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Night Ranger

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Night Ranger is an American rock band from San Francisco that gained popularity during the 1980s. The quintet is perhaps best known for the power ballad "Sister Christian", which peaked at #5 in June 1984.

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Night Ranger is an American rock band from San Francisco that gained popularity during the 1980s. The quintet is perhaps best known for the power ballad "Sister Christian", which peaked at #5 in June 1984.

Nashville Then: Night Ranger concert at Municipal Auditorium in 1985

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Why Night Ranger’s ‘Big Life’ Was the Beginning of the End

By the time Night Ranger arrived at the release of their fourth album, they were poised to repeat the success of the previous three. But record company politics and a movie opportunity that soured took the band on a different ride.

Released Feb. 25, 1987,  Big Life wore the scars and effects of nearly a decade of nonstop hard work. “We had such huge success and the band, we were pretty severely medicated during that period of time,” bassist and vocalist Jack Blades laughed during a 2019 conversation with UCR. “But there’s some good stuff on that record.”

The San Francisco group had logged three straight albums, two of them platinum, collectively filled with a slew of hit singles, including “ Sister Christian ” from 1983’s Midnight Madness . The ballad, with Night Ranger drummer Kelly Keagy delivering the gritty, emotional vocal, gave the group a real taste of what it felt like to have huge success at both MTV and radio. The song flew all of the way to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984.

7 Wishes , released in 1985, matched the platinum success of its predecessor and put three additional Top 10 singles on the band’s musical resume. Still, they weren’t happy with the sound of the album and also wanted to make good on a long-held wish to just stay home in the Bay Area to make their next record.

Deciding to break with Pat Glasser, who had produced the group’s previous three LPs, Night Ranger began to meet with prospective producers. “I remember that Ron Nevison showed up. We had lunch in Sausalito and he’s quite a flamboyant character and a really great guy,” Keagy tells UCR now. “He’s super nice.”

Nevison had been in the studio for legendary sessions with the Who and Bad Company in the ‘70s and his success continued to grow into the ‘80s. Coming off a string of hit albums with bands like Survivor and Heart , his plate was crowded.

Still, he was keenly interested in taking on the project. “I really wanted to do that album, but a month or two later something came up. I had my manager, Michael Lippman, call their manager and pass,” Nevison tells UCR via email. “They were really pissed when I turned that down -- so pissed, in fact, that I was afraid when the Damn Yankees project came up two years later, that Jack Blades would sabotage it.”

He invited Blades out to his house in Bel Air and the pair had a nice afternoon. “He admired an American Indian artifact I had,” the producer remembers. “He said he collected that stuff. I told him I would let him have it if the Damn Yankees album went platinum. It did and I did.”

Night Ranger eventually landed on Journey producer Kevin Elson, who signed on to shepherd the album sessions at Fantasy Studios. From the get go, it was a move which felt good. “He had a real strong melodic sense of melody,” Keagy explains. “You could tell if [he liked something] you played for him. His face would light up. He worked on the songs with us to make sure it was the best that it could be.”

“For me, Big Life was a different album in that it had a lot more keyboards in it,” Blades said in 2017. “I’m not sure that I liked that.” In general, the record certainly sounded more technology driven. “It was my introduction to using a Linn drum machine,” Keagy shares. “I bought one and got really familiar with it. I started to use some of the sounds out of it, including on some of the song intros.”

Keyboardist Alan “Fitz” Fitzgerald was a wizard when it came to building up his parts on Big Life . “Some of the sounds that he used on our albums, weren’t heard before he used them,” Keagy points out, noting that the musician would spend months creating, blending and perfecting the various elements. “He was an absolute genius. Some of the sounds were amazing.”

Witness Fitzgerald’s work on the intro to the album’s title track, which sounds like it might have escaped from a Steven Spielberg film. It worked well as a tantalizing introduction to the album, giving way to the twin guitar attack led by Jeff Watson and Brad Gillis. “Big Life” set the stage well for the experience of listening to the rest of the record.

Listen to 'Big Life' by Night Ranger

“Secret of My Success” is probably the most well-known song from Big Life and one that came together outside of the regular album sessions. Bombastic and over the top, David Foster was at the helm, to help the band craft a huge single.

Earmarked as the title track for the Michael J. Fox movie of the same name, the Canadian producer came armed and ready. He had put together the identifiable introduction that would become a signature element of the song.

As Keagy arrived, he found Foster hard at work. “He was holding the reel of tape on a microphone stand and feeding it through a tape machine and those two tracks were recording to another tape machine,” the drummer and vocalist remembers.

