Sirius XM TranscriptTranscribed by Greta
When Joe mentions songs on TV soundtracks, I kept thinking of Good Omens. Every time the characters in the show say "Armageddon" (and they say it a lot), that's a missed opportunity. Queen and Leppard on the same TV soundtrack. Ah well. Would've been nice.
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Host: All right, welcome. It is Debatable, and special guest in the studio. I’m not sure why he’s here, but he sure has been here a lot. We’re giving him an office. Frequent volume contributor. Yeah! Joe Elliott. Welcome.
Joe: Hello. Well I do my radio show once a month, so I suppose I’m like a distant cousin. That’s what it is.
Host: But the idea that you actually show up here—
Joe: Yeah—
Host: To do the show—
Joe: I’m like bad money. I just keep coming back, don’t I. Well, we were here at the end of March for the Hall of Fame. We came in and did a round of things. We did the Q&A with David Fricke and a ton of things. I mean, you know, you come here and just work, don’t you. And it was, you know, it’s, we know. We know how the game works. You’ve gotta keep your face in the lights. You’ve gotta talk to people, and I’ve been blessed with a big mouth. I have a big mouth and a quick tongue and I know how to talk.
Host: So, but before we actually came on the air we were talking a little bit and last night you were on stage at Madison Square Garden with Billy Joel … Which is a pretty big deal, really.
Joe: Yeah, when you say it like that, it just rolls off the tongue. But when you actually stop and think about that for a minute it’s Madison Square Garden. This is something that as an English kid, we used to read the reviews of bands that would play there. It would be like Kiss or the Eagles or whoever it was. Even Jackson Browne as well back in those things. We’d think, Madison Square Garden! Wow! It must be so cool to play there. And last night, there I am, as a guest of Billy Joel, you know. Amazing.
Host: And not even, I mean it’s not like “Oh here’s an up and coming young boy. Let’s give him a shot.” This, like—you walked out on stage and people go berserk!
Joe: Well, he did give me a very nice introduction, I must say, you know. It was almost like the guy that does it for the WWF. It was lovely! And, you know, we played there last year with Journey and it’s a great—I’ve only ever played Madison Square Garden once before and that was in ’92. So that was, you know, Billy just did his 36th consecutive sellout and I think his 110th show? So there’s a long way to go to catch him up, I’m afraid, but he’s always nice to go.
Host: He’s got that and he’s got the baseball stadiums.
Joe: Yeah.
Host: And the reason I even sort of go there is because, I mean, you guys are legacy at this point. You’re about to start a Vegas residency—your second Vegas residency. I mean not everybody can do that.
Joe: No, I suppose. Well, Vegas has become a very rock ’n roll town. When we used to play Vegas it was transient, you know. It was just one show like on a tour, so Vegas to us is no different than Philadelphia or Chicago. Residencies back in those days were Wayne Newton, you know. Dean and Frankie and, you know, what have ya. Then, it’s got all sexed up now. We’ve had residencies in the past from Prince, the Who, Aerosmith just finished one. Um, Kiss. Bon Jovi—oh no, he didn’t do a residency. He borrowed our gear and did a one-off gig. We did. Mötley Crüe, I think maybe did it. Um, so it’s kinda becoming I don’t want to say ‘normal’ so it’s passé. It’s not. It’s been accepted like this is a great thing to do. If you can be in a situation where you get to spend 28 days in the same bed and the audience comes to you, most bands are gonna snap your hand off, you know, and say. You know, you have your second time in six years doing it. But it is a fun thing to do. The difference from moving from town to town or playing the same stages—you are psychologically kind of put into a position where you know you can’t play the same thing every night. Because you know you yourself know you’re not moving. You do the same show in a different town, it’s fine. You’re psychologically prepared for that because it’s different people hearing the same songs and the same order, so it doesn’t matter. But you just know ’cause you’re in the same town there’s this kind of inbuilt thing that you have to, like, change things a little bit.
