by Phil Collen
My auntie Grace died first. She passed away in 1997 on my birthday, December 8. Auntie Grace never had children, so I was like her little boy. I’d go around to my grandfather’s house and my auntie Grace and her husband, Jim, lived with him. We’d go over there every Sunday, it seemed. We were very close. I was kickboxing at Benny “the Jet” Urquidez’s place when I got the news. I came home and called my mum, asking her if she was all right and if she wanted me to come to England for the funeral. She answered, “Yes.” Auntie Grace’s death really freaked her out. They were really close. I flew to England and went to the funeral with my mother. It was interesting because it was my dad’s sister with whom my mum had remained close after she and my dad had broken up. But when my auntie Grace got Alzheimer’s, my dad was the only person who could really take care of her. She’d phone my dad up and go, “Ken. Someone stole the bloody keys to the front door.” And he literally would go around and change the locks—stuff like that.
After the funeral, I came back to the States, but my time in California would be short-lived. I got a phone call from Liz on February 12, saying, “You had better get your ass back to England quick!” My mother was in the hospital and it wasn’t looking good. Liz had been around to visit my mother, as she often did, and my mother started complaining about a stomachache. Liz immediately took her to the doctor’s office, although my mum was going, “No, no, no. I’m okay,” as they do. The doctor didn’t seem to think it was anything very serious. But Liz thought it was something else and took her to the hospital. They kept her and said that it was peritonitis, which is what happens when your appendix bursts and poisons you from the inside. I immediately booked a flight, spoke to my mum, and told her I loved her. My flight wasn’t until the next morning, Friday, February 13, leaving from LAX. Before I left in the morning, I received the news that she had died. Liz held my mother’s hand while she passed away, which made me feel better for my mum. I didn’t realize how much I’d been dreading this moment until it actually happened, and seemed to make it worse. The worst part of it was that my mum was a very young seventy-two-year-old woman. I felt that she had at least another good twenty years in her, so that’s why it was shocking. Ironically, as I was waiting for my car service to take me to LAX, I came up with the guitar riff for the song “Promises.”
When I got to England, there was much to do. I’d never had to do anything like that before. Liz helped a lot, and she was great. The constant phone calls and then having to arrange a funeral were almost overwhelming. Liz and I have always been close, and I am thankful she was there for me during that time.
After everything was said and done, I flew back home to California. I was there for a while until ultimately another trip to England came up. I wasn’t really looking forward to going, since it would be my first time back without my mum. I decided to rent a Winnebago sleeper van and take Rory and Anita to southern England to see some castles. This was just the ticket. We all had a blast visiting places like Corfe Castle and Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. My dad had taken us in his sleeper van when I was a kid. This was summer in England, and it was cool. In hindsight, I figure the following: when someone important to you dies, you put everything on hold. It was a subconscious decision, but I removed myself from life for a moment. To me, I pressed a reset button, and it helped me deal with the stress. I think if you struggle with that notion, then you run into frustrations. The more experienced you become, the less you worry about everything. What would have been crippling years ago you now brush off. In the grand scheme of things, most things are trivial pursuits. Things like career, popularity, etc. all have less of a stranglehold.
It was 1998 and we had started recording the Euphoria album in Dublin at Joe’s place. Pete Woodroffe produced the album and Mutt would be involved in the songwriting and recording process again. He did four songs, “It’s Only Love,” “All Night,” “Guilty,” and “Promises.” Around the same time, a terrible terrorist bombing occurred in Omagh, Northern Ireland. One Saturday afternoon a splinter group called the Real IRA, opposing the IRA’s cease-fire, planted a car bomb that went off prematurely, killing twenty-nine people—Protestants and Catholics alike, including six teenagers and a woman pregnant with twins—and wounding hundreds of others. The band was in Southern Ireland at the time. It wasn’t that far away. It was really a horrible event, and when we heard about it the song seemed to write itself and wound up being “Paper Sun.”
I think Euphoria is very underrated sonically and structurally. I played it recently and was shocked at how great it sounded. We bypassed the raw approach that we had applied to the Slang album and went overboard on the backing vocals. I think we did some ludicrous amount of multitracking, and I actually love the way it sounds. Also, at this point, music was moving into another era, everyone having gotten bored with the whole grunge rock antihero thing. Bursting onto the scene were entertainer/pop acts like Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, and *NSYNC. It was okay to use massive light shows and have fun again. I’ve always been humbled that we managed to maintain a career during all the changes while keeping our integrity. All of a sudden we were actually cool again. At a festival we did with the band Hole, someone yelled out, “Def Leppard sucks!” because the guitar player in Hole was wearing a Def Leppard tee shirt. Courtney Love actually retorted back something like, “Show some respect! Def Leppard is an amazing band!”
