Rise up, gather ’round
Rock this place to the ground,
Burn it up let’s go for broke,
Watch the night go up in smoke.
Rock on (rock on)…
The 1980s were the apex of bands and artists singing about rock. Not being rock, per se, but singing about it. Singing about rock, and rocking, and how great it is to rock, and how you can’t let the man keep you from rocking. Sure, there were songs about rock prior to the 80s. Rick Derringer sang “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Coo” and Bad Company had a “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy” and Don McLean reflected on the day the (rock) music died. Grand Funk Railroad told you they were gonna come to your town and help you party down and Kiss wanted to rock and roll all nite (sic). But there was something in the water (or possibly the Jack Daniels) in the 80s that took it to a whole different level.
Bands were no longer content to have a song on an album about rocking, they made rocking their core tenet. Def Leppard was one such band. Their first album came out right at the start of the decade. The cover of On Through The Night features a semi-truck hauling a huge guitar, which is a promising start. Looking at the track list we’ve got “Rock Brigade” and “Rocks Off” (which is both about getting your rocks off and reference rocking at a concert), and “Hello America” posits that by 12 o’clock “you feel that you got to rock”. Their sophomore effort, High ‘N’ Dry, leaves the word rock out of the song titles, but have no fear, there’s still rocking happening. “Let It Go” tells us to “let it rock, let it roll”. “On Through The Night” doesn’t specifically use the word rock, but there’s talk of being on stage, the place where one, of course, rocks, if you’re Def Leppard, and the woman in “No No No” is a “foxy rocker, a roxy roller”, so she rocks too.
Which brings us to Pyromania and Tipper Gore. You might be wondering what former senator and vice president Al Gore’s wife has to do with rocking, because she doesn’t seem like someone who rocks (and as near as I can tell, in fact did not rock). It’s because she was part of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and at the forefront of the effort to, if not censor, then at the very least marginalize certain kinds of music and lyrics in the 80s. To, you know, protect the children. And in 1985 she and the (mostly) ladies of the PMRC put out the Filthy Fifteen, a list of songs that had naughty lyrics they didn’t like, generally about sex or violence or the occult. One of the bands on that list was none other than the English rockers Def Leppard. Surprisingly Gore and company didn’t choose a track off their massive, most recent record Pyromania, but instead selected “High ‘n’ Dry (Saturday Night)” due to lyrics about drug and alcohol abuse, with Joe Elliot singing about have both is whiskey and his wine, which sounds like a guaranteed hangover come Sunday.
But Tipper did have a bone to pick with Pyromania as well1. Two in fact. In her 1987 book Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated Society she mentions the mighty Lep three times, once for the aforementioned “High ‘n’ Dry (Saturday Night)”, but the other two times calling out tracks from Pyromania. She mentioned the music video for “Photograph” in which “we saw a dead woman tied up with barbed wire”, as well as “Foolin'” (which she writes as “Fooling”, because she’s not going to stoop to the level of their poor grammar) which “shows an eyeless woman playing harp, a man in bondage tortured three times by a woman, and skulls on fire.” Now, I’m old enough to have seen both these videos dozens and dozens of times when they were new, and none of this rang a bell to me. Thankfully, however, we live in the era of YouTube! and these videos are just a click away.
The end of “Photograph” does have a Marilyn Monroe look-alike with her eyes closed and some strands of barbed wire around her standing over a chalk outline (which does imply a death took place there), which is… a few seconds of the video and not involving any gore or anything, so it’s pretty innocuous. Her take on “Foolin'” is comically bad. First, there is indeed an eyeless woman playing harp, but I’m not sure what the actual problem is with that. It’s not as if any violence is implied – she just has no eyes. As for the man in bondage being tortured, that man is none other than lead singer Joe Elliot, and while he is restrained, there’s nothing in those sequences implying torture (perhaps the closest is the small “explosions” that actually break him free of his restraints). And the skulls on fire? That’s a fire in the center of a room, a room with an image of a skull being projected on a wall. Of all the bands and videos you could pick to go after in 1985-87 to make a point about negative influences in rock music, Def Leppard is just a poor choice. Sure, the band was immensely popular; but to say this is all a reach would be an understatement.
Anyway… back to Pyromania! The mighty Def Lep continue to sing about rocking. We’ve got “Rock Rock (‘Til You Drop)” and “Rock of Ages” for starters. In “Photograph” Elliot refers to himself as a “rock ‘n’ roll clown”, and “Stagefright” is about performing, though it doesn’t mention rocking directly. And I’m here for it. I loved this record when it came out and I’ve owned it on all three major formats (cassette, CD, vinyl). Yesterday I upgraded my vinyl copy to a Japanese pressing, complete with obi and insert, courtesy of my friends over at Volver Records. I hadn’t played it all the way through in years, and man it still sounds great to these old-ish ears. Hysteria may have been Def Leppard’s most popular album, but for me Pyromania will always be the best.
- Pyromania was also one of three albums included by Senator Paula Hawkins in her opening statement to the infamous ___. Senator Hawkins states, “Subtleties, suggestions, and innuendo have given way to overt expressions and descriptions of often violent sexual acts, drug taking, and flirtations with the occult. The record album covers are to me self-explanatory.” What followed were three album covers – Pyromania, Wendy O. Williams’ WOW, and W.A.S.P.’s Animal (F**k Like A Beast). Oddly enough Pyromania doesn’t meet any of the descriptions Senator Hawkins listed. I suppose the crosshairs and explosion could imply the destruction of property, but to infer anything else is a bit of a leap. Even Williams’ cover is a bit of a stretch – it’s pretty tame overall, certainly less racy than her Plasmatics covers. As for W.A.S.P., well, yeah, that’s kinda bad. ↩︎