Every moment of Hysteria works at this scale. “In the beginning,” “White lights,” “A wild ride”—these are the respective opening words of its first three songs, each like a tagline for a blockbuster movie trailer. Most singles on Hysteria could be shaved by at least a minute and often were; “single edits” would ditch the backmasked intros, the pitch-shifted narration, the extended guitar harmonies, everything that signified Hysteria as something beyond mere rock—“operatic” and “symphonic” for people who would never set foot in an actual opera or symphony.
But critics wanted Pyromania, not Wrestlemania—“Def Lep have lost their youthful kick, attitude, and focus,” Creem wrote amid an extended constipation metaphor that ends with them comparing Hysteria unfavorably with Metallica’s The $5.98 EP. All of which completely missed the point. Hysteria drew in adolescents who saw the spandex, the exaggerated musculature, the implied sexuality, and the catchphrases signifying battles completely beyond their understanding, whereas the adults could just appreciate the physicality and Manichaean stakes. The only people who couldn’t buy in were all making the same complaint—this isn’t real, you know.
Nothing about this was supposed to sound like five guys in a room. But Def Leppard flaunted their process rather than hiding it, breaking down pop metal to reconstruct it into something bigger, brighter, more suited to mass scale. Clark and Collen recorded their parts on a tiny Rockman, the headphone amp developed by Tom Scholz, the MIT-trained frontman of Boston. Marshall stacks look cool on stage, but in the studio, the crunch and grit overpowered the things that pop songs emphasized—the vocals and the beat. Hysteria is misremembered as an album where all chords were overdubbed one string at a time, a tidy summary of Lange’s inefficient attempts to achieve mechanical perfection. Ironically, that method was only used for the pre-chorus of “Hysteria,” the most strummed-sounding guitar part on the record. “A guitar player friend of mine came in the studio to say hello, and I was sitting there going ‘bing, bing, bing’ on one note…and doing another note, ‘ding, ding, ding,’…and he goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’,” Collen recalled in 2013, which prompted the response, “Wait ’til you hear it all together.”
Unlike more celebrated rock-to-robot pivots, Hysteria did not result from Def Leppard getting bored with rock music or having serious misgivings about the Singularity. Elliott saw his childhood favorites Mott the Hoople and T. Rex and even the Rolling Stones in a lineage of British pop, and their contemporary models were other pop acts that happened to use guitars—INXS, Prince, and of course, the Michael Jackson of “Beat It.” Rather than calling up Eddie Van Halen or the guys from Toto to provide whatever they needed, Def Leppard went digging in the crates.
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