I'll admit that climbing the steps into the jet makes me feel like a hotshot. I think of Zero Mostel in the movie The Producers, shouting out a window at a passing Rolls-Royce, "Flaunt it while you got it, baby! FLAUNT IT!" For Def Leppard, though, this is old hat. While they're fully aware that there might be some eye-rolling at this type of pampering-especially nowadays, when so many bands are adopting anticorporate stances-they see private jet travel as a simple practicality that enables them to uphold their position as one of the world's most popular rock bands.

"We take a plane 'cause of necessity," Phil Collen says, matter-of-factly. "We wouldn't be able to do the amount of shows we do without it. We'd be canceling. The fact is, we do alot more vocals than most bands. With Joe's voice, the parts are higher. It's a more intense kind of workout, if you like."

"Seven hours of air-conditioning on a bus will wreck it," Joe asserts. "I need a bit of gravel to my voice, and traveling on a bus in the middle of the Pyromaina tour with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I couldn't get it off until I had a mouthful of water; then it kind of peeled off. Also, the 16 or so hours, it's tiring. It's not like we're 23 anymore."

"That's the big difference," Phil admits. "I'm 35 now. You can't do it. It changes."

"We're old," Joe croaks unapologetically.

The guys, in fact look pretty rested and healthy for musicians who've been touring since May of '92, mention that this same style of jet is used by Bon Jovi, Metallica and numerous other bands.

"Eddie Vedder won't travel on one of these, but the rest of Pearl Jam will," Joe pointed out. "He'll grow out of that. In five years' time he'll be flyin' on one of these-if they have three or four albums that sell five million like their first one."

Joe is reasonably sensitive about the topic of "corporate rock," a term often used to describe Def Leppard. He comes back to the subject at various points throughout the day.

"If you can accept that you are corporate, then you're not," he says. "You're just a rock band. You're in the wheels. What's the point of fighting it? What's the point in trying to pretend that you're not something that you are? Stop selling records if you don't want to be big.

"You know what really pisses us off?" he asks as we soar over the midwest. "People like Flea-brain from the Chili Peppers. He has a go at us every time he opens his mouth, about us being this corporate rock band, and then there they are, doing adverts for the Gap. There's him, full-page advert, advertising bass strings. There's them on the Lollapolooza tour, which is sponsored by Molson lager in certain places. It's as corporate as we are. In fact, it's more corporate than we are. At least we're not pretending that it isn't, like they are."

"Getting out of limos at awards shows and stuff like that," adds Phil.

"We travel in big, old, chunky vans," Joe asserts, on somewhat of a roll. "We don't like limousines. I think that's pretentious waffle. Suit and tie and bow ties for f?!kin' award shows and stuff like this. They're always having a pop at us for being like they are. But we ain't like them; we're really much more normal. At least we can say that we've been this way for a few years now."

Indeed, Def Leppard have been a mega-band ever since 1983's Pyromania vaulted them to international stardom. Since then the LPs have been slow in coming, delayed again and again by personal tragedies that have been covered in the press thousands of times over, and by meticulous recording procedures that drag on for years. Now, though, the band seems rejuvinated and eager to get material out in a more timely manner. Despite being on the road for the last year and a half, they recently managed to put the finishing touches on Retroactive, a rocking collection of unfinished tracks and B-sides that they've completely retooled into a proper new Def Leppard album.

Rick Allen completed his drum trakcs during a short break at the beginning of the tour, following a hugely successful hometown performance.

"After we did the Sheffield show, there was about a week where we didn't necessarily have anything to do," Allen recalls. "So we went in and did the day shift, patching up the drums I'd done from the mid-'80s. Fortunately I had enough time to do what I had to do."

Those drum tracks were originally recorded almost immediately after the development of Rick's first "one-armed" kit, so I wonder if he noticed any difference between his playing then and his playing now.

"It's interesting you ask that," he says, "because I suppose, in a way, I paid myself a really big compliment. We thought we could just go into the studio and salvage whatever I'd played back then. Some of the songs were done very basically when I had two arms, and then I redid them when I first went in to record Hysteria, went over the top with the Mach 1 one-armed drum kit. Listening to tracks again now, I realized how much I'd improved since I first lost my arm, so instead of trying to salvage stuff, what we ended up doing was just doing all the drums over from start to finish."

