Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection | 
| Artist: Def Leppard
Label: Island / Mercury
List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $7.78
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Rating:  106 reviews
Sales Rank: 607
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 000464702
UPC: 602498293560
EAN: 0602498293560
ASIN: B0009299LU
Publication Date: 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New - Factory Sealed - Shipped from Florida via USPS First class mail. We ONLY sell what we have in stock. NO back orders here.Import Edition
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| Tracks:
Disc 1
| • | Pour Some Sugar On Me (HISTORIA video edit) | | • | Photograph | | • | Love Bites | | • | Let's Get Rocked | | • | Two Steps Behind (acoustic version) | | • | Animal | | • | Heaven Is | | • | Foolin' | | • | Rocket (VISUALIZE video edit) | | • | When Love & Hate Collide | | • | Armageddon It | | • | Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad? | | • | Rock Of Ages | | • | Hysteria | | • | Miss You In A Heartbeat | | • | Bringin' On The Heartbreak | | • | Switch 625 |
Disc 2
| • | Rock Rock (Till You Drop) | | • | Let It Go | | • | High 'N' Dry (Saturday Night) | | • | Too Late For Love | | • | No Matter What | | • | Promises | | • | Mirror, Mirror (Look Into My Eyes) | | • | Women | | • | Another Hit And Run | | • | Slang | | • | Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion) | | • | Rock Brigade | | • | Now | | • | Paper Sun | | • | Work It Out | | • | Die Hard The Hunter | | • | Wasted | | • | Billy's Got A Gun |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
While many of their peers were abandoning '70s metal and arena rock to hop the punk/new wave bandwagon, Def Leppard smartly stripped the earlier era's music of its excesses, bolstered it with energetic, pop-savvy hooks and quickly found itself the vanguard of the UK's new metal revival and one of the '80s most spectacularly successful rock acts. The first disc of this 35-track, two-and-a-half hour double-disc retrospective focuses on the familiar hits of their early MTV, platinum-selling prime, though the inclusion of the video edit/remixes of "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Rocket" attempts to cast them in a more club-friendly contemporary groove. But the grittier second disc showcases some of the early, overlooked roots of On Through the Night and High 'N' Dry, as well as underappreciated later gems like '99's "Promises" and a power-pop-perfect take on Badfinger's "No Matter What" from an upcoming covers project. --Jerry McCulley
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| Customer Reviews: Read 101 more reviews...
 The best Def Leppard retrospective out there May 17, 2005
Taylor X (Las Vegas, NV (USA))
171 out of 182 found this review helpful
Rock Of Ages (2005.) A Def Leppard hits compilation.
Def Leppard. This classic rock group has been together for several decades, and their music is truely timeless. From NWOBHM to hard rock to pop rock to just plain pop, Def Leppard has done it all. Despite numerous tragedies in the band and even a commercial flop/disappointment every now and again, the band keeps on keeping on. In 2004, a new hits compilation that put the old Vault one to shame got a foreign release. I thought us Americans had been deprived. But nope. A separate, two-disc compilation has been compiled for America! Is it better or worse than its foreign counterpart? Read on or my review of Rock Of Ages.
Below I list each of Def Leppard's albums, what this set takes from them, and my opinions on the compilation's song choices.
ON THROUGH THE NIGHT - 1980
Rock Brigade, Wasted
COMMENTS: Only two tracks from the band's highly underrated debut album? What a shame. This is my favorite Def Leppard album, and it really got cheated. Wasted DESERVES its place here, no denying that, being that it was the band's firs single. But that's where the problems begin - THIS IS THE `ON THROUGH THE NIGHT' LP VERSION, NOT THE SINGLE VERSION! The single version has never gotten a CD release, sadly. And then there's the other song from this album - Rock Brigade. It's one of the WEAKER tracks on the album! Why put it on here instead of Hello America (which was released as a single?) I'm also disappointed not to see Sorrow Is A Woman and It Could Be You on here. And no Overture? That's the ultimate sin..
HIGH `N' DRY - 1981
Bringin' On The Heartbreak, Switch 625, Let It Go, High `N' Dry (Saturday Night), Mirror Mirror (Look Into My Eyes), Another Hit And Run
COMMENTS: Vault cheated High `N' Dry severely. But on this new compilation, they got it right! Not only is the band's first big hit, Bringin' On The Heartbreak, on here, but IT'S THE FULL-LENGTH UNCUT VERSION THAT FADES INTO SWITCH 625! This is the ONLY compilation, to my knowledge, that has the uncut version. I also can't believe they put the title track (underrated masterpiece) on here! My only real complaint is that they didn't include Lady Strange.
