I’ve listened to all kinds of music in my time, and my interest crosses multiple boundaries of multiple genres. But for whatever reason, the head-banging screamer-rock of the late eighties and early nineties sort of escaped me.
I was once a head-banger, in the late seventies, but I had obviously mellowed out a decade later, and preferred to stick to my Phil Collins, Genesis, and Stevie Nicks, among many others.
And then, suddenly, 2019 was upon me, and my music interests were unexpectedly added to with the emergence of one of those same long-haired screamer bands onto my music radar, in the form of a live concert.
You see, Def Leppard was making a cross-Canada tour, and one of the stops was at the Canadian Tire Centre in Ottawa. Normally, something like this would come and go without catching my attention. I mean, I had heard of Def Leppard and everything, but they’d never been a band that grabbed too much of my entertainment attention or dollars.
This is where my daughter, Avery, enters the story.
Avery knows her music, and even more impressively, knows my music as well. I was going to name her Stevie in honour of Stevie Nicks when she was born, but that was ruled out because it had the feel of me being all caught up in my own name, so we went with Avery instead, something she’s yet to complain about. She’s now attended at least a half-dozen Stevie Nicks concerts, with me having to endure the indignity of driving her to Toronto a couple of times so that she and a friend, or she and her mother, could go attend a concert featuring my favourite singer while I drove the streets of downtown Toronto waiting for them to come out.
Life can be weird that way.
Anyways, Avery was monitoring local Ottawa radio stations when she got word that one of them was having a Father’s Day contest, with the winner getting a free pass to the Def Leppard concert coming to town. And not just the concert, but meeting the band before-hand, having a picture taken with the band, and seats in lead singer Joe Elliott’s back pocket stage-side.
The entry requirements? Tell a story featuring both your dad and Def Leppard.
Avery went to work.
She told the radio station a story from my younger self, from my first year at at Carleton University, in Ottawa.
Def Leppard was in town, and my buddies and I all had tickets. In order to prepare for the concert, we drank ourselves silly, and probably smoked ourselves silly as well, all in the certainty that the concert would be an absolute blast. In a word, we were excited, and so we partied excitedly.
We partied so thoroughly that we almost forgot to go to the concert itself, but somebody among us must have had a watch and enough common sense to get us out the door, albeit late. We scrambled through town to get to the Civic Centre at Landsdowne Park, parked, and raced to the entrance, having our tickets validated by arena staff who recognized that they were dealing with a gaggle of morons, probably not their first.
We found our seats, incredibly, and had to do the old “Excuse me, excuse me” thing as we had to pass in front of concert-goers already in their seats in order to get to our own. The band was cranking out something onstage, and then, after we were seated, they left the stage. It seems we arrived just in time to see the second half of the band’s encore.
It was a great story, and Avery used it. And she won, as in won the contest for the Def Leppard tickets, the meet and greet, and the team photos. And she was going to take me, her dad!
There was just one problem.
That concert? The one way back when we drank ourselves into seven shades of stupid?
It was a Queen concert. I’m not even sure if Def Leppard was even invented yet.
I was thrilled and scared at the same time.
What if somebody asked me a Def Leppard question? What if somebody asked me for my favourite song? What if I was to be exposed as the fraud that I was?
I had work to do.
So I loaded up my phone with Def Leppard tunes and sat out by the pool and listened to them one Friday after work. It was strange.
“Hey, I know that song!” I said to myself as soon as I started rocking out with the boys with my Beats headphones on. Then it was “Hey, I know that one too!” And so on, because not only did I recognize all the tunes, but I thought they were all awesome, too.
I shared my story with the boys at work. One co-worker, I’ll call him Dave because that’s actually his name, suggested that I find the most obscure Def Leppard song I could and claim it to be my absolute favourite, his thinking being that only a “real” fan would ever know about such a song’s existence. It was great advice, and I followed it.
On concert day, I was ready.
I had purchased online a Def Leppard t-shirt with “Pour Some Sugar On Me” emblazoned upon it, determined not to stick out for any wrong reasons, and wishing to fully embrace the situation. We got there early because, well, we had to meet the band.
Before meeting them, though, we received a bit of a tour that included going up on stage and interacting with the band’s workspace, complete with the drum kit and guitar stands and everything else minus the band themselves. Standing on stage and looking out over the empty Canadian Tire Centre was a real eye-opener, and an absolute blast of perspective. I could just imagine what the experience would be like standing on that very stage with 18,000 screaming fans directing their adoring attention right back at you. This, all by itself, was really cool.
We then went to meet the boys, the boys in the band if you will. Before entering the space where they were, one of their handlers gave us a couple of pieces of advice for meeting the band. For example, don’t shake the drummer’s hand too firmly. You see, the drummer, Rick Allen, had lost an arm in a car accident some years before, so he was down to just the one hand, half as many as most drummers compete with. So go easy on Rick in the handshake line.
I congratulated the band on their recent inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lead singer Joe Elliott responded by saying “Aw, thanks, mate.”
I mean Joe Elliott called me his mate!!! I determined right then and there that I would never wash my ears again.
We went through the rest of the band with nobody swapping phone numbers with anyone else, and then it was out to our seats.
Our seats. Funny thing to say, and I suppose a person needs to know where they’re to report to at a concert, but as far as seats go, I don’t think we sat down in them at all for the rest of the evening. We were literally standing at the right angle where the stage proper meets the runway where the performers strut out into the audience, although elevated and not part of the crowd.
In other words, we were so close, we could literally reach out and touch these guys as they performed, though I’m sure that security would have something to say about that. Like, they were right there, Def Leppard and my new best mate Joe.
I’ve been to a lot of concerts in my life, all of them being big-name acts, with Queen being the only outlier in terms of screwing-up with pre-show drinking. This was the best one of my life, probably to do with the whole experience, and mostly to do with the fact that I got to experience it wth my daughter, the author of the whole thing. It was particularly cool to have guitarist Phil Collen reach out and give Avery that big high-five, actually low-five, as the band was working through its encore.
Something I’ll never forget, although the stupid radio station lost the photos of the two of us with the band. That would have been a framed keeper for sure.
Anyways, I’m now a Def Leppard fan for real, although Joe never calls or texts, but he’s busy I’m sure. The fact that the whole thing was as a result of a drunken misadventure way back in 1979 made it even better.
Thank you, Avery.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 