Where were you when you heard Def Leppard’s Pyromania for the first time? If you don’t have an answer to this important question, we appreciate the pageview, but invite to make your way to another story on the site. But if you have an answer and are reading this far, it’s likely you were among the 6,000 locals at Chaiftez Arena on Saturday night for the band’s 2012 Rock of Ages Tour, a suitably singles-heavy compendium of Def Leppard’s career, one that in many respects was defined by their incredible run from 1981 (with the release of the their breakthrough, second album, High ‘n’ Dry) and 1987’s seven-hit album Hysteria.
Songs were produced and albums were released well into the ’90s and ’00s, of course. But with 1992’s descendingly popular Adrenalize, the rise of grunge and alternative rock had sealed the group’s fate as a catalog band. Luckily, they produced enough quality pop rock (disguised as metal) to ride out the years as a band that can consistently fill small arenas and theatres worldwide.
St. Louis, we don’t need to tell you, is a classic rock town, with KSHE-95 a years-long supporter of Saturday’s triple-bill of Lita Ford, Poison and Def Leppard. The Brew100.3 FM has come onto the scene more recently, but basically has given what feels like tenth of its playlist alone over to Poison and Def Leppard. So the well was primed for a good turnout at Chaiftez, with an audience suitably aged between 35-50, who offered their own impromptu and enjoyable fashion show, which took place in the arena’s walkways. (Gentlemen, some of those fitted graphic tees... oh, my.)
The night’s opener, Lita Ford, was missed by this show attendee due to poor planning and nothing else. But an 8:05 arrival meant that Poison’s first song was just kicking in. And here’s where things get interesting: Back when Poison was pumping out the hits, you couldn’t look at your phone and call up the group’s recent concert playbills from a site like setlist.fm. But today you can, so it was easy to determine that the band—including all four classic-era members, including reality TV star Bret Michaels—were going to play between seven and 11 songs, with a good chance that “Unskinny Bop,” “Talk Dirty and To Me” and the twin-ballads of “Something to Believe In” and “Every Rose Has its Thorn” would be on the list.
Also featured: a drum solo, a guitar solo, a hidden keyboardist and several mentions by Michaels that the band’s been around for 26 years and they still appreciate the annual support of St. Louis. With his American flag pants, Michaels aggressively worked the catwalk extension and generally kept up an energetic set of the group’s cotton-candy-lite hits, all of which went over predictably well.
Def Leppard’s set, too, was all but written by the night prior’s set, at the Klipsch Music Center in Noblesville, IN. With slight variations, the group mixed in some “newer” cuts alongside the classics from High ‘n’ Dry and Pyromania, with “Foolin’” and “High and Dry (Saturday Night)” going over positively. There was a mid-set break in which all of five members sat on a road case at the end of catwalk with four acoustic guitars, joined by the shakers of drummer Rick Allen, who enjoyed several huge ovations as the evening wore on. That particularly was true on the instrumental “Switch 625,” which allowed each member of the group a moment or two of instrumental shine. Having lost an arm early in Def Lep’s career, Allen’s turn, of course, was the best-received, with several Go-Pro-style cameras almost putting you into Allen’s trigger-heavy drum kit, his feet flying through an energetic solo.
That piece came within a thick pack of hits, like the slightly-drowsy “Women,” the old-school “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” and “Hysteria,” which was set up by singer Joe Elliott’s introduction of several key dates in the band’s history, culminating with news that it was singer Vivian Campell’s 50th birthday. As they’e doing throughout the tour, Def Leppard closed with three singalongs: the FM-radio staple “Photograph,” the international strip-club anthem “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and then, after a short break, their sole encore number, “Rock of Ages,” tipped by the sample, gunter glieben glauchen globen, and the cowbell punctuation of Allen. After “Rock,” the band stayed onstage for a lengthy round of goodbye waves and high-fives, at which point, a closing-credits reel began to play on the video monitors, listing all their crew members alongside archival video. The end of the gig played very much to the long-running narrative that the group’s just a rock band, a hardworking, crowdpleasing one without a lot of artifice.
With relatively restrained light show and only the mid-set, six-song acoustic medley as a set-breaker, the band played things safely, but with all the needed elements in place. Nearly two-dozen songs appeared, all played faithfully, if a bit thinner than their original, highly produced album versions. Elliott’s voice had moments of audio reinforcement from the back-of-house, with reports indicating some vocals issues over the years. While guitarist Phil Collen was shirtless through the set, another Def Lep-must, bassist Rick Savage, didn’t pop off his top until after the encore, an interesting, late move. (And tuning into to KSHE after the show, the station smartly programmed nothing but Def Lep and Poison until midnight, giving fans an immediate chance for nostalgia on their drives back to Dupo and Warrenton. And South City.)
Aside from Collen—who appears to be doing a thousand crunches a day—the band’s aged a touch, just as the fans have; Elliott’s soft-fabric, rocker jumpsuit kinda proved that as much as anything. But the joy of a show like this is to tap into collective memories, and the band’s use of the video board during “Photograph,” displaying a ton of pics from through the years, was the most-clear acknowledgement of that.
To answer the lede’s question: I first heard Pyromania in the summer of 1983, when invited across the street to a neighbor’s pool. The teenaged girl of the house, a few years my senior, slapped the tape into the jambox and it was a Leppard afternoon for the next 45 minutes; it’s “Foolin’” that stuck in my head that day, though “Photograph” is the clear keeper all these years later. Took 29 years to finally see/hear those cuts live. And, yeah, it was worth the wait. Totally.
