Rock of a Very Specific Age

Album: Def Leppard, Pyromania, 1983

Acquired: I received this tape as a Christmas present in 1983. I also received my first Walkman that day. Thanks, Santa!

Best Track: "Stagefright" (And isn't this t-shirt better than just an album cover?)

Lasting Memory: Pyromania is the first album on cassette I ever owned. I listened to this tape almost continuously for the next six months.

It seems inevitable, then, that Pyromania and Def Leppard are the first album and band that I grew out of. As the years went on, I acummulated hundreds of other albums, my musical tastes changed, and lines like "Rock of Ages/ Keep rollin'" eventually lost their poetic grip on my soul. While I still do dig "Gunter glieben glauchen globen" because I can think of no better way lead Leppard Joe Elliott could have signaled he had something to say about the indominable nature of rock 'n' roll (Alright!), I have to concede that the proto-hair metal of the early 1980s couldn't survive my journey to adulthood.

How are you going to keep them in the Hampton Coliseum once they seen the cigarette-smoke-dimmed spotlights of the original 9:30 Club?

The answer is that you can't. Which is one of the reasons I was kind of reluctant to slip Pyromania into my boom box yesterday afternoon. I knew giving a good listen to "Photograph" and "Too Late for Love" "Foolin'" would take me back sharply to the much simpler time of when I was 14, my biggest adventures were weeklong trips to Boy Scout summer camp, and I still reckoned my biggest challenge in life would be spending the millions of dollars that would someday magically become mine.

At the same time, I really didn't enjoy being 14. I have no traumas to share, but didn't everyone dislike being 14 to some extent? If you didn't, dislike yourself now for ruining middle school for the rest of us.

Another reason I wasn't looking forward to revisitng Pyromania is because doing so would mean I'd be ignoring St. Paul's example of putting childish things behind me once I'd become a man. As I've made clear in dozens of posts, much of the music I collected during my teen years still speaks to me in important ways. The songs of Def Leppard stopped appealing to my ears or my conciousness as early as 1985. But what a great year or so I had burning through Pyromania and its genre kin produced by the likes of Motley Crüe, old Ozzie, The Scorpions, and Twisted Sister.

The dirty big secret, of course, is that the hard rock of all these artists stands up fairly well when judged solely by the standards of blues rock played fast and at 11. Nobody did it better than Led Zepplin, but the others serve in a pinch as por men's fist-pumpers. I'll try to remember make this point more explicitly when I get to my Crüe tapes in a few months.

For the time being, see and hear for yourself what I'm blogging about by watching the video for "Foolin'" and this concert footage of "Stagefright."

Up Next: Dire Straits, Dire Straits, 1978