Now on our last residency, we were doing Hysteria. So we had to because the first half of the—the second half of the show was the album in sequence. So the 45 minutes that preceded it had to be like vastly different or we’dve gone nuts! You know, so we were playing 33-year-old B-sides, songs that people had never—we hadn’t played live. So, consequently, Phil and Vivian had never played them at all. So it was kind of a bit like Pink Floyd going back and doing “See Emily Play,” which they would never do because Sid’s not there anymore. So it was an interesting—
Host: Unless you go out with Nick Mason.
Joe: Yeah, it was, again, change of circumstances. So we knew that we had to do—we invented the Def Flatbird persona for the opening act and we became our opening act. And I would slag us off, saying that they wouldn’t give us any lights.
Host: Not treatin’ you right.
Joe: I’ll tell you, this is an absolutely true story. I’m not going to say who, but a very famous celebrity came to one of our shows and one of his friends, God bless him, he said to me after the gig, he says, “You wanna have a word with your support band.” I said, “What?” He said, “He was slagging you off on stage.” That was me! Slagging me off. You know.
Host: But is that the big difference with the residencies really looking at the set? Because some of these acts really change up arrangements. ‘cause they know they’re gonna be there, they’ll bring in horns or they’ll stage different.
Joe: Yeah, I don’t think there’s much danger of a horn section, I’ll be honest. Um, I can see why that would work for Aerosmith, ’cause they’ve used them on their records. But since we didn’t … I’m just trying to imagine. Just think about this for a minute. Pour Some Sugar on Me with a horn section.
Host: Oof.
Joe: Let’s not. Let’s not go there. But yeah, it’s more a case of not doing the same set all the time. But you’ve gotta be careful. The way that we’ve always, when we tour, we like to say we have an A list, a B list, and a C list. And the A list is the crown jewels. These are the ones that if you don’t play them, you don’t get out of the building alive and I don’t say that as though it’s an albatross around or neck. I love the fact that we’ve got Sugar and Photograph and Rock of Ages and Foolin’, etc., in our locker. It’s great. Then you’ve got your B-list songs which are the ones that have got longevity, but they weren’t singles or hits. You know, you’ve got songs like maybe Women or Too Late for Love or Let it Go, off High ‘n’ Dry. And then you’ve got your C list which is like how brave do you wanna be? And what normally comes under that category is songs from your brand-new album, which have to be played, but does anybody really care anymore? And then a couple of like really weird ones that set Twitter alight. “Wow, they played Comin’ Under Fire or High ‘n’ Dry, the title track, you know, or something other than Bringing on the Heartbreak off High ‘n’ Dry.” So, you know, we like to mix it up a little bit.
When it comes to new songs, I’ve always used the back of a Rolling Stones bootleg as a yardstick as to how many you play, and where. Because you pick up a—in Japan they’ve got fantastic bootleg shops and the artwork, it looks like real stuff. But you look at, say, the Steel Wheels tour, ’89, or Bigger Bang in 2005, was it? And they open up with a new song. And then they’ll play Satisfaction, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, bla bla bla bla. And then they’ll play a new song. And then they’ll play Gimme Shelter. And then an hour later they’ll play another new song. And then they go into the whole straight boom boom and that’s it.
Host: One of our colleagues was positing that theory on the morning show. Bands get three new songs.
Joe: Yeah well, Larry Flick, I just talked to Larry Flick, and he said Fleetwood Mac’s rule of thumb is three new songs. We played three new songs on our last tour. We opened up with the kind of epic one that’s got the big intro. It’s got the big, you know, the lights go down, and you’ve got all this mad backwork stuff and you play the new song and if the ones that really care, they’re in. The ones that are still milling around, buying their beer, miss it—they’re the ones that didn’t care to hear it in the first place, otherwise they would’ve been in. So you have Wasted as a song, they go, “Oh man, I missed it. I never—” ’cause we don’t open with it. We might do it second and then everybody’s in their seats and then we do another new one after about 30 minutes, another one after about 55, and then we just plow through. It satisfies us, and it doesn’t overindulge your audience. I really don’t think that Paul McCartney goes on stage at Shay Stadium or it’s gone now, but the equivalent—he’s never gonna say, and nobody wants to hear him say, “I’m gonna play my entire new album!” If he’s going to do that, it needs to be a TV special in front of 500 people at the Bowery and then it’s an event. But nobody’s, we don’t go to stadiums or arenas to be preached or to be educated. We go to be entertained.