PYROMANIA - 1983
Photograph, Foolin, Rock Of Ages, Rock Rock (`Til You Drop), Too Late For Love, Billy's Got A Gun, Die Hard The Hunter
COMMENTS: Pyromania is Def Leppard's all-around best album and it is represented well here. There are the four hit singles, kind of a mandate for any Leppard compilation. Plus they throw on two of their most underrated songs EVER - Die Hard The Hunter and Billy's Got A Gun (I never thought these would make it onto a compilation, but I'm glad they did!) The record company even did one better and got rid of that annoying minute or so of static hiss that was the last minute of the latter track. The omission of Comin' Under Fire is my only complaint here.
HYSTERIA - 1987
Pour Some Sugar On Me, Love Bites, Animal, Rocket, Armageddon It, Hysteria, Women
COMMENTS: Hysteria had seven hit singles. You get them all here. Enough said. Rocket, sadly though, is an edited version. Pour Some Sugar On Me is the extended edit, which is actually better than the original Hysteria version (these are the same versions of the songs that appeared on Vault.) I wish they'd gone beyond the hit singles, though, and put on my favorite song from the album, Gods Of War.
ADRENALIZE - 1992
Let's Get Rocked, Heaven Is, Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion), Have You Ever Needed
Someone So Bad
COMMENTS: This album was not terribly popular, but did have a few hits, and you get most of them here. One question, though - Where's Make Love Like A Man?
RETRO-ACTIVE - 1993
Miss You In A Heartbeat, Two Steps Behind
COMMENTS: Good songs from the band's 1993 revamped rarities compilation, I just wish they'd used the electric versions instead of the acoustic ones, but the acoustic ones WERE the more popular ones, so I'm not complaining. These are the same versions that appeared on Vault. I would have liked to have seen I Wanna Be Your Hero, Fractured Love, and Desert Song, though.
VAULT - 1995
When Love And Hate Collide
COMMENTS: When Vault, the band's first compilation was released, it featured this then-unreleased ballad as a bonus cut. It's nothing spectacular, but was a fairly big hit, so its inclusion is understandable.
SLANG - 1996
Slang, Work It Out
COMMENTS: I HATED the Slang album, but I think the band did a good job choosing two of the best songs from an otherwise less-than-stellar album. I'm a little surprised All I Want Is Everything didn't make the cut, though, being as big a hit as it was.
EUPHORIA - 1999
Paper Sun, Promises
COMMENTS: Def Leppard's short-lived return to rocking spawned a few hits, and two of them made this compilation. I'm quite surprised they did put on Goodbye, though - it was just as popular, if not MORE popular, than the two songs featured here.
X - 2002
Now
COMMENTS: Like Slang, I HATED the X album, Still, Now was a fairly big radio hit, so I can see why they put it on here. Good thing we only have to put up with one song from it.
NEW RECORDING - 2005
No Matter What
COMMENTS: As a bonus track, we get a cover of the Badfinger classic No Matter What - and the cover is surprisingly good. It doesn't top the original, but it's still a solid cover version. The UK version of this compilation lacked this track in favor of a cover of the Kinks song Waterloo Sunset (and had a few other small tracklist differences) I wish Waterloo had been put on the American version, too, along with No Matter What. But if you really want whatever track your compilation lacks that the other one has, just download it.
OTHER COMMENTS:
I think that, overall, this CD is superior to its import counterpart, simply titled Best Of. The tracklist is better, for the most part, and the cover art is certainly superior. I really wish they had put the tracks in chronological order, though(mixing them up works for some bands, but NOT for Def Leppard, due to their radical sound changes over the years.) I also wish they'd put on some of the songs the band did prior to On Through The Night (The Def Leppard EP version of Ride Into The Sun, for instance - none of the songs from that era have EVER gotten a CD release.) The liner notes are nice, too. Don't bother importing the pricey UK version of the compilation, because the US version is better.
OVERALL:
If you want the best possible introduction to Def Leppard, and a brief overview of almost every part of their career, Rock Of Ages succeeds. I personally recommend getting all of the band's pre-nineties albums, but if you don't want to spend that kind of money, it's understandable, and this compilation makes for a decent substitute.
Really good full career encompassing greatest hits package July 9, 2005
Joseph M. Siegler (Garland, TX USA)
30 out of 33 found this review helpful
I used to have one of Def Leppard's older Greatest Hits Packages (Vault). This is one of those bands that as a child of the 80's, I knew very well. Def Leppard in the 80's were a band that you simply could not ignore. I knew all their hits, I had a few of their tapes back in the day, but as time went on, they felt like a band I had "outgrown". They tried to change their style in 1996 (Slang), but then changed back to their more traditional sound after that, but I wasn't terribly interested anymore (although I did like a track here and there).
