what they should do next, the band’s management thought that they would be in good hands when working off of Jim Steinman.
Having already turned in time with Meatloaf, Steinman was known as one of the premier songwriters in the business, turning every one of his productions into the most extravagant form of rock music ever conceived. From the first time he stepped into the studio, though, Joe Elliott could tell there would be problems.
When talking to Classic Albums, Elliott kept insisting that Steinman would not have worked as a producer, saying, “I pointed this out to various people in management and was never taken seriously. I kept saying, ‘Todd Rundgren produced Bat Out of Hell. Steinman wrote it’”. Since Leppard already had most of the basic tracks finished for the songs, Steinman would quickly become more of a liability to them in the studio.
Rather than working them down to the bone like they were used to, Steinman was looking to capture the attitude of the songs without any care for the actual sonic quality. When working through one of the album tracks ‘Don’t Shoot Shotgun’, though, Steinman made a critical error when he decided to record some of the backing tracks as they were rehearsing.
Looking back on those times, Elliott remembered that being the last straw, explaining, “[That was] the last nail in the coffin lid. Steinman’s in the control room and says, ‘I think we got it there, guys. And [guitarists] Phil [Collen] and Steve [Clark] said, ‘We haven’t even tuned up yet’. He was like, ‘Yeah, but it sounds honest’. Yeah, but to a kid in Boise, Idaho it sounds out of tune, Jim”.
Having to buy him out of the producer’s chair, the band’s budget ended up going through the roof before they had finished a single track, only for bad luck to hit them again when drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car crash. By the time Allen made his recovery, Lange eventually acquiesced, coming back to the studio to help them create one of the biggest rock albums of the late 1980s. Although Steinman may have been known as one of the greatest songwriters at the time, his talents were far better suited to writing the songs rather than fine-tuning them.
