Def Leppard Atomic Mess News

On a day when the space shuttle Discovery launched back into space, two of the world's most successful rock bands blasted into Raleigh.

More than 11,000 people packed Alltel Pavilion at Walnut Creek on a humid Tuesday night, choosing to celebrate America's birthday with a bunch of British rock stars — Def Leppard. Of course, that's only half true. Journey, which calls San Francisco home, opened the show.

Both bands gained worldwide popularity in the 1980s: Journey with songs such as "Don't Stop Believin' " and "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" and Def Leppard with "Rock of Ages" and "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Each band focused on these hits Tuesday while sprinkling in new songs as well.

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Two of the biggest rock bands of the '80s performed at the Toyota Pavilion at Montage Mountain on Friday before a ready-to-party crowd of 10,500. And though the perception might be that the two groups are quite different stylistically, the show revealed, surprisingly, that they might not be as far apart as one might think.

Journey and Def Leppard, quite simply, are both very good, guitar-driven rock bands with a super gift for melody. Put 'em on the same stage on the same night, and you've got yourself almost three hours of pop and rock classics.

America's Journey – considered by most to be the softer of the two – actually rocked pretty hard during most of its set. Guitarist Neal Schon, one of rock's finest players, gave a chunky kick to tunes such as "Be Good To Yourself," "Wheel In The Sky, "Chain Reaction" and "Lights" while the rest of the band also played more like a hard-hitting unit than a band best known for prom songs.

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England might have lost in the World Cup last weekend, but it won the unofficial battle of the bands Monday night at Hersheypark Stadium, where pop-metal king Def Leppard shared a bill with American rockers Journey.

The five-piece band from San Francisco started off with the title track from its latest album, "Faith in the Heartland," but it was marred by a muddy, too-loud mix that would plague the group throughout.

Singer Steve Augeri struggled, both to be heard and to hit notes. Guitarist Neal Schon, however, was in fine form with his trademark clean, crisp tone and fiery solos.

"Be Good to Yourself" was set off by great harmonies, but again, even when Augeri was singing alone, he was barely audible. Schon took over for a blistering rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and played with plenty of embellishment.

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On Def Leppard's ninth studio album, Yeah!, the band become the most famous cover band on the planet. The songs they picked to cover are ones they remember fondly from their youth; a soundtrack, as it were, to their pubescent lives. "Yeah!" is rewarding taken at its face value premise of celebrating the longevity of the group while honoring some pop classics. But it is disappointing that, while the production values the band is known for is still top notch, stamping their indelible sound, one that took them to the upper echelons of rock stardom in the 1980's, onto the performances of these fourteen notable pop/rock tunes from the late 1960's and 1970's, are relatively straight forward note for note copies of the originals.

Ironically and quite unintentionally, Yeah! exposes in glaring light Def Leppard's strengths and weaknesses as artists. The band's strengths, going all the way back to their first full length recording, On Through The Night, to Yeah!, has always been their exuberant performances that showcased very fine musicianship with boundless passion and energy devoted to the craft of recording songs. They love rock 'n' roll and it shows on all of their recordings.

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With the rain that soaked the area all week gone by Friday night, 10,500 people came to rock out at the Toyota Pavilion at Montage Mountain, with generations of fans gathering to enjoy the classic rock sounds of Journey and Def Leppard.

Journey kicked off the night with a high-energy tune including the typical Journey elements of electrifying guitar solos and pounding drum beats.

As the night wore on, Journey mixed old favorites like "Be Good to Yourself" and "Wheel in the Sky" with more unfamiliar recent songs.

Although a few diehard fans scattered throughout sang and danced with lead singer Steve Augeri, an undertone of disappointment spread through the Pavilion. Unfortunately, although their names sound similar, there was no mistaking Mr. Augeri for rock legend and former front man Steve Perry.

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"We were nothing to do with a new wave. Never were. So don't call us heavy metal. We always had one foot in pop." Joe Elliott

Call it hard rock if you want, and feel free to split hairs about what Def Leppard used to be when they released On Through The Night and High 'N' Dry, but the fact remains that once upon a time, this band created a record–Pyromania–that may have very well been the best damn record ever released in the 80's–I'm not kidding. Each song had a definite hook combined with tons of emotion accompanied by a memorable, anthemic chorus. Sadly enough, tunes like "Too Late For Love", "Comin' Under Fire" and "Foolin'" are light years removed from the "adult contemporary" material the band has been releasing ever since. It is precisely because these guys were once so fuckin' amazing that the Bon Jovification of Leppard on VH-1 has been so difficult to watch.

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The Sheffield-steely glam of Def Leppard and the album-oriented rock of Journey have zip connection. So, despite being '80s media stalwarts under VH-1 sponsorship, it was hard to tell what Friday's sold-out pairing of those rock elders at Camden's Tweeter Center was meant to convey to its crowd - a mix of over-40s and young teens. Other than that there's no age limit on an audience's ability to ape guitar pyrotechnics and look stupid doing it. And that the mullet is indeed a tonsorial staple of all generations.

Def Lep - MTV's first metal darlings - happily refuse to age gracefully. Instead, the mussiest of hair bands (a compliment, that!) chop-chop-chopped and shugga-shugga swaggered through gutsy glam stuff with equal amounts of icy precision (their signature helium harmonies) and groovy sloppiness (their punchy rhythms).

