by Phil Collen
I found it odd that he was up so early (I was the one who was usually up early), so I told him to come on over. What was going on? Our little studio apartments were basically next to each other, so it took him just a minute to be at my door. When he showed up, he held his hand out straight. I noticed that it was shaking almost uncontrollably. He said he was like this every day now and that he would go to a bar to get a drink and make the shaking stop. “That is the only way I can see you guys and look kind of normal,” he admitted. I suddenly realized how serious this was. But I was also relieved, in a sense, because for the very first time he was addressing the fact that something was wrong. I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high, but it was a positive step, this acknowledgment.
Soon after that, I had a terrible dream that Cliff Burnstein called me to say Steve had died. It woke me up in the middle of the night, and as I lay there thinking about it, it didn’t seem like that far a stretch. Steve called me a few weeks later from a hospital in Paris. He’d gone on a bender and had gotten alcohol poisoning. I flew in from London, where I had been during a break in recording, and when I arrived, there he was, hooked up to an IV, head down. He didn’t want to look at me. He was embarrassed and ashamed, especially after recently admitting that he had a problem. I said, “Steve, I’m here for you. We all are. But first you’ve got to realize you’ve got a problem.” We still didn’t really know much about alcoholism, but that seemed pretty basic. Address that you have a problem.
All of us knew that Steve had a problem, but none of us knew what to do about it; it was a learning curve for all of us. We thought that if you drank too much, you should probably stop. I was able to do it, but it wasn’t like that for Steve. We all stopped encouraging any kind of drinking around Steve. Joe and I even accompanied Steve to a few AA meetings in various cities on separate occasions, but Steve really needed go to an intensive rehab program. And he wasn’t going to get there by himself. Everyone in and around the band’s inner circle knew we had to do something—soon.
{ 4 }
In the winter of 1989, a few of us were in the studio one day when we got a call from Mensch. “Steve’s in trouble. He was found unconscious in a bar in Minneapolis, and he’s been rushed to a hospital there.”
We flew out to see him immediately. It was me, Joe, Mutt, Tony DiCioccio, and either Peter or Cliff. I remember turning up at the Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center, northeast of Minneapolis. The patients looked like the cast from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, including the large Native American. We were asked by the doctor to write a letter to Steve voicing our opinions and how we felt about all of this. But then the doctor said, “Okay. Now I need you to read it to him.” The doctor also told us about enabling and that if we loved our friend we would have to confront him via intervention. I read my letter first. We all sat in a circle and we told him, “Steve you’re scaring the shit out of us.” He sat there with a cigarette, taking it all in. Mutt gave him a big hug; then we all hugged him and told him that we loved him. That was a very tearful and emotional experience for all involved, especially when the doctor explained to us that about 70 percent of alcoholics who get to this level usually end up getting killed either by accident or overuse. This was just about as serious as it could get. This was something very different.
The doctor also told us that the alcohol level in Steve’s blood was 0.59. That didn’t really mean anything to us, until he explained that it was a 0.41 level that had killed John Bonham from Led Zeppelin. Then he went into detail about just how dire it was—more statistics about alcoholism, the physiological and psychological toll on the body, everything. Then family members and friends of alcoholics at the facility came in with their stories.
With our support, Steve went to another rehabilitation center, this time in Tucson, Arizona. We told him to take a six-month sick leave and get healthy—that we’d keep working on the record and that as soon as he was able to, he’d get back in the fold. It wasn’t long afterward that Steve met Janie Dean, another patient who was being treated for heroin addiction. Steve thought this would be great—they could help each other cope with each other’s addictions. But, as anyone familiar with addiction knows, this was a bad fucking idea. They both left rehab and continued aiding each other’s addictions. We didn’t think it could get worse, but it did. It became almost impossible to keep track of Steve’s whereabouts or what he was doing.
The morning of January 8, 1991, I got a call from Cliff.
