Rock epic of the month: "Gods of War" (Def Leppard) 1987

Rock epics of the month is a series of posts where I'll look back on classic examples of what I think is the greatest excess of rock and roll - the rock epic.

This month, I'm going cock rock again. Sorry.

Every now and then, music reaches a production high point that just makes you breathe out a sigh and go, "Damn!".

We saw it in the sixties with Sgt. Pepper's, in the seventies with The Dark Side of the Moon and in the nineties with Ministry's Psalm 69 and Massive Attack's Blue Lines.

In the eighties, these production high points happened in cock rock land with two acts and two producers - Bruce Fairbairn with Aerosmith on Permanent Vacation and Pump, and Robert John "Mutt" Lange with Def Leppard on Pyromania and Hysteria.

And it's with Def Leppard that we go to for this one.

They'd released their breakthrough release in the US with the well received Pyromania in 1983 and chose wisely when following this up to work with Lange again. Hysteria sold twice as many copies as Pyromania - being 20 million. That is positively enormous.

I was prompted to write about this one, when a friend of mine talked about the impact that Def Leppard had on her. I must admit to being somewhat ambivalent to the impact of cock rock, generally, but I thought I'd go online and have a listen to this album (and Pyromania) in full again to get an idea of what it was all about back then.

Hysteria is everything a cock rock lover loves. Big riffs. Big high screaming vocals. Guitar solos all over the shop. And enormous hair all round, usually mulleted.

Naturally, I'm still not convinced about the worth of this genre in the pantheon of rock and roll, but I can respect the place that Hysteria, and for that matter, Pyromania holds within the affront that cock rock presents to good taste and indeed, to rock and roll itself. After all, can we not also celebrate rock and roll's missteps as well as the high-points within those missteps?

Anyway, it's a wonder that Def Leppard were able to get this album out at all. Drummer Rick Allen was involved in a car crash prior to recording this and as a result, became rock's most celebrated one-armed drummer. Lange had to be talked into producing this after the band had flirted with the idea of Jim Steinman or producing it themselves.

It does speak some amazing volumes of the loyalty of the band members: Most bands would have parted ways with Allen, but they encouraged him to soldier on, developing a modified drumkit enabling him to play with a lot of foot pedals and one drumstick in hand.

On Pyromania, Phil Collen had been brought in on guitar to replace Pete Willis who had been fired for alcoholism. But things were not well with the other guitarist Steve Clark, who was slowly dying of the exact same thing. As a result of Clark's unreliability, Lange chose to get Collen to do quite a lot of the solo work. This supposedly caused a rift in the band, although I suspect that it was between Clark and the rest of the band.

So on to "Gods of War" which occupied six minutes and 37 seconds. This is actually surprisingly good, although the first and second refrains are somewhat iffy ("On a countdown to zero..." and "Here it comes...") because they require a key change which does, while I'll admit sets up the chorus quite nicely, appears slightly out of kilter with the rest of the song.

The song starts off with a fairly simple, yet iconic bassline from bassplayer, Rick Savage. Clark starts playing the intro riff for a couple of bars, then it's all on from there. The chorus is killer with some awesome cock rock screaming from vocalist Joe Elliott, but the tune really kicks into an open goal just before the end when the last minute kicks in, with some nice guitar riffing, subdued soloing and sound-bites of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that indicate that, whatever else, they loved a good military dust-up.

The proper video features bits from Top Gun. Quite ironic when you consider that this is quite an anti-war song, and that Top Gun was such over-the-top, flag-waving, pro-American propaganda.

Anyway enjoy this live video. It should take you back to the days when rock concerts only happened in stadiums and realises that this tune was a fully worked live proposition. Enjoy:

Rock epic of the month: "November Rain" (Guns n' Roses) 1992

Rock epics of the month is a series of posts where I'll look back on classic examples of what I think is the greatest excess of rock and roll - the rock epic.

This month, I have a contender for the worst rock epic ever recorded, if that's at all possible.

The cock rock wave of the late eighties was something of a wonder. How could the kids of the late eighties be so blind as to not see what a colossal embarrassment this was for rock and roll?

Guns n' Roses usually get lumped in with this particular school of rock, but this itself is embarrassing. Cock rock, or hair metal or glam metal as it was also sometimes known, was an execrably poor representation of rock and roll, best exemplified by the worst acts of the genre such as Poison, Mötley Crüe, Van Halen and the appallingly bad Warrant and Ratt. The common thread was that lead guitarists who appeared to get off on their own instruments were lauded as the Nordic gods the players also tried to look like.

Guns 'n Roses were usually regarded as being somewhat better then their competition. Consequently, as an example of an eighties cock rock outfit, they're not the best example. Especially since, they actually had some good tunes.

"November rain" wasn't one of these. It was one of the tracks on Use your illusion I, one of GnR's Use your illusion double set. Use your illusion was the bookend for cock rock - a celebration of the genre in all its glory, delivered in an over the top double album package. Not only that, but there was no discount here - if you wanted the full package, you had to pay twice.

And the albums did have some mighty fine tunes, even if the best ones such as "Dust n' bones" and "14 years" were written by Izzy Stradlin and thus, will probably never be performed live ever again.

On to "November rain".

This is one of the most overwrought ballads ever recorded. And you know, for the money that was spent on recording this, GnR could have done a lot better than the cheesy keyboards and synth flute lines employed throughout. Particularly since they also used a string section.

Axl Rose's voice is pretty much the main instrument in this. There must be about nine verses to this because it seems to go on forever, and it's probably at this point that he sees himself as the new Elton John.

But at three guitar solos and 8:53, is it any wonder that cock rock imploded after this?

Former Guns n Roses guitarist Tracii Guns reckoned that Rose had been working on the song since well before 1983, when Guns was in the band. It's certainly possible - Rose is known for, if nothing else, taking his own sweet time in realising his ideas.

The video that accompanied the release of this song as a single was enormously expensive, but probably featured the peak of cock rock's fortunes - the moment in the third guitar solo where Saul "Slash" Hudson climbs onto Rose's piano and solos away happily, oblivious to the impending market collapse facing cock rockers everywhere.

In fact, the combined effect of this song, the bombast of the accompanying video and the sheer overweight bloatedness of Guns 'n Roses musical ideas did more to kill off cock rock than the grunge explosion.

Here it is in all its glory. Enjoy.