Mercury 512185
Producers: Mike Shipley and Def Leppard
Track listing: Let’s Get Rocked / Heaven Is / Make Love Like a Man / Tonight / White Lightning / Stand Up (Kick Love into Motion) / Personal Property / Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad / Wanna Touch U / Tear It Down
April 18, 1992
5 weeks
Following the trauma Def Leppard endured in making Hysteria, the members of the band expected the follow-up album to be a little easier to make. Unfortunately, they were wrong.
“We finished a tour in October 1988 and then we went straight into the studio in December, which was the stupidest thing we have ever done, because we didn’t have that much material,” says vocalist Joe Elliott. After six weeks, the sessions were aborted and the band took a five-month rest.
When the band regrouped, it became apparent that guitarist Steve Clark had a serious drinking problem. “It became obvious that the record wasn’t going to be very important to us without contributions from Steve, but Steve was much more interested in picking up a bottle than his guitar,” says Elliott.
The band put recording on hold while Clark checked himself into rehab. Elliott built a studio at his home in Dublin so the band wouldn’t end up with the tremendous studio bills it had racked up during the recording of Hysteria. But even in the more relaxed atmosphere, Clark was having a hard time working.
“Steve went in and out of rehab about five times during the making of the album,” Elliott says. “After the fourth time, he came out and walked into a bar and got annihilated and ended up in a coma. We decided that the best thing to do, for his own sake, was to give him six months’ leave of absence to let him sort himself out and decide what he wanted to do. We didn’t fire him.”
Clark did contribute to six songs in the early stages of the album, but he never completed his six-month leave from the band. “He was due back in February or March, but unfortunately, he never made it,” says Elliott. On January 8, 1991, Clark was found dead of a lethal mix of alcohol and drugs at his home in the Chelsea section of London.
“After Steve died, we went through six weeks of hell,” says Elliott. “But we went back to work the same way we did after Rick [Allen, the group’s drummer] lost his arm. But after about six weeks, we sat around a coffee table and looked at each other and said, ‘This is bullshit. There’s no soul in what we’re doing. He’s not coming back, he’s dead, he’s gone, and we got to get on with it.’ After that, there was a big relief. “
The band once again started fresh in late March, and by December the album was complete. Clark was remembered in the song “White Lightning.” Says Elliott, “It isn’t some sappy thing, it is looking steely-faced at the crowd and singing about what happened to him. We wanted the lyrics to hit home and maybe someone that wants to listen will learn and think, ‘I better quit.’ It was therapeutic to do that kind of song.”
But Adrenalize wasn’t only about heavy subject matter. “After we did that song, the last thing we had was this funky, mid-tempo, rock thing,” says Elliott. “Because we just went through this really heavy thing, we decide to go the opposite way and write the most stupid thing we could think about. That’s how ‘Let’s Get Rocked’ came about. It was a big chunk of fun going back to our youth and bands like Slade, T. Rex, and even Gary Glitter.” The upbeat rocker ended up being the ideal opening track. Says Elliott, “We didn’t want the album to end up to like some Leonard Cohen-type thing.”
There was certainly little chance of that. Adrenalize became the first album of 1992 to debut at the top spot. It had plenty of competition that week, as new entries by Bruce Springsteen and Wynonna rounded out the top four. But Def Leppard had prevailed through turmoil once again.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of April 18, 1992
1. Adrenaline, Def Leppard
2. Human Touch, Bruce Springsteen
3. Lucky Town, Bruce Springsteen
4. Wynonna, Wynonna
5. Wayne’s World, Soundtrack