“Phil,” he said, “I’ve got some bad news. Steve died in his sleep.” It was exactly like the dream I had had. What had happened was that he had been drinking and had cracked a rib earlier on. The doctor told him not to drink while taking his pain medications. He drank anyway. The coroner’s report, I believe, read that it was due to a swelling of the brain. Janie had found him at his Chelsea house in London. The very surreal part about it for me was that I had expected a phone call like this perhaps from Cliff for the past five years, so I wasn’t shocked but instead freaked out. This was such a huge psychological blow for all of us. After Rick’s accident and amazing recovery, we hadn’t thought we’d ever have to confront anything like this but now one of us had died. It’s incredible that we never prepare for death while we’re young, almost as if we have this immortal streak in us. Janie was not to be of this world for much longer either. We heard a few years later that she also died from drug use.
Initially, I didn’t even want to be in the band after Steve passed. It just didn’t seem right to replace him. Steve Clark had been such an integral part of the band; he had been instrumental in creating the sound and was part of this family that we had. I mean, you wouldn’t replace a brother if he died. It’s funny—many people have said to me over the years, “It’s great you kept Rick after his accident,” as if it’s only about being in a commercialized music group. I have to say, I always feel quite insulted by that statement. We’re a lot deeper than that. We chose to be together in this band, and we’ve spent more time together than most blood-related families. If you consider it, kids usually leave their parents’ households in their twenties if they’re lucky. But we have thirty-something years together under our belt.
With all this being said, one morning Joe and I were in the kitchen and I said, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.” One of us had gone and the gang was broken. He said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I told him I’d rather be a plumber. (A bit ridiculous, considering I can barely turn a faucet off. But you get the idea.)
But Joe talked me off the ledge, saying, “Don’t become a plumber. We owe Steve for all these songs we wrote together on this record. He’s still part of us. Let’s, at the very least, honor him and finish what we started.”
So I did what Joe suggested: I threw myself into work. For weeks after Steve’s death I would go to the studio and play guitar and listen to the parts that Steve had done on our demos—I had to learn his parts and then play them verbatim along with my own. It was just me and Steve in that room. It felt as if there was a ghost in there with me as I played his parts over and over. It was almost as if he was still alive. It was just so weird. But I knew how to put his spin on all those notes. I lost myself in trying to sit there and play along with Steve, working as hard as I could to create something he would have been proud of.
I never really gave in to the emotion, though all that time I was dealing with Steve’s death. I had put up many walls so I wouldn’t have to deal with it or accept it.
It wasn’t until about three months later, when I was stuck in traffic on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles and the Rolling Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend” came on the radio. I burst into tears. I pulled over to the side of the road and cried like a baby. I couldn’t stop. That was really the moment that I began to deal with the loss of my best friend. To this day, I continue to have dreams where Steve appears and we just talk as if nothing has changed. It feels totally natural, and that’s fine with me.
This was the first time a
nyone in the band had suffered the loss of someone that we saw every day. Although we were all trying to process this, there was something that really started annoying me. It was the fact that when Steve’s funeral was announced, all of a sudden, everyone started caring about Steve—from total strangers to people who knew him on the fringe. I was so pissed about this that I decided not to go to the funeral. When Steve needed help, only the people really close to him were there. As soon as he died, everyone jumped in with their “I knew Steve” stories, not trying to help with his addiction but simply based on trying to hang out with a rock star. Initially, Beryl and Barry, Steve’s parents, wanted to have just a private family funeral. But when they succumbed to having a public funeral, the floodgates opened and all the sycophants started pouring in, which confirmed my decision not to go. I know Steve would have been with me on that.
The album Adrenalize was released in March 1992.