Funnily enough, as I began to feel less and less controlled by the industry I was in, I received a phone call from Peter Mensch. He called to tell me that because Hysteria was in an exclusive little club of its own by going over ten times platinum—meaning it had now sold in excess of ten million copies in the U.S. alone—we would be receiving an invitation to the first Diamond Award ceremony. This club is a very special one. The Diamond Award was created by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to honor sales of ten million copies or more of an album or single. The ceremony was held on March 16, 1999, in New York City at the Roseland Ballroom. At the time, there were only sixty-eight artists who had achieved this status. Among that group were Michael Jackson, Elton John, Prince, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, us, and not that many more. This was actually very special. People often ask, “At what point did you realize you’d made it or achieved what you set out to do?” The real moment for me was when I gave up my thirty-quid-a-week job to become a professional musician. But I think everyone likes to hear the more glamorous answer, which would probably be, “When I stood on that podium and took up the microphone to say thank you along with my bandmates and the guys from Metallica,” then seeing who was in the audience—Elton John, Jimmy Page, Billy Joel, etc., and realizing they were our peers. We’ve never been considered for a Grammy Award and weren’t really trendy enough to get that particular recognition, but we made great records. A couple years later we would get another Diamond Award. The reason the huge success of the band wasn’t apparent to me before, apart from having a lot of the personal stuff happening that past year, was because we were usually either making a record or touring, and I really never used the time to reflect.
The Euphoria album was released in early 1999 and the single “Promises” was actually a minor hit, as was the album, which went gold. I remember once the album came out, we all went on The Howard Stern Show in New York. I remember how shocked Howard was that we weren’t as crazy and debauched as he’d heard. It really kind of proved how those rumors have taken hold. He was talking about the in-the-round under-stage orgies that we’d all been hearing about for years. Unfortunately, someone forgot to involve us in them.
We started touring America in June 1999 and continued all through the summer. In the fall, we went through Japan and Europe, returning to America in December. During a short break I finally got married to Anita on December 17, in Laguna Beach, California, near our home. But then it was back out on the road. On December 31, we played our Y2K show at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. It was a fantastic gig that we’d done many times before. When it hit midnight, the world
didn’t end and aliens didn’t swoop down from the lighting rig, so we carried on with the tour. Apart from a few amazing shows, the record industry was really changing. The advent of the internet made the recording and publishing industry as we knew it borderline obsolete. Record sales were declining 8 percent each year due to the downloading of music, illegal or otherwise. But, more interestingly, it created an environment of “free ownership,” where people just didn’t invest in or buy music anymore.
We also got into a bit of a rut playing state fairs. It started getting a little bit frustrating. We were still valid and better than ever onstage, but we were playing these really shitty venues. Despite everyone telling us how great we were, we didn’t seem to have much to show for it. I really wanted us to get independent PR and have a much stronger presence on the internet, which had finally put the world in a stranglehold. Although our record label promised us many things, it didn’t really deliver. We had also run our course with our management, Q Prime. They had worked with us for a long time. But now they had other clients. It was getting frustrating that we were not the priority we once had been. As occurs in any progressing relationship, we reached a crossroads. We needed a fresh approach.
This all came to a head after we played in front of 12,000 rabid fans in a field by a river somewhere in the Midwest. I threw a wobbler at the band. I said, “Fuck! I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to sit here and just watch all of this disappear when we obviously have people who love us but we’re doing absolutely nothing to push ourselves forward.” Everyone in the band said, “Well, we’re with you, whatever you want to do.” I told them I thought we should change management. We eventually did, in 2005.
As everything was switching over to digital, major record labels tried to scramble together and circle the wagons: they started releasing their artists’ albums digitally. However, because of Mensch and Burnstein’s masterstroke, our label wasn’t allowed to do that. They had put a clause in our recording contract stating that the label couldn’t release on an alternate medium without the band’s explicit consent. It was a godsend: otherwise we’d have ended up in court alongside Eminem and countless others, having been taken advantage of by the big, bad corporate record companies who offered the same royalty rate for digital format as for the physical format, even though costs were much lower. In short, Q Prime gave us control of our future. Also luckily for us, Def Leppard had managed to become entrenched in pop culture, albeit in a slightly nostalgic way. All the things we had achieved and endured through the years made us compelling subject matter—poster boys for survival and perseverance. So much so that the cable network VH1 made our story one of their first episodes in the documentary series Behind the Music in 1998. The documentary was well received, and it helped revive us to a degree, because the network would re-air the crap out of it.
I also should mention that it was at this time, when I was at home on a break during the Euphoria tour, that Greg Ladanyi, famed American record producer (Fleetwood Mac, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, etc.), said to me, “This is someone you should meet.” He then introduced me to C. J. Vanston, who had played on a gazillion records as a keyboard player and who was also a producer. We hit it off and went in many different directions with writing. It could be country, pure pop, or even a soul song. This started a relationship between C.J. and me that has endured to this day. C.J. ended up cowriting with me the Def Leppard song “All About Believin’ ” on the Mirrorball album.