So acknowledge the fact that there’s nothing wrong with having a legacy. When I go and see Macca, I want Let it Be and I wanted Helter Skelter and I want Love Me Do or Eight Days a Week as well as Live and Let Die and Band on the Run. And yeah, by all means, play something from Egypt station. Play two or three or four of them. But not the whole thing. ’Cause it wouldn’t be the event that it is. When McCartney plays or when anybody on a legacy plays, it has to be an event. Especially when you’re 70-something. Let’s be honest. I’ve been going to see the Rolling Stones since 1982 in case one of them died! You know what I mean?
Host: It could be the last time for how many times? 34—
Joe: They haven’t had a death since the ’60s! And when he died, he wasn’t in the band, so they’ve never had one! It’s incredible. So there is always that kind of, that’s the danger element with this kind of thing.
Host: Right. The residency thing, I wanted to talk about aside from the stage part, you sort of take up residence at this place, you have the stage, you kind of do wlovever you want. But personally, you’re in the same bed. Like, how—does the family come, what, like, do you gamble? What do you do?
Joe: Listen, this industry is the biggest gamble anybody every took. I’m not going to take any winnings I got out of this and throw it on the roulette table and put it on the one green thing that the ball might land on, you know. No, I’m not a gambler. I actually, I’m up $125 in Vegas and that was from 1983. I walked away when I’ve won. I’m done. I’m not gonna go and put it all back in. I’m not a gambler. It’s not my thing.
Familywise, they’ll come and go, you know. Some people’s families will just move in. They’ll just rent an Air B n B. Cause there’s lots of downtime, which is great. But it’s not lazy downtime. For me it’s like, if “Love” is still on, I’m gonna go and see it at least four times and sit in different places because it’s outstanding. So you get to do—I’ve got mates there and there’s great places to go and visit. There’s things to do. Kiss Crazy golf! I mean there’s a million things to do in Vegas, you know. But the fact that you can actually settle down—you can write.
That’s another great thing. On days off people can get together and write songs. We did some stuff for the last Def Leppard album that came out in ’15. Some of that was written during the Vegas residency in ’13. So, you know, you just enjoy the fact that you’re not having to pack up and move. You’ve got one load in and one load out and it’s a month apart.
Host: I do want to ask. You’ve got this boxset that’s coming. Def Leppard in the ’90s. What’s the—and at the Hall of Fame speech you made a, the line of the night, you know, “If alcoholism, cancer, and car accidents couldn’t end us, the ’90s had no chance.” Putting this together, do you think of that as a distinct era for the band?
Joe: It was a challenging era. I mean, it started out fine. That’s the thing. Even though it was maybe late ’91, early ’92 when we started seeing these mad videos of all these girls with pompoms and this guy with a mad shirt on this gym, you’re going, all right. You didn’t think at the time, “Oh, this is going to change the world.” It did, but you didn’t think that. I mean, I remember, I saw a great interview with John Paul Jones where somebody said, “What was it like when you wrote ‘Stairway to Heaven’?” And he went, “It’s just like any other song. It’s not like we were the Three Wise Men and knew that this was—it just happened. When we first started playing that song, people hand-clapped them.”
So the ’90s started out for us, we were playing multiple stadiums, you know, arenas, and flying around in private planes with an album that was #1 for five weeks, sold nine million copies! 1992 was like 1998 all over again. It was only in 1996 when it had four years to kick in that there was a change a’comin’. And it had really knocked the socks off, I mean knocked the stuffing out of every other band from that error. The only bands that really survived were ones like Bon Jovi and Jon changed his musical style slightly more to country which means that he, basically seismic shift in where his attention was. But he still kept selling records and selling out stadiums and arenas and that kind of thing.