Just to give you a historical timeline, there was social upheaval in America at the time and everything had changed drastically. This is when the L.A. riots were going off, following the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating the year before of black motorist Rodney King. Adrenalize hadn’t taken us as long as Hysteria, but obviously the death of Steve prevented us from completing it as quickly as we had originally planned. And that was fine. As a band, we were now used to dealing with major personal adversities, and in the end, the records would just come out when they came out. But similarly to when Hysteria had been released, the musical landscape had again shifted dramatically. This time, however, it wasn’t pretty arena bands like Bon Jovi that had come to rule the world. Now it was the ragged and flannel world of grunge that was taking over, and this was going to be a much tougher environment for us to exist in. In the ’80s, it was fairly easy for us to go head-to-head with other powerful arena bands. But bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were going to be a whole other story.
I love those bands, actually, and it kind of reminded me of the musical shift when punk first exploded in England. You had the two leaders of the charge, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and everything else after that was just sort of trying to be like them. In the early 1990s, Nirvana became the wind of change in America. It was the closest thing that America had to Britain’s punk explosion. It was different. It changed music, but it was still not as bold and brash as the Pistols and the Clash. Initially, Nirvana was about Kurt Cobain’s narrative about his personal demons, which white America could relate to; hence he influenced a whole generation. The music was so ferocious and cool, as was the antifashion—and it worked. A lot of kids could relate to what Kurt was singing about. Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was about a kid bringing a gun to school and shooting himself in front of his class. We didn’t have that in England. We quickly realized we couldn’t compete musically with social commentary that everyone could relate to. Liking a certain kind of music is almost like belonging to a club. People wear the uniform of the club. In this case it was lumberjack shirts and old cardigans. When you are dealing with a social commentary—e.g., punk, rap, hip-hop, or grunge—you can’t really compete by just being part of a “musical genre.” We were a rock band, and for the first time in our career, that wasn’t enough.
It was into this environment that we released Adrenalize, which, despite all the writing and recording that went into it, immediately seemed outdated. However, that still didn’t stop the album from being No. 1 on the Billboard charts for six weeks and going quadruple platinum. Had we released that album three years earlier, perhaps it would have been even more relevant. But in the nineties it was totally irrelevant because of the political and musical landscape. The country’s mood was changing. Just like back in the 1960s, race relations and race riots were dominating the headlines, and all of a sudden it seemed like all the progress that had been made over the years had dissolved in a wash of anger, injustice, and violence. The world had become far more serious since we first exploded on the scene, and we didn’t seem to fit in. Ironically, even though we were on the wane, this is the first and only time we would nab the cover of Rolling Stone (and it would just be, sadly, four, not five, of us). The irony is that Rolling Stone mag was so trendy at the time, and we were about as hip as hemorrhoids. Still, we ended up on the cover without Steve. The headline on the magazine was “To Hell and Back,” and the focus of course was all we had endured in terms of tragedy. It began: “They say they’re not jinxed, but the members of Def Leppard have had to endure a string of tragedies that would have destroyed most bands.”
The record was done, and we had a tour to start. How can you replace a family member? You don’t. But you move on.
So instead of auditioning guitar players, we invited five different people down to hang out and play. It wasn’t a cattle call, which would have been crap. John Sykes had helped out with some backing vocals on the album. He has the most amazing voice and plays his ass off on guitar. We also contemplated Adrian Smith from Iron Maiden, who I’ve known for years from him growing up in the same part of London as me; Nick Lashley, who played with Alanis Morissette; Huey Lucas, who was a really good guitar player and wrote really good songs; and Vivian Campbell, who played in Dio and Whitesnake. The main thing was that we had to get along well with whomever we chose, they had to be British—Vivian is from Belfast—and had to know how to sing.
