Mutt Lange surrounded the band with samples and screeches and whooshes and his own aaah-aaahs. This was not a case of a bunch of guys getting into a room together and hitting record. Hysteria was a mutant beast of an album, painstakingly assembled in the studio over years. The funny thing about “Love Bites” is that the band never played it all together in one room until after it reached #1 in the US. (Its tally is now past diamond.) At the end of 1988, Billboard named Hysteria the #3 highest-selling album of the year, behind only Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. When Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” finally had its week atop the Hot 100 in America, Hysteria had already been out for more than a year, and it had sold seven million copies. For the hard rock bands of the late ’80s, it was almost always the ballad that pushed them over the top. It was the ballad that did it, of course. That’s not Thriller, but it’s about as close as hard rock ever got. One of them - the only one in Def Leppard’s decades-long history - got to #1. Four of those singles made it into the top 10. Hysteria has 12 songs, and it spun off seven singles. Def Lep had never had a top-10 single in the US before their 1987 album Hysteria. Lange and Def Leppard basically succeeded. He intended to make something that would just smother them. In a Guitar World interview a few years ago, Def Leppard’s Phil Collen laid that vision out in plain language: Lange wanted “a hard rock version of Thriller.” Lange planned for Def Leppard’s next album to be something that wouldn’t just cross over to the pop charts. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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