With us it wasn’t quite that successful. But it wasn’t totally bad. I mean we were still selling sheds out and arenas and stuff. What was painfully obvious was in 1996 nobody wanted to tour was. You know, ’cause the new bands saw us as the old enemy. The only band that wanted to come out with us were Tripping Daisy, who were fantastic, but our audience just looked at them and went, “What?” It was hard work for them, more than us. We loved having them out. They were great.
Then towards the late ’90s it all started moving back and melody started becoming more acceptable again. When we did Euphoria in ’99, we were just like, it had been eight years since we recorded Adrenalized. Which is one long the Beatles were together! So when you look at it from that point of view, it was like “it’s okay to go back to your signature sound.” We moved away from it ’cause we were bored with it. We’d done three, the trilogy of albums. Pyromania, Hysteria, Adrenalize. Big productions, massive multitracked harmonies. We thought, “Oh dear. Time to do something else.” Bowie got away with it! He went from Ziggy Stardust to Damn the Dogs to Alad—to Young Americans. And it’s like, wow! Different guy, almost.
But we learned the hard way that a solo artist can do that much easier than a band can. A band just deciding to do a 360 doesn’t always work. When we did Slang, we jokingly, the working title was “Commercial Suicide.” Because we knew that’s what it was. We knew we’d made this great record. And as somebody once said, actually, I think it was the then magazine that reviewed albums; it was one of the Cashbox or Billboard, and one of the DJs said, “This is fantastic. I would play this if they changed their name.” That’s what we were up against. So it was like, wow.
But it wasn’t us. It was people’s perception of us. Our theory was we were just in turbulence. We’re still in a great jet plane here, it’s just turbulence and sooner or later it’s going to come out and there’s going to be lovely blue skies and the sun’s going to be shining. And that’s exactly what happened.
Host: So when you’re looking at this box, is it with some ambivalence?
Joe: I look at the box with like defiance, if you like. It’s like, it started off great. It went in the middle it went—we’re talking from a commercial point of view here, it went a bit hokey in the middle. And then it came out the other side. I mean, you know, we’ve got songs like Promises and Paper Sun and It’s Only Love on Euphoria, which are great, great songs. From an artistic point of view, there’s no problem with that wobble in the middle because to a man, everybody in this band loves the Slang record because it was who we were at the time. We were always an escapism band. We wrote songs for the kids in the crowd the way that Kiss used to do, I suppose, or the Beatles in the ’60s.
What we did with Slang was we accepted and acknowledged and embraced the first time in our lives we were going through marriage, divorce, childbirth, and death. And parents dying, kids being born, people were getting married, people getting divorced, and within the band and within our circle of friends. And we started to write about things like that, which some of our audience didn’t want. The critics did, and there was the rub, because the critics didn’t necessarily buy into the stuff that sold gazillions. But the kids loved it. And this time the critics loved it but the kids didn’t!
So it was like, okay, this was an interesting thing. Sooner or later you just learn with age. You just go, “I don’t care what people think anymore.” You know, you’re not pandering. We never did pander, but we were always conscious of it—
Host: Right, conscious of the audience, so you changed the way that you approached—
Joe: The audience, we’ve learned, by saying over and over again “This is the way we are and if you don’t like it, then you need to step aside.” We’re always going to make records for us and hope that you come along on the journey. We’re never going to write an album that we think you’re gonna like because nobody can do that. You’re gonna make the biggest mistake of your life if you do that. So, all those records, we made them for ourselves. We’re just a different beast every time. In the ’90s we came to making a record that the Adrenalize should have been released in 1990 and it would’ve been a totally different record and received differently. But it was still received well, Adrenalize, in ’92.
Slang was a weird one and also, let’s not forget, in between we put out Retro Active which was our kinds of odds and odds basement tapes album. Even that sold like three million copies and had like top 10 hits with songs that had previous been B-sides.
We were not struggling in the early ’90s. It was fine. It just came later on and then, of course, you get tainted by it. It’s like somebody throwing ice cream at you when you’re making a speech. You’ve got it on you for the rest of the day. We had Slang overshadowing a lot of and the “ohhh, they’re playing state fairs,” you know, “they’re playing smaller arenas” or wlovever. But we still weren’t playing bowling alleys. And we just knew that with hard work and determination and a total belief in our abilities, we could get through this because we looked at other bands that had gone through the same thing that took advantage of certain circumstances that worked in their favor, like Queen at Live Aid. You know, or other bands that just happened to be in the right place at the right time and it all comes flying back.