I was up at C.J.’s place when a toilet valve broke at my house in Laguna Hills, taking out the bathroom upstairs and in turn the kitchen below via the ceiling, and every room in its wake. I walked through the door and the alarm was going off. My poor German shepherd dog Woofie started howling as all this water was pouring from the ceiling. This was more than an inconvenience, as I had to eventually move out of the house for about a six- or seven-month period while it was being repaired. I temporarily moved into this lovely house in Laguna Beach. Once I settled in, I remember getting a phone call from Scott. He said he was sailing down from Vancouver and that he’d stop off and see me in either Newport Beach or Dana Point, two harbors that were very close to Laguna. However, he never made it. I later received a phone call from his ex-wife, Donna, who told me that he’d disappeared overboard in San Francisco Bay. Everyone was still combing the area looking for him. Apparently a freak wave had knocked the boat on its side. When the boat turned back over, Scott was nowhere to be seen. Mike Reno, Loverboy’s lead singer, spent the next two days frantically searching for Scott, but unfortunately he was never found. This was like when my mum had died. I wasn’t ready for her to go. Yet here I was again, speaking to someone on the phone, making plans to see them, and then somehow getting the news that they had died. Like my mum and Steve, Scott went way before his time, and I felt cheated. I can only imagine how his family felt, because Scott was such a loved person.
In 2001, we got ready to head over to Joe’s studio at his home in Dublin, dubbed “Joe’s Garage.” By this time, we would all have been working on some ideas for the new album in our respective homes and then bringing those ideas together to work on them, rather than starting from scratch like we did in the old days.
We decided to call the album X (ten) because technically it was the tenth album for Def Leppard (I had joined up with them on number three). We worked with Pete Woodroffe again as a producer, and this time out, in terms of concept, we decided to sort of go the “pop” route.
For the first time ever, our record label also suggested that we record a song that had already been written by someone else, in this case a guy named Wayne Hector, which was kind of a strange thing for us. But we played along with it. I think they suggested it to get some new blood in the room; they were just looking for a hit, and so were we. Marti Frederiksen, who had produced a lot of latter-day Aerosmith, came in to work with us as well. We had our guard up with these strangers at first, but they were great, and the experience was better than we expected. But during this time a couple of things happened.
My most faithful companion of the past ten years had been my dog Woofie. I got her when she and Rory were both six months old. She was a constant throughout my time in Laguna Hills. So it was heartbreaking when I got the phone call from Anita. Woofie had been sick, but now she had taken a turn for the worse. She had cancer. About a week after I got to Joe’s place in Dublin, where I was recording the album, Anita phoned and told me that she couldn’t get Woofie into the car. So I called Stan Schiller, my friend and then guitar tech, who came to the house to help her. They took Woofie to the vet. By the time they arrived, Woofie was so weak the doctors told Anita, “We should put her down.” I had to give the authorization over the phone. I felt bad, but I felt worse for Anita, because she had to endure it all alone. The bulk of 2001 was taken up with recording until the day that changed everything.
September 11, 2001, I remember seeing the events unfold on TV like everyone else and was still unclear as to why, how, and what was going on. The next day I was in an elevator in Los Angeles and total strangers were talking to each other. They were talking about President George W. Bush’s speech and his thoughts on the terrorists’ motives: “They hate us for our freedom.” The people in the elevator seemed to buy this explanation. I, however, needed a lot more—I just couldn’t comprehend why fifteen Saudi Arabian nationals would commit suicide and mass murder in such a dramatic fashion. I began reading and researching to help me understand more. I’d never cared too much for politics, but this event changed me. I saw the noted philosopher and political commentator Noam Chomsky basically get thrown off a TV talk show because he was trying to explain why he thought this event had occurred. So obviously I started devouring all of his books. This led to other authors, such as Howard Zinn and Australian journo John Pilger, and new political discoveries, which gave me an alternative understanding to what we the general masses had been fed on a daily basis for many years. The fact that fifteen Saudis attacked America, which responded
by invading Afghanistan, whereby a faction of the U.S. public responded by buying gas masks and duct tape, fearing a biological attack from the former puppet dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who’d ignored his script and attacked Kuwait, was interesting to say the least. The more I read, the more I saw a familiar pattern emerging: history seemed to be repeating itself over and over again, identically, with every imperial empire making the same mistakes. It almost seemed like the movie The Matrix, and almost everyone else had swallowed the blue pill and was delightfully floating along in blissful ignorance. This was an awakening for me in that I was starting to pay more attention to the world beyond just the musical bubble I lived in. At this point, I couldn’t believe that I had been traveling around the world and had not been aware of any of this. It was like when I went back to London after a tour in my late thirties or early forties and “saw” the architecture that I’d grown up around for years for the first time. The realization of the beauty around me was a powerful one and almost brought me to tears. To this day, when I go to a beautiful city like Paris or Prague, I truly appreciate what I see on such a different level. The most wondrous part of my transformation was that when I actually conversed with someone whom I would never have met had I not been in a world-touring band, I could actually have an experience and conversation on such a level that I would not have believed possible. Within the same year on two very different occasions I had a conversation with the Queen of England and an arms dealer, however brief. I can remember when Def Leppard played the Jubilee concert in Leeds, England. We met the Queen after our performance. She was sharp as a razor blade as she shifted gears talking to everybody in line. You can’t unlearn stuff like this. It affects every other aspect of your life. A lot of things start making sense. So, like I said, I had all of these amazing experiences with amazing people, and yet my intellect had still not been activated. What unfolded in the aftermath of September 11 activated my intellect. As a result, my learning and awareness curve started spiking at a ferocious pace.