NIGHT RANGER EXPLAIN THEIR OWN MIGHT!

FEATURES

Teri Saccone

Talk about your classic identity crisis— Night Ranger is one outfit that’ve experienced a shitload of schizophrenic tendencies. Throughout their five-year tenure at the top of the charts, it’s been virtually impossible to pin down what they’re all about, musically speaking.

Consider the following: Night Ranger’s auspicious debut LP—Dawn Patrol— featured ex-members of a Frisco-based funk/rock band called Rubicon (Jack Blades, Kelly Keagy, and Brad Gillis— vocals/bass, vocals/drums, guitar, respectively), along with ex-Montrose/ Sammy Hagar keyboardist Alan “Fitz” Gerald, and metalhead-guitarist Jeff Watson. An interesting combination, to say the least. This premier release nevertheless proved that these guys could rock hard ’n’ wild at will, especially with the wailing guitar attack supplied by Gillis (who, incidentally, briefly replaced Randy Rhoads in Ozzy’s band). And, although the album’s single, “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me,’’ is considered by the band to be one of their “rougher’’ songs (it was typical AOR fare), Dawn Patrol did offer harder-edged material.

The follow-up release, Midnight Madness, spawned three singles that shot straight to #1: two rather syrupy ballads (“Sister Christian’’ and “When You Close Your Eyes”), and one bona fide rock anthem, “(You Can Still) Rock In America.”

If the first two albums did show some teeth, the third LP, Seven Wishes, was a pair of dentures in comparison. “Sentimental Street” ended up as one of the album’s #1 singles, and with material like that, the whole of Seven Wishes brought N.R. right back to less aggressive— basically wimpy—terrain.

To confuse matters even more, the band was, at the time, being featured in conceptual videos that portrayed them as a bunch of yuppie-ish jerks who were, basically, “sensitive guys.” But here’s the real twist—because of their live shows, Night Ranger were being brandished as a tight unit of balls-to-the-wall rockers. Their audiences knew their secret—Night Ranger could bring the arena down with their smokin’ live performances, no matter how middle-of-the-road they sounded on radio.

NIGHT RANGER EXPLAIN THEIR OWN MIGHT!

Now if that doesn’t mix you folks up just a nary, remind yourselves that you are reading about Night Ranger in the world’s leading heavy metal magazine! Hell, even / was slightly confused as to why METAL decided to feature this particular band on these revered metallic pages. It all became clearer when I had the chance to hear some material off their new LP, Big Life, which brings Ranger closer to their roots, playing hard-edged rock ’n’ roll with a gutsy bite that’ll surprisingly knock you on your ass.

Only the title track had been mixed when I met with Jack Blades and Kelly Keagy at New York’s Record Plant studios . . . but, judging from that one track alone, the new stuff is certainly a whole lot heavier than what you’ve probably come to expect from these guys. Cynic that I was about Night Ranger, I came out pretty damned impressed.

• • •

Vocalist/drummer Keagy—very enthusiastic about the new LP and eager to clarify any misconceptions about the band—doesn’t mince words about his expectations for 1987. “This is gonna be a major record for us,” he admits. “The. band has gotten so much better at playing together over the years that we cut the tracks live in the studio with all of us in there together.”

A few minutes later, vocalist/bass player Jack Blades enters the room, zipping off to the john before settling in for some straightforward conversation about Big Life. “The title track happens to be my favorite,” he confesses, “and if you had a dick (noticing I’m of the feminine persuasion), it would knock your dick in the dirt.

“This album is gonna give people a better idea of what we’re about because we’re making sure that we’re staying with this project to the very end. Making sure that it’s mixed the way we want it to be so that it sounds as hard as we really are,” Jack continues. “The Seven Wishes LP was pretty dissatisfying for us because we left the mixing up to the producer. We left to tour Japan right before it was being mixed and, up to then, it sounded great. But when we cjot back it was finished, and it sounded like one limp dick.”

Would Blades go so far as to describe Seven Wishes as having a wimpy sound?

“Well, I feel that it’s less than what we hoped it would have been,” he responds. “I’m not blaming anyone for that but, for whatever reasons, that LP didn’t turn out the way that Brad, Jeff, Kelly, Fitz and Jack recorded it and wanted it to turn out. So we made damn sure that this album was gonna turn out our fucking way, and not the way some asshole wanted to control it.”

The band spent a grueling two-and-ahalf months in the studio recording Big Life (they admit that they’d much prefer being out on the road), and—to compliment their ideas and style—they recruited producer Kevin Ellson (of Journey fame) to co-produce the album. They also added one intangible but vital element to the record—fun.

‘‘I think it’s the first record that we had fun making since we did our first album,” says Blades. “I think it’s because we took three or four months off after we came off the road. In the past, when we did a record, we’d usually come off a ten month tour, take three weeks off, go right into recording and then into touring again. This time we took some time off—let everybody sit back and really concentrate on writing tunes. So we had better ideas when we re-entered the studio.

