When Rick Allen of Def Leppard almost fought their producer
When a band is first getting together, no one thinks of the hardships that come with it. Playing music always feels like a dream come true, and making records is the moment an artist can finally realise the vision for the music they’ve had in their head. It might come easy to bands like The Rolling Stones, but Def Leppard was sent to boot camp when they got Mutt Lange as their producer.
Having already come off of making iconic albums like AC/DC’s Back in Black, Lange was a stickler for perfection and would often hammer at the band until they got it exactly right. Singer Joe Elliott remembered the process of making Pyromania as nearly torturous, even remarking in Rock Icons, “I was like ‘Christ, it’s like being in the fucking army’”.
Part of Lange’s style was to build the drums outwards, which didn’t sit well with Rick Allen. As they were talking about laying down some of his drum tracks, Allen remembered a time when he sat behind his drum kit for hours as Lange listened to the playback of his take. When Allen got frustrated, he recalled almost getting physical with the producer, telling Ultimate Albums, “All I would hear is ‘Just listening, Rick….We’re almost done….we’ll be with you in a little while.’ I just said, ‘Why don’t you let me listen to it?’ [Mutt] looked up and said, ‘When I want your opinion, Rick, I’ll ask you for it’. And I just lost it”.
The rest of the band remembered Allen throwing different drumsticks at the control room and having to be restrained. His bandmates weren’t much better, either. When he was looking to cool out, Elliott talked to David Coverdale from Whitesnake and got so drunk that he got thrown into a taxi and given a few days to cool out before returning to the studio.
Everyone was playing for their lives, but the loose end became guitarist Pete Willis, who would go off on drunken benders and show up at the studio the next day borderline incoherent. After one too many drunken scraps, Willis was sent packing, with Phil Collen coming into the band to fill out the rest of the solos.
All the hard work paid off in the end, though, as Pyromania became one of the biggest albums of the band’s career and launched them to a new level of stardom almost overnight. The hardships were only beginning for Allen, though, who would suffer a terrible car crash and lose his arm, after which he would spend days in a hospital and months in the studio practising on an electronic drum kit to play the drums with his remaining limb.
Even in the face of adversity, Leppard always persisted, standing by Allen during his accident and turning in something even more successful on Hysteria, which became one of the most successful albums of the hair metal movement. Rock and roll might have a reputation for being rough around the edges, but if anyone was making a record with Mutt Lange, nothing would happen until every note was pitch-perfect.
