Robert John "Mutt" Lange. A name that represents many things depending on who you talk to: Big Record Sales. Pop Perfection. Gross Overproduction. Lifeless Radio Crap. Amazing Intuition. Unparalleled Song Doctor.
Put me in the "fan" camp. I think the man makes exquisite ear candy that bears repeated listening across decades. Two Mutt-produced records in particular are still in frequent rotation in my music collection: The Cars' Heartbeat City and Def Leppard's Hysteria. Only recently did I discover that these two records' stories are actually somewhat intertwined.
In the excellent Classic Albums documentary on Hysteria, Def Leppard and their managers discuss the fact that Mutt wasn't going to be available to produce the record due to another commitment. What that commitment was isn't spelled out onscreen – it turns out it was to The Cars. So instead Lep's management hired Jim Steinman, who had no production credits. Lead singer Joe Elliott doesn't presume to speak for the band but indicates that he thought it was a bad idea; "Todd Rundgren produced Bat Out Of Hell. Jim Steinman wrote it!" The episode was a disaster. Steinman apparently enthused about takes where the band hadn't even fine-tuned their instruments. "To a kid in Iowa, it sounds honest," he's purported to have said. Elliott says his response was, "That kid will think it sounds out of tune, Jim."
The band's management bought Steinman out of his lucrative contract and scrapped the work done with him at the helm, which meant that Def Leppard now had to sell a hell of a lot more copies of the not-yet-begun record just to break even.
Then, drummer Rick Allen was involved in the car accident that cost him his left arm.
By the time Allen was healed enough to begin figuring out how he would continue playing drums, Mutt Lange was finishing up Heartbeat City for The Cars. The record inverted the usual Cars recipe of guitar-driven rock seasoned with very pure, strident synthesizer sounds; Greg Hawkes' keyboard rig was now the centerpiece of the band's newly lush sound, with Elliott Easton's guitar adding flavor. A contemporary article about the band's experience gave a window into Lange's process. Bassist Ben Orr returned to the band's rented accommodations after a long day of working one-on-one with Mutt. Someone asked how it went. Orr replied, "Well, we started to get a bass sound today." Drummer David Robinson might have had it worse; it seems clear that all the drums on the record are derived from machines rather than his drumming.
Out of affection for the guys, and with his commitment to The Cars fulfilled, Mutt then signed on to produce Hysteria. What's interesting to me is that the experience with The Cars seems to have influenced the sound of Hysteria. It's been said that Hysteria would be a very different record if not for the hell Def Leppard went through to get it made. That's undoubtedly true, but the other side of the coin hasn't really been acknowledged; if not for Mutt's experience making Heartbeat City, where he developed some of his trademark treatments and techniques and was exposed to more synth and sampling technology by Greg Hawkes, Hysteria would have been a very different record anyway.
Listen to them back-to-back sometime and you'll see how Heartbeat City informed Hysteria and evolved the sound Mutt and the band had already established in all kinds of ways: The hyper-layered background vocals sung by Mutt himself, the impossibly heavy backbeats, the sound of the cymbals, the commonality between the bass sounds of The Cars' Ben Orr and Def Leppard's Rick Savage. . . . The list of things pioneered or perfected on Heartbeat City and then applied to Hysteria is long, and why not? Heartbeat City was a smash, spinning off numerous Top Ten singles. Since Def Leppard's ethic on Hysteria was the idea of writing a "greatest hits" record from scratch, Mutt's success with The Cars made it natural that Def Leppard would choose to apply much of what he developed while making Heartbeat City.
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