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Aging hard-rock bands have been piling up the covers albums lately, baffling their fans by revealing heretofore-unacknowledged influences. If Def Leppard's Yeah! is any indication of what makes a veteran metal act's heart beat, then it appears 20-odd years of arena bombast have been masking a glam-rock band.

On Yeah!, Def Leppard muscles through songs by David Essex ("Rock On," naturally), Roxy Music ("Street Life"), and David Bowie ("Drive-In Saturday"), as well as more power-pop-inclined acts like E.L.O. ("10538 Overture") and Badfinger ("No Matter What").

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Def Leppard may be enjoying somewhat of a career renaissance. A successful tour in support of their double disc hits package set the stage for a band that seems to be reinvigorated after a few years of silence.

The iron is hot and the band has decided to strike with, of all things, a covers album. What could have been a simple cash-in stopgap to keep their name in record stores until the next release; Yeah! is actually the best and most exciting record Def Leppard has made in years.

Yeah! may be the lamest name for a record that I have heard but Def Leppard delivers the goods on some well- and lesser- known songs that influenced each band member.

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Def Leppard have a huge chip on their shoulder about being lumped in with the U.K. and U.S. hair-metal bands of the Eighties. To set the record straight, they've recorded this album of covers of songs by their real heroes: people like David Bowie, T.Rex and the Kinks, as well as lesser-known Seventies rockers such as Sweet and John Kongos. Happily, Yeah! is their most convincing album in fourteen years, which proves their point.

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It's hardly unusual that Def Leppard would hit the road in support of a new disc.

But the latest release by the British band that spent the 1980s as king of the hard-rock hill is an extraordinary 14-track '70s glam-rock tribute titled "Yeah."

On it, Def Leppard covers songs from Bowie to Blondie, stopping along the way to take in T. Rex, Badfinger, Sweet, Mott the Hoople, the Kinks and Roxy Music.

"We're showing our roots," says guitarist Vivian Campbell, who cut his teeth with metal acts Ronnie James Dio and Rainbow in the 1970s before joining Def Leppard in 1992 after the death of Steve Clark.

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Nearly a year ago, Def Leppard "leaked" its version of Badfinger's "No Matter What" as a tease for a long-in-the-works covers album, "Yeah!" It's an ideal song for a band that specializes in layered harmonies and sticky choruses, and it allowed singer Joe Elliott to turn down his increasingly distracting rasp.

Frankly, "No Matter What" was so good, it roused plenty of interest in even the most jaded Lep fans.

That the underrated '80s rockers — always more British glam than hair metal chose songs from bands that directly influenced them (Mott the Hoople, Sweet, ELO, The Kinks) gives the album a hint of purpose. But at least half of these songs never needed to be pursued outside of sound checks and goof-off jam sessions.

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Hollywood, 1992, and a photo shoot of Def Leppard in a deserted parking lot is interrupted by the arrival of two teenage boys in a pick-up truck. "Hey! Def Leppard!" they honk, waving frantically. Accustomed to such behaviour, Def Leppard duly wave back. Do they want an autograph, perhaps? A photo? They do not. The boys do, however, have a message for the band, one that will encapsulate the increasingly popular perception of these arena-rock colossi. "You guys suck, man!" "And with that, they were off," recalls Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell with a smile, his King Charles II curls gently flapping in the early afternoon breeze. "There was nothing we could say because we probably did suck. We were so stuck in the 1980s. We didn't have a clue, heh-heh! We'd had the rug pulled from under us. But, y'know, that's what you need sometimes … "

Fourteen years after the rug parted company with Def Leppard's white trainers, the group could find itself poised on the verge of a comeback, in the US at least. Grunge - the press-championed movement that did to Leppard and their tightly trousered, irony-free brethren what punk did to prog rock in the late 1970s - now seems as ludicrous a concept as the "hair-metal" genre it purported to destroy. Def Leppard's contemporaries Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi have recently enjoyed a critical re-evaluation, and Leppard's new album Yeah!, a muscular tribute to the bands and singles that tickled their adolescent fancies, has secured a solid no 16 placing on the current Billboard Chart.

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Forget "The DaVinci Code." Def Leppard has answered a more mysterious question for the ages. Can a hair-metal band from the '80s successfully cover a handful of glam metal and seminal rock songs from the early '70s?

Without a single car chase or hidden message, these five Brits have proved that they have a deeper set of rock 'n' roll roots than one might expect. "Yeah!" is a rollicking journey through a set of 14 album tracks from a vital time in the U.K. rock scene.

With any collection of cover tunes, the artist lives or dies by the song selection. Stick with the obvious and you're boring - go too deep into the obscure catalog and you risk losing the average listener. With "Yeah!" Def Leppard has chosen to reconstruct the music that first put the glint of a Gibson guitar in their eyes.

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It's quite possible that there's no room today for unironic rock. From the opening chord of "Yeah!," Def Leppard's first release in four years, the album's expectation's are set — and met with predictable mediocrity.

Nearly every song can be described as "Sounds like Def Leppard covering ______," and this is precisely what a covers album should not be. The band's take on hits by T. Rex and Thin Lizzy flaunt how derivative Leppard is, while Bowie and Kinks covers reveal their thinness.

The band themselves may not be to blame; Gen-Xers deflated rock's sincerity. Today, only commercial rappers can get away without some amount of irony, unabashedly flexing their cash, money and hoes. Really, they're the ones rocking out.

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