When I was in sixth grade (year 7 to Brits), the school I attended put on a talent show, my involvement in which constitutes one of only two memories I have from that period. Imagining myself at age 11, I picture a boy who was usually quiet in class and at recess, not joyless or anxious, exactly, but aware of occupying a rung just below the middle of the social ladder he perceived among his classmates, and cautiously unwilling to maneuver for a higher perch. It would take years of gushing hormones and who knows what other ingredients of conditioning for him to evolve into an adolescent who ran for student office, induced largely by the requirement that candidates deliver three five-minute speeches in front of the school (with a microphone, no less). The 11-year-old — at least as I remember him — wouldn’t have stood even in front of his classroom for more than twenty or thirty seconds, given the choice, so the fact that he and two friends got on stage at the sixth grade talent show in carefully chosen outfits — all I can recall specifically is three pairs of sunglasses (maybe a denim vest?) — and danced around while lip-synching Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” and “Rocket” suggests that participation was mandatory.
Although “Pour Some Sugar On Me” reached number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 (#18 in the UK), and “Rocket” cracked the top 15 in several countries, it was “Love Bites” that gave Def Leppard their first and only #1 Billboard single (#11 in the UK), and it’s “Love Bites” that emerges nearly 40 years later sounding fresh and not at all ridiculous, more than can be said for its fellow singles, even if they do retain a certain charm. But — and I don’t think this contradicts my last sentence — 11-year-old me thought “…Sugar…” and “Rocket” were the two standout tracks on Hysteria, Def Leppard’s fourth album and the one that first attracted me as a listener. As to why it wasn’t until Hysteria that I awoke to Def Leppard’s importance, the band’s breakout album, Pyromania, was released a full four years earlier, in 1983, when I was six, and not yet actively listening to rock & roll, or anyway not yet cataloging what I was hearing. The year after touring concluded on Pyromania, Rick Allen, the band’s 19-year-old drummer, was driving his new Corvette on a small road (the A57) near his home in Sheffield, England, when he collided with a brick wall and was thrown into a nearby field, the sudden, violent deceleration of the vehicle working with his body’s momentum to sever his left arm. According to David Fricke’s abbreviated biography of Def Leppard c. ‘84-’87, Animal Instincts, the crash was caused by two men in an Alfa Romeo who were offended by the sight of a person about their age behind the wheel of a “flashy” American sports car. They interrupted Allen’s carefree afternoon drive with a series of taunting maneuvers that succeeded in riling the talented musician. “For a brief moment, Rick was window-to-window with the two punks, evil grins growing in twisted upward curves on their faces as they dangerously edged their Alfa closer to the Corvette,” Fricke claims (p.7, 1987 edition). (No other drivers were ever under suspicion or officially questioned by police.) Not one but two nurses were nearby when the accident occurred, and one of them packed the severed arm in ice, which was delivered with Allen to Royal Hallamshire Hospital “less than 20 minutes after the accident” (ibid.). Doctors were able to reattach his arm, but the replantation ultimately failed, and Rick Allen, professional drummer, set about the formidable task of adapting to his new constraints. He succeeded, but the process contributed to a two-year delay in Def Leppard’s delivering Hysteria to their label and waiting fans, and to latent fans like me.
I suspect that 11 was the perfect age to revel in “Pour Some Sugar On Me”’s suggestive but nonsensical lyrics, which include this stanza in the second verse:
Listen, red light, yellow light, green-a-light go
Crazy little woman in a one man show
Mirror queen, mannequine, rhythm of love
Sweet dream, saccharine, loosen up (loosen up)
Loosen up
“Love Bites,” by contrast, begins with a spare, slow drum beat and occasional trickles of reverby guitar, over which Joe Elliott, his voice forlorn, sings:
When you make love, do you look in your mirror?
Who do you think of, does he look like me?
Do you tell lies and say that it's forever?
Do you think twice or just touch and see?
