The reason why Joe Elliott broke down when recording Def Leppard’s ‘Pyromania’
No classic album can claim to be a walk in the park to make. Any artist could probably spend a week playing the most straightforward songs imaginable and yet still find a way to run into problems when it comes time to mix or balance every member’s contributions to the songs. When Def Leppard was going into the studio to create Pyromania, though, Joe Elliott was treated to the equivalent of hard rock boot camp.
As the band began in the early 1980s, they were much closer to metal than they ultimately became. Coming out around the same time as bands like Saxon and Iron Maiden were making the rounds on the festival circuit, the band’s debut, On Through the Night, was indebted to the sounds of harder rock in the vein of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. While the songs suited them, things started to change when they got Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange behind the boards.
Having served as producer for some of the biggest albums by AC/DC, Lange would become the unofficial sixth member of the band, working on every single song until it was as perfect as it could be. Although the band’s sophomore album High ‘N’ Dry was a huge success thanks to the song ‘Bringin’ on the Heartbreak’, Lange dared to dream bigger when working on their third album.
As Joe Elliott recalled, Lange wanted to take the band into pop music, telling Rock Icons, “He said ‘We can go in and make High N Dry 2, or we can try to make something that no one has ever heard before’”. Although the band were up to the challenge of writing pop-rock songs, Rick Allen wasn’t thrilled about having to wait around to get the right take.
Since most of the time was spent getting the perfect drum sound, Allen would usually have to play the drums in perfect sync with the grid without the help of a metronome. Once the group relentlessly tried to hammer the drum track, Allen would almost come to physical blows with Lange after the producer made a snide comment at him for asking about the mix.
Once it came time for Elliott to lay down his vocals, he began to crack up reasonably quickly. When discussing the number of times he had to sing the song, Elliott thought that he was put through his paces far more than he wanted to be, explaining, “He made me sing this so many times, over and over again. I’m like ‘Christ, it’s like being in the fucking army’, I just got to the point where I thought I couldn’t do it anymore”.
Needing some motivation, Elliott found his way to the next studio over where Whitesnake was recording. While he may have gotten some reassuring words from David Coverdale, the liquid courage ended up getting to him, saying, “I was so drunk they literally had to pour me into a taxi. Mutt was just like, ‘Send him home’. And then I felt sorry for myself for a day and then came back and went, ‘Okay, let’s do this’. If this is what it takes to be in the big leagues, this is what you gotta do”.
Even though Elliott was able to get over his own struggles, Pete Willis wouldn’t be so lucky. After one too many drunken trips back to the studio, Willis would be fired during the album’s production, bringing in Phil Collen from the group Girl to lay down guitar solos for songs like ‘Photograph’. If Def Leppard thought they had weathered the storm when working on Pyromania, Hysteria would end up being an even bigger undertaking just a few years later.
