Is it better to burn out than fade away?

I had a friend in highschool named Wendy Hastings who LOVED Def Leppard. That's all I'd hear about when we talked; Joe Elliott, Def Leppard and Pyromania. At the time, I was a HUGE Loveryboy fan. I must've played the LP Get Lucky a bazillion times in our basement. (gotta love the red leather pants)
So after alot of nagging by Wendy I finally watched a Lep video on MTV one night and became totally intrigued. Not by Joe Elliott, although I admit I was completely envious of his hair, but of their music and the fact that they weren't your average rock band. They were cute, running all over the stage with youthful energy and they're songs were really solid. I was sold!
22 years later I still love the Leps. Maybe even more now than I did then. At the same time like any past love there is some pain involved. Why? Because my favorite member of the group died back in 1991. As much as I have enjoyed VH1 Classic's Metal Month, it's still quite painful to watch when the videos for Photograph, Rock of Ages and especially Foolin' come on the screen. Steve Clark looked so young then. You couldn't see the demons lurking in his head. All you saw was his blonde hair, his pale skin under whatever opened shirt he happened to be wearing at that time and his guitar down around his knees. What was hidden was his poor, tortured soul and his badly abused liver. He was as talented as he was depressed.
I had a friend in college named Dave who spent hours in a hallway trying to perfect the opening guitar sequence from the song Foolin. A few years later he crashed a motorcycle he was taking for a test drive, hit a tree head on and died from the injuries.
Then the video for the song comes on and there's Steve playing that opening part on the acoustic guitar. It leaves me somewhat speechless and sad.
That song always reminds me of Dave and Steve....it probably always will

Here's what Joe Elliott wrote about Steve five years ago:
http://www.defleppard.com/diaries/index.html

So here we are, January 8th, 2001 and I’m in Japan with the Cybernauts. Tonight I’ll be singing a song called “Rock and Roll suicide”…How ironic, don’t’ you think? It’s 10 years to the day since Steve passed away and I shall be dedicating that particular song to his memory.
Steve lived it like he wanted to, and if the truth be known, probably went the same way. Always one notch too low with the strap, always one step ahead with the ideas, he could be the most inspiring and depressive person you ever met. But I wouldn’t change a thing. Yes, of course, I wish he was still alive but I doubt he’d be in the band anymore….But you never know do you??

I’ve seen women fighting over him, I’ve seen him fighting with his own demons and I saw him lose the ultimate battle, the one for his own life. At the end Steve wasn’t happy but he always meant well, even if he knew in his heart of hearts that he was letting us down. I think he enjoyed the success , but ultimately wanted to be Johnny Thunders more than he wanted to be Steve Clark. We all found out the hard way he couldn’t be both.

I miss him, I miss his humor, I miss his spark, but I don’t miss the heartache of seeing him slowly killing himself. Life moves on and so did we, and to borrow from one of his favorite bands, he’s ten years gone.

It’s almost nine years since Viv joined and we’re still here doing our thing. In many ways we’re a stronger unit now than we were before, but we wouldn’t be in this position if it hadn’t been for the contribution of one Stephen Maynard Clark. I love you, man, I always will, and I know that if you are up there (I doubt it!), you’re watching what we do, and you’re rooting for us. My guess is you’re DOWN there, whooping it up w/his un-holiness, beating him at cards and telling him why the Pistols were the world’s second greatest band. You always did love the danger of it all….