‘‘This time, the album wasn’t forced,” he continues. “I mean, everybody had a good feeling with this one, and the key to rock ’n’ roll is feeling. I don’t give a fuck who you are—you gotta feel it. On Big Life, all five of us are blazing away together live, and that good feeling—that live feeling—really translates onto the tape. This year, we’re gonna set the record straight.”

And what about Night Ranger’s wishywashy image? “Night Ranger? Man, those guys are a bunch of fags; they’re a bunch of poof-tahs,” jokes Keagy as he and Blades erupt in laughter. “Man, we’re an American rock band. All those dudes in those English bands are fags,” Blades laughs in a mock-macho tone, adding “Are you gonna quote me on that?”

Keagy: (to Blades) “Now when we go over there to tour this year, you can be sure they’ll be throwing shit at us on stage.”

In actuality, Night Ranger haven’t exactly gone over tremendously well in England, but Jack Blades doesn’t seem to be losing much sleep over it. “We’ve been over to Europe to tour, and I think it’s important to keep building up your audience over there,” he admits. “We did fine in Germany and Holland, but in England—there’s some weird shit going on there. It’s a bizzare scene—if a record is #1 here first, they might never have even heard of the damn thing there. I mean, this chick Samantha Fox (an English singer who is charting well over there) ... will you give me a break? Would you, please? I mean, I could go and cut a hole in the ass of my pants and get the same attention. In fact, it really happened by accident at a gig one night in Indianapolis.

“I came out of this Alladin’s lamp that we had on stage for the tour,” Blades recalls, a distinctive gleam in his eye. ‘‘As I came out of this thing, I heard my pants rip. They ripped all the way down, and it was like I had two pieces of clothing on with the crotch ripped right down the middle. So here I am, playing right down in front, trying to hold my guitar in front of my crotch, but all the people in the front rows are trying get a good look at me. Anyway, we were still on tour about three months later when my production manager comes up to me and says, ‘Here’s a picture of you at the Indianapolis gig.’ So I look and say ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ He says ‘Look real close.’ I look again and there’s everything hangin’ out for all the world to see. I was out there singing ‘If you’re handed seven wishes ... ’ (laughing). What do you do in a situation like that? You keep on playing.”

Blades maintains that seeing the band in a live context is definitely crucial in understanding what N.R. is really all about. “If you come to our live shows, you see where Night Ranger stands, in no uncertain terms. I think that, because of our past, our record company and radio in general have given people certain ideas about us. Because we’ve had real success with ballads as far as airplay goes, people don’t know if we’re a ballad/pop band or a hard rockin’ band with songs like ‘Rock In America’ or ‘Don’t Tell Me You Love Me.’ We are much harder when we play live. That’s been where the inconsistency has come in, and I think on Big Life, we’ve put aside all those inconsistencies and made a consistent album.

“Our record company has never really tried to stuff any particular style down our throats,” he continues. “But they’ve always pushed us to release the ballads as singles. And this time we told them, ‘If you release a ballad, we’re fucking walking.’ You see, we wanted to release rock tunes, because that’s what we’re really all about. We got that commitment from them, so we feel good about it.”

Kelly offers his reasoning as to why Night Ranger has often been associated with heavy metal: "I think it’s because we came on the scene in ’83 at the same time that Quiet Riot, Motley Crue, and Def Leppard came out, and we were all releasing new records. We were a lot more metal then, but we branched out a bit since then. We’ve become more poporiented, which is good for us.”

It may have been good for Night Ranger to become more pop-oriented in terms of dollars and exposure, but what about their fans? ‘‘It’s been a natural thing,” Kelly explains. ‘‘We haven’t consciously said, ‘Let’s write a hit song.’ It hasn’t happened that way. We’ve evolved that way because every time you go into the studio to make an album, you’re a different person than you were the time before. You’ve gone through different things and you have to let ’em out. We still have all the powerful guitars that anybody could want—especially on the new album—it’s just that everyone in the band happens to agree with our musical direction. It just happened.”

"This year we're gonna set the record straight." —Jack Blades

“As Jack said,” Keagy continues, “we rock harder live than we do on records, and that’s because we get all that energy from the audience. We get pumped and we really pound hard. Even if it’s a ballad, we do it harder live and it ends up sounding huge. Touring is the thing that really gets us charged.”

The road is also the place where the band often comes up with ideas for songs. In fact, the Big Life title came during the band’s jaunt through Japan, where someone spotted the phrase on a shopping bag. Clever, huh? “Actually, a couple of songs on Big Life started during our soundchecks on our last tour,” explains Keagy. “Lots of times we’ll play AC/DC numbers at our soundchecks and, one time, we did the most beautiful rendition of Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing.’ When we did that one, everybody’s hair was standing up on their arms. Speaking of Jimi, I recorded my lead vocals in Studio B here at the Record Plant, where Electric Ladyland was actually recorded. That was an amazing experience. But overall, we had great ideas for this record and everyone contributed and was so creative. It’s gonna be a winner.”