More tracking was completed during the break, but not nearly enough to finish the album. Thus the band has been overdubbing backstage prior to concerts. Collen explains how this process works.

"We've got a couple of digital machines called ADAT's," he says. "They're f?!cking unbelievable. They're this big (about the size of a CD player), so you eliminate this thing that's the size of a washer and dryer combined. It makes everything portable.

ADATs are small eight-track recorders that can be linked with other ADATs to make 16-, 24-, 32-. etc. track machines. The tapes of the original versions of the songs Lep is reworking are submixed down to stereo, and these submixes are tranferred to two tracks on one of the ADATs, leaving (for example) 22 tracks for overdubbing. Once overdubbing is completed, the tapes head back to England.

"We Fed Ex it back to Pete Woodroffe in London, who flies it back on the original and mixes it," enthuses Phil, who, "old" or not, is still openly excited about the process of making music. "It's really very cool. We've been working on the album sleeve. We've got a deadline, and it's the first time, I think, that we're going to meet a deadline."

"Twenty-nine-and-a-half minutes," Mortimer announces, clicking his stopwatch at the precise moment the jet lands. A new pair of vans picks up the band, transporting most to the Pine Knob ampitheater (or "Wooden Dick," as some affectionately call it), and the rest to a hotel in Troy, Michigan. Said hotel is also home to the groups performing at a rap festival. L.L. Cool J and Naughty By Nature are in the house, and the potential cross-cultural intermingling of groupies could get interesting.

Backstage before the show Joe cranks his boom box to play some of the Retroactive tracks. Whatever their individual sources, they come together as a whole on the LP, and some selections, especially a dead-on cover of the Sweet's "Action," will raise a few eyebrows.

Joe raises his eyebrows when his wife enters the room, showing off her newly pierced nose. He's obviously caught off guard, but doesn't want to blow his cool in front of an esteemed American journalist. After he leaves the room, Karla shows me that the stud is actually a fake, just a piece of metal held to her nose by a magnet stuck up her nostril. She got it at the local mall. What will they think of next?

The show runs as smoothly as Mortimer's stopwatch. I stand at stage left, unwilling to mingle with the crowd, fairly plowed thanks to openers Ugly Kid Joe's backstage brew. It's fascinating to watch Rick Allen from the side, close enough to see how masterfully he rethought rock drumming so that he'd be able to work with his physical limitations, which he's now completely overcome. As the band blasts through a cover of the obscure U.S. bubble glam gem "Black Betty," Phil appears right in front of me. He startles everyone huddled around the monitor soundboard by laying down a brief off-stage solo in front of the floor monitor that's doubling as a guitar amp at the moment. "F?!king hell!" he shouts to no one in particular, then bounds back onstage.

Following the show the band chills out with some Indian food, prepared to perfection by their on-tour cook. Newest Lep guitarist Vivian Campbell melts into the couch and claims he's not hungry. The only information I've extracted from him all day is that he's tired.

"Stop staying up all night, being a rock 'n' roller!" Joe admonishes.

Before long the band gathers up and heads back to the hotel. It's a peaceful nighttime drive, and Joe is rambling on about some of his favorite records. Somehow we land on the topic of the Velvet Underground, a band not typically associated with Def Leppard. Joe says he loves Lou Reed's songs, but the Velvet's performances of them were "crappy."

"They never sold that many records," he says. "I can't understand why they're so influential."

I respond with the age-old theory that everyone who bought the first Velvet LP went out and started a band of their own.

"I'd tell people in interviews that I like Lou Reed," Joe states, "but everyone would just think I was deing pretentious, so why bother?"

Back at the hotel the band immediately retires to their rooms. I check out the bar to see if it's as bizarre as I'd hoped it would be, but the meeting of rap and rock hangers-on is pretty uneventful. A combination of a headache, a hangover and jet lag sends me, also, to my pillow.

Like ol' Bill Lee, I consider myself a recorder of input, not an entertainer. I went on this journey with the appropriate amount of journalistic cynicism and objectivity -I'm not a Def Lep fan; I don't even own any of their records- and they came away with a favorable opinion. Like they say, they don't pretend to be anything they're not. The band, crew and entourage all seem to be happy to be doing what they're doing -traveling in style, playing music and making bank- and who am I to hold that against them? Flaunt it while you got it, baby.