I have a little riff on Def Leppard as glam fans and glam epigones in S+A's aftershocks section, mainly based on my great love of "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
Somehow I completely missed this video off Hysteria - "Rocket"
The whole thing is a citational fiesta of glam and glitter references - including images of Gary Glitter, Freddie Mercury, Bowie, Slade, The Sweet....
On the array of TV sets scattered around the sound stage, covers and features from the UK music press of that time are flashed up - some images I recognise from my own research archive of yellowing Melody Makers and NMEs of that time
And then there's the lyrics, which contain interpolations of titles like "satellite of love" and "jean genie"
It's as pomo referential as... well, The Jesus and Mary Chain, actually.
Or The Cult circa "Love Removal Machine"
Something in the air in those mid-to-late Eighties
But then again, Marc Bolan and Bowie and Roxy liked to quote riffs and interpolate lyrics from 1950s and early 60s songs.... rock 'n' roll and blues usually in Bolan's case... The Sweet and Bowie recycled the same riff (Nashville Teens? almost certainly sourced in something American) in "Blockbuster" and "The Jean Genie" at the exact same time, their rip-offs were jostling with each other in the higher reaches of the pop charts (The Sweet won the battle)
So maybe it isn't postmodern at all, it's just the magpie-eyed way pop works
And talking of repetition - I just realised that seven years ago I did a similar post on "Rockit", the start of which make some of the same points above!
Self-kleptomania, aka Ever Decreasing Circles.
Also Ever Deteriorating Memory.
Here's the remainder of it:
Beyond the overblown artifice and concocted excess of their sound - those shrill breath-blasts of oddly centreless vocals, the puff-pastry layering of guitar overdubs - another glammy thing about Leppard is a self-reflexive aspect. Not so much songs about being a rock star (although I daresay there's some, I haven't investigated that thoroughly to be honest). But more like a rocking-for-the-sake of rocking element. (Admittedly that's quite a metal thing too).
By the next album Adrenalize, this thing of announcing their intention to rock the listener, of declaring that they're in the business of rocking - it was starting to feel a little threadbare.
You sense that The Darkness, and Andrew W.K., are not that far off.
Much later on - 2006 - Def Leppard explicitly return to the glam era with this really rather decent cover of Essex's "Rock On" (again, rock-about-rock).
Oh, well I never noticed that this was off an album - Yeah! - of cover tributes to favorite Leppard songs that with a few exceptions are all from the early Seventies - and that include such glam classics as "20th Century Boy", "Hell Raiser", "Street Life", "Drive-In Saturday", and "The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll", as well as the stompy proto-glitter John Kongos hit "He's Gonna Step on You Again."
Yeah!'s CD booklet has photos of Leppard each in a pose that recreates an iconic cover image from the glam-aligned early 70s: Rick Savage is Freddie Mercury from the album Queen II,
Vivian Campbell does Bolan off of T. Rex's Electric Warrior, Joe Elliott pretends to be Bowie from the back cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Rick Allen does Lou Reed off of Transformer, and Phil Collen poses ghastly a la Iggy on the front of Raw Power.
They also did one with the whole band imitating a Roxy inner gatefold
Oh, looky here - a recent thing in Rolling Stone where Joe Elliott talks about his favorite glam artists
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Flashback over...
Now what made me think of "Rocket" was this appreciation of Hysteria by Pitchfork's Ian Cohen for their Sunday Review reappraisal series
Disappointed to learn that Mutt Lange did not record each chord individually and then retune the instrument because of the infinitesmal drift out of tune caused by each strike of the plectrum!
That is a myth - but it seems he did record one specific chord string by separate string to get an absolutely crystal clear sound on each, that he then recombined on tape
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Despite Wiki-Fear and Wiki-Fizzle (one day I'll write that post), Wikipedia really is one of the great boons of the Internet era - how else would I be able to find all these wonderful little snippets about Mutt Lange, eh?
In 1978, Lange wrote and produced Ipswich Town's FA Cup Final single "Ipswich Get That Goal", his connection with the club due to their South Africa-born player Colin Viljoen. (MUTT'S FROM SOUTH AFRICA, YOU SEE]
Beginning production work in 1976, his first major hits came in October 1978 with the UK No. 1 single "Rat Trap" for the Boomtown Rats, followed in July 1979 with AC/DC's hard rock album Highway to Hell (No. 8 UK, No. 17 US). He produced a total of five albums for UK band City Boy from 1976 to 1979.
He produced two more albums with AC/DC, including Back in Black (1980) which is, as of 2019, the second-best-selling album of all time. [IS IT REALLY? I DO NOT THINK IT CAN BE]
After hearing Shania Twain's music, he got in touch with her and they spent many hours on the phone. They finally met six months after the initial contact and were married on 28 December 1993. Lange is a teetotaler and, as a result, they had non-alcoholic champagne at their wedding...
On 15 May 2008, a spokesman for his employer Mercury Nashville announced that Twain and Lange were separating, after Lange had an affair with Twain's then-best friend and secretary Marie-Anne Thiébaud, with whom he reportedly continued the relationship and moved to Switzerland. Lange and Twain divorced in June 2010. On 1 January 2011, Twain married Frédéric Thiébaud, the former husband of Marie-Anne.... [I WANNA KNOW MORE! SURELY THEY ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE THESE SECRETS TO THE GRAVE WITH THEM...]
Lange is a strict vegetarian and a follower of the egalitarian teachings of Sant Mat. [????] He has not given an interview for decades and prefers to live a secluded life, primarily in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland....
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That said, there is no explanation of how he got his off-putting nickname Mutt
I have Cars on the brain, it seems - my first thought about Lange was this paragraph from an Ocasek obit:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-mystery-of-ric-ocasek-900031/
'In 1984, the Cars reached the peak of their success with their fifth LP, Heartbeat City, and its hits “You Might Think” and “Drive.” But the album’s nearly yearlong recording with pop-metal producer Robert “Mutt” Lange left Ocasek drained, and he later expressed those frustrations to recording engineer Chris Shaw, who worked with Ocasek on some of his later solo albums and outside projects. “I grilled Ric about working with Mutt,” Shaw says, “and he said, ‘I never want to make a record like that again. You spend four days getting a bass sound for one song. It’s really demoralizing.’ I think the process took a lot out of him.”'
Not even getting the actual part down - just having Ben Orr pluck and switch basses while you twiddle the knobs on the board and the outboard effects, for four straight days
DeleteThat's funny, I just today read an ancient review of an AC/DC album, in which it is mentioned that when Ric Ocasek asked Alan Vega about hot producers of the moment, Vega pointed him to Mutt Lange. So Vega's to blame!
ReplyDelete