When they came out with this 2 CD Greatest Hits package, I ditched all my existing Def Leppard CD's and went with this, as I felt it comprised all the songs of theirs I really liked. There's no point in listing them here, I'd just be copying the tracklisting. But it's almost all enjoyable. It has a bunch of songs from their earliest days before they got their mega success, which is when a lot of people thought the band lost it's soul. This covers everything up until their most recent studio album as of now, that being "X".
If you ever liked Def Leppard in the past, and don't have any of their albums, get this. It's a great career covering retrospective that hits just about all the corners of their albums.
Let's Get Popped May 18, 2005
doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania)
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is a useful compilation for old-time Def Leppard fans (let's face it, such fans are by far the most numerous) who wish to relive the classic years and sample some of what the band has cranked out since then. Despite the generally haphazard sequencing of the tracks, here we can hear Leppard evolving from anthemic metal to pop metal to power pop. There are just two tracks from the On Through the Night debut way back in 1980, the so-so "Rock Brigade" and the awesome "Wasted." That album could've been better represented, but otherwise the most well-covered albums in this compilation are the three most important ones - High n' Dry, Pyromania, and Hysteria, and we have an overwhelming selection of classics from those discs. However, one problem is the inclusion of dated and uninspiring remixes of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Rocket" (in fact, this version of "Rocket" is missing the killer middle section that was the most interesting part of the original).
There are fewer tracks from the post-Hysteria albums, and deservedly so, because here we find the band getting much less interesting overall, despite a few late-period surprises like "Paper Sun" and "Promises." Note that the new track here is a cover of the early-70s power pop chestnut "No Matter What" by Badfinger, and the liner notes tell us that the next Def Leppard release will be a covers album. That really shows you where they've been headed for the past decade and a half. This band has had an unlikely evolution from young Zeppelin wannabes to the one and only top-of-world Def Leppard to aging Cheap Trick wannabes. But they're still worth loving because they sure made the 80s more interesting. [~doomsdayer520~]
 Finally somebody got it right -- about TIME! May 25, 2005
Jeff Edwards (Twin Falls, Idaho)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Like many long time Leppard fans, I was thrilled when they were scheduled to release 'Vault' as their greatest hits album many years ago (gee, has it been almost a decade already??), but when I finally saw it, I was profoundly disappointed. It was more like a 'Hysteria' tribute than anything else. Nothing against that particular album...it WAS enormously popular, and I believe was the 2nd best selling record of the 80's (behind 'Thriller') but c'MON! The absolute stupidity of ignoring their entire first album??!! What the heck...? I am happy to know I was not the only person who felt this way.
Jump ahead a few years, when the recording trend seems to be centered around How many versions of Greatest Hits by bands can we come up with? After several different incarnations of Def Leppard's Best Of stuff, we finally see a TWO record set that seems to (for the most part) give a decent, well-rounded view of this monumentally successful and horribly underrated band. First off they finally focused some attention to their first record, 'On Through The Night' by including 'Wasted' and 'Rock Brigade' but even though I enjoy both of these songs, it probably would have been a better choice to add 'Hello America' rather than Wasted. Either way, a pretty decent addition, and nice to see their first album recognized.
High & Dry has always been my personal favorite record by this band. Ignored by so many (so called) fans and once again, under-appreciated, this is Leppard at their creative and rocking best. I don't believe any of their records matches this one for it's sheer rocking dominance and incredibly catchy hooks and driving songs. Finally adding 'Switch 625' to the end of 'Bringing On the Heartbreak' was a natural which SHOULD have been done on ALL previous editions of their so-called Best Of releases. I could squabble over the addition of some songs over others, but without including almost every single track, nobody would ever be truly satisfied, so I felt they did right with this selection.
Pyromania certainly was the record that put Def Leppard on the map (at least in America). I was surprised to read in the liner notes how it wasn't until Hysteria that they finally made it big in their own country. A surprise to be sure. I was familiar with the band since before Pyromania hit the shelves in the States, so I wasn't surprised at ALL when this record went through the roof after the release of 'Photograph' (one of my least favorite of their bigger hits). But overall I felt they gave a great rendition of what this record had to offer.
Hysteria is really the record which re-defined Pop/Metal in America, and also put Leppard on the map in England. I still recall hearing 'Animal' for the first time in San Diego and without even being told who sang it, I just KNEW who it was. That perfect Leppard sound is quite unique in the world of music. Once again, nobody will be 100% satisfied with every selection from this album because somebody will ALWAYS believe they sacrificed one song for the addition of another, but after thinking about it, they DID include all the major popular hits. I would have been thrilled if they dropped 'Rocket' (their most popular 'bad' song) and added 'Excitable' instead, but lets not complain.