I imagine my 11-year-old self found these words discomfiting. He may simultaneously have been titillated, probably was, and it’s difficult to remember with any real assurance the interior life of someone who existed so long ago, even if he was you. It’s possible 1987 Chris Cain was a much hornier, slavering fellow than the person I’m sketching here. Without a journal to refer back to, and considering the terrible myopia of my longterm memory, this is mostly guesswork, but there is another fact from that period — a memory actually, but one etched in dark pencil rather than the watercolor in which most of my past is depicted — that evinces a still childish sexuality, yet to assume the cartoonish dimensions of adolescent carnality. This is the second memory I have from that period, and it involves a game of spin the bottle played with some classmates during an overnight camping trip organized by the school. I say “camping,” but actually we were brought to a sleepaway camp in the mountains, the sort with freestanding cabins containing bunks and maybe drawers or shelves where longer-term summer residents could keep clothes — in truth I don’t remember much about the decor of the cabins, only that when we slept, it was in sleeping bags on a long row of bunk beds, I suppose more like the bunk rooms of a military barracks, not the smaller structures available to all of our imaginations courtesy of films like Friday the 13th and Wet Hot American Summer. Sometime before “lights out,” which was presumably designated by our adult chaperones, several classmates and I — six to eight of us — sat on carpet or a rug somewhere inside a building and played spin the bottle. I have the sense that we were at a remove from other students, but not exactly isolated. The gameplay of spin the bottle as I understand it could hardly be more straightforward — players seated in a circle take turns spinning an empty bottle that lies on its side between them, and whomever the bottle points to when it stops spinning must share a kiss with the spinner. But in reconstructing the memory in my mind, I have to admit to one or two significant lacunae. Who kissed whom? for example. I don’t remember if the spinner or the person indicated by the bottle was charged with taking action. I do know that when Marley Bramble’s spin pointed to me, she leaned across the person sitting between us, took the left side of my head in her right hand, drew her face close my other side and kissed me on the parotid region, the soft area just in front of and below the ear, behind the joint connecting the mandible to the temporal bone. I suspect she lobbed her kiss into an area chosen for its safe distance from my lips, but the placement was nevertheless incredibly intimate, perhaps even more so for being under-trafficked. I remember being instantly flushed with heat — no doubt blushing cherry red — and blurting out, “She kissed my ear,” which wasn’t really true.
Another detail I’m missing about spin the bottle’s rules as we practiced them that night in 1987 is this: What happened when the bottle landed on a player whose gender was the same as the spinner’s? Today, I imagine players of spin the bottle are thoughtful and expressive enough about gender identity, sexual orientation, panoply of preference, etc., to make several variations of gameplay available, each suited to a different mix of well-informed participants. But I know that in Utah in 1987, we were playing “hetero-only” spin the bottle, and without having discussed it. My problem is that I have no sense at all of what happened when the bottle suggested a same-sex kiss. I suppose that the spinner simply re-spun, like re-rolling dice that have flung themselves off the edge of a table. It occurs to me that I interpreted the lyrics of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” with a similarly blithe heteronormativity, even though, when I listen to them today, they make more sense as a vivid description of gay male sex. To understand them this way, one has to accept that the singer, Joe Elliott, playfully refers to his male lover with endearments like “mirror queen,” “demolition woman,” and “little miss innocent” — plausible sex patter, to my ear, and it allows us to solve for the lyrics’ far more preoccupying mystery, to wit, what Elliott would mean by telling a woman, “pour your sugar on me,” and how her doing so could leave him “hot, sticky sweet, from [his] head to [his] feet, yeah.” One repeated line has Elliott urging his partner to “take a bottle, shake it up, break the bubble, break it up,” which to me sounds phallic, the sort of thing that could lead to Joe being covered in his lover’s jizz, if not literally from his head to his feet.
Life seems to me deeply, inherently whimsical, if often in terrible ways — maybe the better word is arbitrary. If 19-year-old Rick Allen hadn’t spent a small pile of his newfound wealth on a flashy American sports car, had instead settled for something still exciting but at least British, a Triumph TR7 maybe, or even an Alfa Romeo, he would have been spared the collision that cost him his arm. But then Def Leppard probably would have finished Hysteria sooner, almost certainly without “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” which was written when the rest of the album was already in the bag, and with a different title — Allen came up with “Hysteria” while reflecting on the media storm surrounding his accident. (“Animal Instincts” was the album’s early working title.) Likewise, had the bottle not pointed to me after being spun by Marley Bramble, a girl who up until then I had not given any special consideration to, I would have been freed from countless hours of vague, amorous reflection centered on her over the ensuing months and even years, reflection that in the end amounted to almost nothing, and even at its most pointed would not correctly have been called a “crush,” more like a psychic bruise, in the way that bruises can sometimes be pleasurable. I find it difficult to describe the exact qualities of that aftereffect, like a cymbal ringing out — even though it began during a time when, as I’ve said, I was still fairly innocent, I believe it continued to resonate into later years when Marley Bramble in my thoughts would have taken on a more sexual valence. The lyrics of “Love Bites,” it seems to me, have something to say about this — of course there is the sense in which affairs of the heart can be sharp and painful, like a bite, but they may also leave a mark that lasts long past the initial contact, and may even pass a sort of infection into the person who is bitten, sometimes quite intense, like acute malarial fever, but often more low key, simmering, barely present, fading continuously but never gone. Then again, in “Love Bites” Joe Elliott sings, “Love lives, love dies /
It's no surprise,” and of course that is also true.
Do you remember listening to this song as a kid, Keith? Was there a Def Leppard poster on your wall next to Van Halen’s and Motley Crüe’s? Is it possible that even on your first listen of Hysteria, your pre-pubescent ears perked up for “Love Bites,” your sapling spine straightened, and you announced, if only to yourself, that here, finally, was a song from Def Leppard that spoke of essential truths?
KEITH: Eh, I was always more of a Poison guy, myself.
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