Most people associate Vivian with metal and shredding guitar playing after he played the wonderful solo on Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark,” but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Vivian had been honing his writing skills and practicing his singing (technically, Vivian is the best singer in our band). He was more into bands like Crowded House and the Beatles than anything hard rock or metal. Because we could never replace Steve, it was cool that Vivian could bring a different dimension into the band with his voice. Viv had taken singing lessons from Roger Love, a renowned vocal coach. This whole element took our band to another level, as Roger would give us all vocal warm-ups and exercises. This in turn enabled us to never miss another gig due to our losing our voices. The vocal blend that Vivian, Rick Savage, and I have developed along with Joe freaks me out to this day. When we’re onstage it seems like I’m listening to the record. I remember the first time this happened at a BBC radio session, hearing back the backing vocals that the three of us had just done, thinking they sounded so good that they must be a sample. This is something that we pride ourselves on: being one of the very few bands that actually sing their vocals live. This dimension was brought in when Vivian joined the band. Ironically, when Vivian had seen us back in the ’80s, he thought we were using samples on our backing vocals. We proved him wrong, but we did work our asses off on getting our vocals to where they are today. Out of the guys we were hanging with playing guitar, Vivian seemed to slot right in with the band. It seemed like a natural progression from being with Steve to being a four-piece for a year to integrating Vivian into the band. Rick Allen can sing, too, but after he bailed on some of the harmonies, we let him off the hook to just play drums.
The first show we played with Viv was at a tiny club in Dublin called McGonagle’s. This was to be a warm-up to Vivian’s grand entrance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness.
We were all obviously huge Freddie Mercury fans and were very saddened by his death. The interest that Queen guitarist Brian May had taken in Def Leppard always meant a lot to us, and so it was an honor to be invited to play at this show, which was to be held at London’s Wembley Stadium for a crowd of about 72,000 people. It was also to be broadcast live on TV and radio stations to more than seventy countries around the world, with an anticipated audience of over one billion people. It really got no bigger than this.
All of the proceeds from the show were going to be used to create the Mercury Phoenix Trust AIDS charity organization. Freddie had died in November 1991 from the disease and soon after that, his remaining band members had wanted to get together a big show like this to raise money for research. And did they ever ma
ke good on that plan. That concert was a who’s who of some of our favorite artists. Among those appearing that day were Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, David Bowie, and Metallica, and the list goes on and on. There was also a full-on geeked-out fan moment for Joe and me when Brian May invited us onstage to sing backing vocals for “All the Young Dudes” with David Bowie, the remaining members of Queen, Ian Hunter, and Mick Ronson—another one of my heroes. This was actually to be Mick’s last performance before he died from cancer.
It was time to rehearse for the Adrenalize tour, which would wind up being our longest tour to date—a full year and a half. The venue where we chose to rehearse, for some reason, was the Mediterranean isle of Ibiza, the unofficial center of European hedonism. This wasn’t the first time I’d been to the spectacular Spanish island. Back when I had been in Girl, we’d played in the center of the old town, a seven-hundred-year-old fort, just spectacular, and as payment we were given a villa to stay in for the week, during which time we were completely out of control. One of my vague memories is of hanging out with the guys from Spandau Ballet and strolling into a restaurant, drunk and completely naked. A waiter tried to cover me up with a napkin. That pretty much sums up my week in Ibiza with Girl. Things were slightly different with Def Leppard. We were focused completely on getting the new version of Def Leppard up and running. The new version of me was a complete teetotaler. We focused very hard on all of the harmonies and just overall basic sounds that we would be needing for the next year and a half.
We were going to be there for the best part of a month, and we took over this hotel called Hotel Victoria, the perfect base for us. It was out of the way, and if you didn’t get involved in the insane nightlife of Ibiza, you were left with regular hours of a picture-perfect Mediterranean city. I even flew my mum down to hang out while we were there, and she loved and appreciated it, as she did whenever she visited us during rehearsals in exotic places. It was so funny whenever I’d bring my mum out while I traveled. Its effect created a polar opposite reaction between males and females. The males all said, “What’s wrong with you? Why bring your mum out on the road?” The females would be taking their clothes off for me, thinking it was the most wonderful, thoughtful, and surprisingly sexy thing in the world. I always told people, I love my mum and so why wouldn’t I have her come and visit? And that was the truth. When Steve and I went to Australia in 1988 for a Hysteria promo tour, I brought my mum along—it was just the three of us. I was barely off the flight from London and I was shagging one of the stewardesses, who was simply charmed by the loving act of a son. It always amazed me the effect it had on women.
