Hysteria

Rick Allen lost his arm in a car crash, and then he learned to play the drums again from scratch.

That is the fact the rest of this song sits on. Hold onto it.

The Hysteria album nearly destroyed Def Leppard. Producer Mutt Lange’s perfectionism stretched the sessions across years. The budget ran into the millions. Allen wrecked his car and had to build his playing back up with one arm, on an electronic-and-acoustic drum hybrid nobody else was using. Four years went into it. By any reasonable measure the project should have collapsed somewhere in the middle.

It didn’t. They finished it.

The title track was never a single. It’s a six-minute slow burn, and it carries everything the band picked up across those sessions. The guitars are layered so precisely they sound like one instrument. The harmonies stack into something close to choral. Underneath all of it is Allen’s drum sound — the sound a man makes when he has had to relearn the thing he does, and decided to do it anyway.

“Out of touch, out of reach, yeah / You could try to get closer to me.”

Joe Elliott’s voice is the surprise. He isn’t screaming. He isn’t showing off. He’s just singing, with a plainness most bands in that scene wouldn’t risk, and the arrangement leaves him room to do it — building up, falling back, building again like water.

I didn’t have much use for Def Leppard until I knew what this record cost them. The early songs are fun. “Photograph,” “Rock of Ages,” the hits. Hysteria is a different thing. You can hear the years in it. You can hear the refusal to stop short of exactly right.

The song ends on a fade that runs close to a minute, the harmonies repeating and repeating until they stop sounding like words.

Four years. A budget that got away from them. A drummer who taught himself the instrument a second time. They spent what they had to spend, and you can hear all of it.