NIGHT RANGER WANT TO MEET YOUR SISTER TOO!

NIGHT RANGER WANT TO MEET YOUR SISTER TOO!

FEATURES

by

Kevin Knapp

Let's get this straight. This article is NOT about a talking car. That may be in next month's issue, I don't know. But this is about Night Ranger, a band of people who sing and play instruments, make records and sell lots of them, stuff like that, but do not chase crooks down alleys or pump more carbon monoxide into California's dwindling atmosphere. OK? So no more of that.

The band, however, may have become a vehicle for the members of Night Ranger, who are quickly on the road to success already with a pair of gold albums to their credit. The San Francisco quintet hit paydirt last year with the single "Don't Tell Me You Love Me," a hard-rocker that fit quite comfortably in most AOR formats. But their current radio/video hit is the softer ballad "Sister Christian," which is helping to push their latest LP Midnight Madness well past the first album's gold-status sales.

"Everybody expected us to come out with a second album and just bang it over the head with a real hard-driving thing like 'Don't Tell Me You Love Me,' " says Jack Blades, Night Ranger's bassist and one of the band's two lead vocalists. "Instead, we really felt that songs like 'Sister Christian' and 'Let Him Run' were such good songs that we said, 'Man, this is Night Ranger as well as "Don't Tell Me You Love Me" is Night Ranger.' There's no reason why we shouldn't put that side of us on our album."

Fans of Night Ranger's hard-rocking side might have had due reason to expect more of the same from Midnight Madness. After all, guitarist Brad Gillis did a short-term stint playing for Ol' Bat-Eyes Hisself on Ozzy's Speak Of The Devil tour, appearing on that album. And why would such a sensible, seemingly even-keeled fellow like Brad go off moonlighting in the Land of Oz? Searching for gangrener pastures?

"I like a lot of New Wave." -Kelly Keagy

"At the time, there was nothing going on with Night Ranger," explains Kelly Keagy, drummer and the other lead vocalist. "We were trying to get a record deal then, so it's good we had that release. In fact, I think it helped us when our album came out, since there was some attention drawn toward Brad that had nothing to do with Night Ranger. But after the first week he was out there with Ozzy, he called us up saying, 'I wanna come home!' "

But "home," at the time, was in some disarray. Night Ranger had its legs kicked out from under it when their original record company, Boardwalk, inconveniently folded up. The unhappy interim left Gillis free to hire out his services while the rest of the band pondered fate and awaited a new record deal. Shortly thereafter, the deal did come, and Night Ranger was the first act signed to the fledgling Camel Records affiliate of MCA Records. As Ozzy's tour came to a close, Gillis returned to the fold and the band regrouped.

The trio of Gillis, Keagy and Blades had been a unit since working together as members of Rubicon, a funk-rock outfit that cut two albums and opened the huge Cal Jam II festival before the band's demise in 1979. The three stuck together to found Stereo, a short-lived combo that played the Bay Area's club circuit and proved to be the incubator for the present-day Night Ranger.

"We started out as a club band," offers Blades, "a very pop-oriented club band. A lot of the tunes we have now came out of Stereo. 'Sister Christian,' our big hit now, came out of that band. So it was like a proving ground for Night Ranger. But things in Stereo never meshed right.

"Fitz (keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald) was my roommate at the time, and he had just quit playing with Ronnie Montrose's Gamma. Fitz just kind of said, 'Let's form a rock band and get this whole thing together.' He knew Jeff Watson from Sacramento, where Jeff was a hot-shot guitarist with his own band, and so we all got together and— BOOM! And that was four years ago."

Things seemed to mesh right this time. The bandmembers connected as to the direction of their new group. They already had a number of songs to start with, they had a sound, they had the players. They had what seemed to be the makings of a successful rock 'n' roll venture.

Everything but a handle to hang it on.

"Our first gig was with Eddie Money at the Phoenix Theatre," recalls Blades, "and we didn't even have a name! In front of 2,000 kids, we walked out there and the guy introduces us like, 'Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Hhhrrrffffgghal' We told him to blurt out anything, just something cuz we didn't have a name yet. It was wild. We were up there blazing away.and people were out there saying, 'Who ARE these guys?'"

The identity crisis didn't last long, fortunately for the band, and Night Ranger's stylized logo soon adorned their 1982 debut album Dawn Patrol. Carving out a niche in the saturated AOR market, they put a dent on radio playlists around the country with a sound that overlays the metallic hard rock base with pop-oriented tunefulness and harmonies. The band likens their metal-pop hybrid to a "stainless steel" sound: hard, fleet and polished, an American response to the much-ballyhooed New British Invasion. It's a sound they've found their countrymen particularly receptive toward.

"Last year we were on the road with Sammy Hagar and Kiss," Blades notes. "The press was having a field day with Culture Club and Kajagoogoo and Bow Wow Wow, and they were heralding the New Age of rock ’n’ roll.But everywhere we went, kids wanted to get out there and rock ’n’ roll and just go for it, no matter where it was. West Coast, East Coast, the heartland especially. So we were going, ‘Hey, man, what are these cats in the magazines talking about?’ You can still rock in America.”

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Which is not to say that Night Ranger has any particularly bad axe (?—Ed.) to grind with their New Wave -counterparts.

“Hey, I like a lot of that stuff,” Keagy maintained. “It’s not us-against-them, we’re not trying to be like that. I know a lot of bands are trying to espouse that kind of thing right now, coming on real strong, but we don’t do that. We listen to lots of stuff.”

Keagy and Blades, who co-author the lion’s share of the Night Ranger repertoire, see their success as connecting with their audience on a personal level—not only through the music, but through their lyrics, which have that “lived-in” look to their writers.

“A lot of it is autobiographical,” reveals Keagy. “We write songs about stuff that happens for us. Real stuff.”

“We’re not like some of these bands now where the lyrics come second,” adds Blades, ‘’but we’re not some kind of hidden-meaning ‘message’ band or political conscience-type, either. The songs are something that matter to us. Otherwise, we could take this Holiday Inn menu—(sings) ‘Two eggs on whole wheat!’—put a guitar lick behind it and sell a million records.”

“Our songs have substance,” Watson emphasizes. “The lyrical content is real strong. It’s not like ‘bang your head’ or something.”

Is this a sense of optimism that Night Ranger brings to its music?

“More than optimism, it’s sensitivity,” says Watson, “the way we view things. The optimism shows when we do things like this, interviews and shows, because we’re so happy with what we’re doing.”