10 Hard Rock Bands That Had To Fire Major Members

As Def Leppard went into their third album Pyromania, they were left with a bit of a choice. After tasting some real success off of their previous record High N Dry, their next collaboration with producer Mutt Lange was to either make a carbon copy of their last record or strive to make a pop rock hybrid that would make them millions. Though the resulting album was absolutely stellar, it did come at the expense of a guitar player.

Once Pete Willis started to venture into the studio, he increasingly found himself out of step with the rest of the group, which did him no favors when Lange asked for more effort on their part. Whereas Joe Elliott and Steve Clark managed to step up to the challenge, Willis's drinking problem was getting way out of hand, making songs like Photograph devolve into drunken dirges.

Electing to give him some time to cool out in Sheffield, the rest of Leppard went about replacing him with Phil Collen, whose virtuosic style sounded amazing when playing off of Clark's simplistic riffing. By the time Willis was supposed to come back, he was greeted with a rejection to return, with Collen taking over guitar duties from then on. While Willis does share in the writing credits and even has some rhythm tracks on Pyromania, it was clear that Leppard's sound was turning a corner pretty quickly.