Look at Queen in Wayne’s World. The scene in the car. All of a sudden, bang! You know, The Sopranos for Journey. These things. We’ve never had one of those fortunate incidents where you’re not part of the general energy there. We’ve had to create our own to get back to where we are. Which I’m fine with. I don’t mind working hard.
Host: We’re talking with Joe Elliott from Def Leppard, by the way. It really does seem like you’ve sort of come out on the other side in a way. The Rock Hall thing and the residency.
Joe: I mean, the stadiums this summer! You know, we were playing 10 stadiums last summer. It was amazing really to think, wow, you know, you’d see people going, “I thought they were playing bowling alleys.” Nope, they were in stadiums. “Oh! Where have I been?” Yeah, exactly. Where have you been? We’re here! We’ve been here all along.
Host: So, just recently, this is, I guess, part of this kind of wave thing, Keith Urban just shouted you guys out, he shouted out Pour Some Sugar on Me.
Joe: Yeah, in one of his songs, I saw that! Isn’t that very cool? He’s a big fan, you know. Him and Nicole came to see us play Nashville about three or four years ago. Of course, People magazine, here we are, you know. Yeah, a lot of those country artists like us because of the harmonies and that’s what it is. Harmonies became so uncool because say you’re a staunch Motorhead fan or Judas Priest, when you do what we do, it’s always a bit twee to them, you know, maybe. But the country artists, they all kind of wanted to be Def Leppard. That’s why you ended up with Shania sounding a bit like we did. Alison Krause is a huge fan. She actually interviewed me for Q Magazine once. She was actually saying, “I want to interview him.” Picking me brains about the way we did the harmonies. Mutt Lange’s influence was big on that as well because he would lean us toward doing country harmonies in a rock style. So that’s why you can see. You’re hearing those underlying things, going, “Wait a minute. That’s a Nashville harmony!”
And we were putting them into rock songs like Heaven Is or Let’s Get Rocked and stuff like that and so, you know. We worked with Tim McGraw. We’ve worked with Taylor Swift because, as Taylor said, “I had nine months of you in the womb ’cause my mom was all over it in ’88,” ’89 when she was born. So she was a big fan as a kid and it was great to be able to—we loved the idea of putting a few noses out of joint. “What are they working with her for?” Because a) she’s a fan and it’s very different for us and we really appreciate what she does and admire her for what she does stand for.
Host: I know we have to let you go, but I have to ask this. One moment from the Hall of Fame that I have to ask about which was when you brought up Rick and the accident and that piece of your history. There was an emotion in that room where you felt it ripple round and then round again and it just felt like everybody understanding, my God, look what this band has come through. It was so tangible in the audience. I’m wondering what that felt on stage.
Joe: Well, we knew. We could feel it. Soon as that first ripple went, I knew, I’m not starting my speech for at least another two minutes. I just knew. I just knew. I hadn’t really planned it, but I kind of in the back of my head I thought it’s quite possible that this might actually happen. And when it did, it was like a riptide coming in. It was like, wow! I think the important thing about that whole area of the speech was that it transcended music. It was nothing to do with what we were there for. But we were really there for was and what we’ve always stood for is that brotherhood thing. We are like, as I said at the end of my speech, I don’t—I’m an only child. These guys are the closest thing I have to blood brothers. And it is that, you know. We’re musicians, fine. But most of all we’re mates. We’re friends. And for 42 years, mostly, we’ve managed not to beat each other up.
Host: Which is an accomplishment in and of itself. That is awesome. Joe Elliott from Def Leppard. Thank you so much. Residency, 12 dates, August and September at the Zappos Theater in Planet Hollywood. And the boxset. And just Def Leppard, out and about. You guys are awesome.
Joe: Oh, my Down 'n Outz album on the 12th of October as well.
Host: Down 'n Outz album. Gotta put that out. There you go.
Joe: I might even come in and do this again if you want.
