Def Leppard, Steve Clark, and a long time ago...

I became a Def Leppard fan the first time I heard "Let It Go" from the High And Dry album at age 15. Some time after that, they were cemented in my heart with the release of Pyromania.

And...I'm a sap. Maybe. I don't know.

I was on the living room couch this afternoon, nursing a headache, and a I caught a showing of VH1's Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story. I'd seen it before, some time ago when it was first aired. The show was near it's end, focusing on the triumph that was the Hysteria album and its promotional tour. Afterward, in the ten-minute gap between the end of the movie and the start of the next show, they aired two Def Leppard videos ("Hysteria" and "Photograph"). I watched the images of Steve Clark with a sense of wistfulness that grew to full-blown sadness. I thought about the difficulties he'd faced in his life - "difficulties" being an altogether inadequate word - and the senseless, tragic way he died. It's been more than fifteen years since his death. Vivian Campbell has been with the band now longer than Steve himself was. And still I can't get over that vague feeling of sorrow over what once was and what might have been.

It's more than just my affection for Steve. It's particularly about my affection for the band in its earlier days, its heyday, and about the visceral memories the music can still bring to the fore.

Hysteria was released at a time when my life was undergoing the biggest changes I had ever experienced. The summers of '87 - when the album was released - and '88 - when its biggest singles became monster hits - were summers of simultaneous joy and dissatisfaction, times of beginnings and endings, possibilities and regrets. My favorite music remained constant, and many nights I'd lie on my sofa bed, the stereo on for company, my eyes closed, and the songs enveloping my entire self, seeming to come from inside. I was lonely often. Steve and Joe and Phil and Rick and Rick kept me company on many a balmy night in a ground floor apartment, a baby sleeping in the next room.

Even now, the music takes me back. I can hear one note and be overcome by an almost intoxicating sense of time suspension, surrounded by a strong sense of blue skies, thick humidity, and my friend Lynn and I good-naturedly arguing about which one of us would get Joe Elliot. If I lost that argument, I always chose Steve Clark next. I was young and uncertain. The music always returns me to that vulnerability.

After Hysteria, Def Leppard began work on a new album. During the recording of that album Steve died, early in 1991. Released after his death, Adrenalize was the last album featuring the work of Steve Clark.

And so...as I lay there on the couch this afternoon, the whole rush of it came back to me at once - the me that I was those summers eighteen and nineteen years ago, the flashes of memories like a slide show, one after the other, rapid and never quite complete, and the sadness for the death of a man I didn't even know.

The tears came.

For me, for Steve, for what might have been...I don't know. And somehow I didn't feel any better when they stopped.