On the morning of Jan. 8, 1991, Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen received a phone call from his manager Cliff Burnstein, bearing news he had been dreading for close to five years. His best friend, co-guitarist Steve Clark, had died while sleeping on a couch. He was 30 years old.
An autopsy revealed the Clark died from an unintentional overdose of alcohol, Valium and Codeine. He had been drinking and he cracked a rib earlier on, Collen wrote in his biography Adrenalized. The doctor told him not to drink while taking his pain medication. He drank anyway. The coroners report, I believe, read that it was due to a swelling of the brain.
Clark joined Def Leppard in 1978, a year after their formation, and was a key songwriter on the bands biggest albums 1983s Pyromania and 1987s Hysteria. Like his bandmates, Clark celebrated the bands success and the perks that came with it, especially free alcohol. During the time Pyromania was blowing up, Clark and Collen became known as the terror twins, because of their drunken antics and the pranks they pulled on other musicians. In addition to relishing their drinking adventures, the two guitarists bonded on a deeper level.
We quickly became best friends, Collen wrote. It wasnt just the guitar playing or extreme boozing. We both found that we were soaking up all that we could and learning more on the road than we had ever learned at school, with a healthy appetite for new and exciting cultural discoveries. We also found that we loved each others company. We could get into deep conversations that would last for hours.
When Collen quit drinking in the late 80s he realized Clark was spinning out of control. For years he had been a functioning alcoholic, but he had developed a serious problem and his behavior had become erratic and unpredictable. Every morning he woke up shaking and had to go to a bar and drink until he stopped trembling. At one point, he went on a bender in Paris and wound up in a hospital with alcohol poisoning. Then, in the winter of 1989, several members of the band were in a studio when their co-manager Peter Mensch called to tell them that Clark was found unconscious at a bar in Minneapolis and had been rushed to a nearby hospital, Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center.