Adrenalize was another under-appreciated record which I found to be almost as good as Pyromania, and definitely gave us some great rockin' songs. The notable absence of 'Make Love Like A Man' is probably the biggest omission on this entire compilation. But again, only a minor complaint.
Almost everything after Adrenalize has been an odd mixture of experimentation and sometimes it paid off (Euphoria was pretty good overall) and sometimes the fans reacted with an almost snubbing of 'Slang' and 'Retro Active'. Both records were not appreciated for what the band were trying to accomplish (at least this is MY opinion) and the dismal record sales sent a pretty clear message to the band: STOP EXPERIMENTING AND GET BACK TO YOUR ROCKIN' ROOTS. Unfortunately they continued the trend and gave us 'X' which was a full record of nothing but semi-lame Power Ballads, none of which were radio-friendly (I should know since I've been in radio 15+ years). I was SO looking forward to this album, and I was SO disappointed when they added absolutely NO hard-driving songs at all. I am still mystified by this odd decision. Again, the fans (which are quite diverse and many) for the most part virtually ignored this record because sales-wise, it was quite a disappointment to the Record Execs, and rightly so. Us fans have come to expect a few things from this band, and songs with heavy guitars and BIG sound is what we want and usually get, but with 'X' we were let down in a BIG way. I understand there are many who feel strongly that this record was and IS great and entirely upset at how the so-called Core Leppard Fans snubbed it. Oh well. I'm not going to like an album just because somebody ELSE liked it. I consider myself an honest-to-goodness hard-core LONG TIME Def Leppard fan (since 1981, PRE Pyromania) and I felt the record stunk to high heaven. I don't like to say that about my favorite band, but like it or not, that is MY opinion. But I am happy to say that by and large, if I were to choose my personal own Best Of album of Leppard tunes, it would be pretty dang close to what Rock Of Ages ended up being. All things considered, as I said earlier, Finally, somebody got it right. Leppard Fans world-wide REJOICE!
R.I.P. Steve Clark! May 28, 2005
Joy Elizabeth Teets (Fairfax, VA USA)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I was really disappointed with Vault and the import of Best Of not having Switch 625 which is done by the legendary guitarist, Steve Clark! Steve Clark is one of the best guitarists in history and I do miss him! Out of all the instrumental songs I've heard I must say that Switch 625 is my all time favorite because Steve Clark really shows talent and I am so thrilled to have a greatest hits with this masterpiece!
Def Leppard is my favorite band of all time and they were also the first metal/hard rock band that I got into in the very early 90's. The very first song that got me into them was Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad and now it's my 2nd favorite rock ballad of all time next to Love Bites. Def Leppard are such a unique band and no album of theirs sounds exactly alike. Even between Hysteria and Euphoria, you can hear differences. And I love how Def Leppard do these epic songs like Gods Of War, Die Hard The Hunter, White Lightning with 2 guitar solos, and Paper Sun! My all time favorite song from them is Pour Some Sugar On Me and I always find myself dancing and singing along to it, it's so awesome! I love both versions of the song, the video edit and the album version, it would have been so cool if for this greatest hits 2 CD set for the Leps to have both intros from both versions before the actual song began. Like you would hear "Step Inside, Walk This Way, You And Me Babe, Hey Hey" and then right after hear that part in the intro to the video edit and then the song would begin. I know it would take some editing but it would be cool to have a special version of the song but of course the "Step Inside" part would have to be first! But the video version which is on this CD is awesome and since I own almost all the Leps CD's including Hysteria, I'll live.
I have heard every single song from this CD, and there's not one song that I don't like. There are a few like Slang which I might not like as much but I still like it. This is the ultimate collection of Def Leppard songs you could ever want, especially because of Steve Clark's masterpiece, Switch 625! I love that song so much that I'll put it on repeat and listen to it over and over again. Now don't get me wrong, I do like Vivian Campbell as well but I got to admit, I hear a lot more uniqueness in the songs with Steve Clark. Another favorite of mine is Women, I totally love the way Joe Elliott sings in this song!! I just totally love Joe's vocals! I know he's not an opera singer but I love his voice and I will be honest, he's got the best voice out of all the rock/metal vocalists ever!!! His voice is so sexy, another reason Def Leppard is my favorite!!
Another thing that I love about every greatest hits compilation they have put out is they don't put the songs in any particular order and I love it that way! I find that when they're all mixed up, it's a surprise as to what song comes next, you never know what's coming! And I love the album cover with the U.K. flag on it, gotta love those Brits! This whole collection is awesome and any true Def Leppard fan or rock fan should not leave this masterpiece out of their collection!
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