The musician quickly discovered the visible passion the producer had for his craft. “He’s holding this microphone and this piece of tape is just going in a loop,” Keagy details, imitating the pattern of the sequence. “I’d never seen anything like that in my life. I’m like, ‘What are these guys doing? These guys are mad scientists!' He looks over at me and he winks at me.”

Keagy summarizes the experience of working with Foster as “awesome,” though the commercial results didn’t fully deliver what the band had been promised. “We’re all sitting around the TV watching the trailer for the movie and it’s like [sings ‘ Walking on Sunshine ’ by Katrina and the Waves] and I’m like ‘What?,’” Blades remembered in 2014.

Listen to 'Secret of My Success' by Night Ranger

“The movie people didn’t take our song, ‘The Secret of My Success,’ instead they put ‘Walking on Sunshine’ in there,” he continued. “Talk about the high hard one -- we were just like ‘You’ve got to be frikkin’ kidding me.’ We were calling everybody - we were calling attorneys and everybody and they were like, ‘Well, that’s what film people do.’ It’s like ‘Fuck you, we’re going to do what we want.’ So that just crumbled the whole thing -- the whole rollout that we were doing and everything like that was just a disaster.”

It cast an unfortunate pall on any potential success for the Big Life album, a record which already had seen its share of challenges, including the band collectively helping Blades say goodbye to his father, who passed away during the making of the LP.

“Jack and I got on the phone and discussed the chorus in ‘Carry On,’" Keagy remembers. “[His dad] Ned was passing and I thought, ‘What would his father say to him?’ He would want him to carry on. He would want him to keep going,” Keagy explains. “I think that’s where the chorus came up. I came to Jack and I said, ‘What if this was the chorus?' You know, 'I’ll be here to carry on/ I’ll be running down the road beside you. '"

Listen to 'Carry On' by Night Ranger

Personally, Keagy puts at least part of the blame for the failure of Big Life at the feet of “Secret of My Success.” “I’m not totally clear on what everybody else thinks. But I think at the time, we were kind of caught up in that whole thing of record, tour, record, tour,” he says. “I think when they released 'Secret of My Success,' the public and critics heard that song [with] all of those phony sounding horns and stuff. I think it was a disappointment.”

It widened a chasm that had been developing since the success of “Sister Christian,” a song which painted Night Ranger as a ballad band. “They didn’t let us be a rock band for the last two records that MCA was involved in,” Keagy laughs. “I think that was a disappointment for us, that we couldn’t call our own shots at that point. We were just part of the machine and we just felt let down. Because we wanted to release 'Big Life' [as a single]. We wanted to come out of the gate with fire and guns and everything.”

Fitzgerald exited during the early moments in the creative cycle for their next album, 1988’s Man in Motion , which was produced by Keith Olsen. The remaining members decided to be bold. “We thought we were being hot shit. We turned the record in without a ballad,” Keagy says. “They laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right . A Night Ranger record without a ballad. Do you think we want to release it without a ballad?’ They just held our feet to the fire.”

“Restless Kind,” a Keagy-sung ballad, was added to the album and while it was positively received by the label, who expressed excitement about the track, it went unused as a single. After touring for the album wrapped, the members of Night Ranger went their separate ways and moved on to other projects. Keagy and Gillis moved forward and eventually recorded an album under the Night Ranger banner, 1995's  Feeding Off The Mojo .

Listen to 'Restless Kind' by Night Ranger

Blades, meanwhile, got a certain last laugh with “ High Enough ,” his first hit single with Damn Yankees. “Night Ranger, right after 'Sister Christian,' MCA would only allow us to release ballads from that point on,” he explained in 2015. "It was very much a struggle in that context, but it was also a vindication for me, because [Night Ranger’s] record company and producer at that point, wouldn't allow me to sing a ballad.”

“I said, ‘I can sing a ballad,’ and they said, ‘No you can't. You sing the rockers. Kelly sings the ballads. That's how it works. That's the formula,’" he continued. “I was like, ‘Fuck the formula, let's just do this! Let's try it differently this time!’ And they said, ‘No you can't do it.’ So it was a nice vindication for me that I can have a huge smash hit with me singing a ballad.”

Ultimately, the bassist/vocalist wishes they could have had some time away before making Big Life . “I think at that stage of the game, we were just like hamsters in a cage, just going round and round and round and round,” he said in 2017. “I feel like if I would have taken some time and sat back, I could have written songs that were more meaningful to me.”

“Hence, they would have been more meaningful to the audience and stuff like that,” he concluded. “That’s not to say that it wasn’t a good album, but I think it could have been so much better.”

Happily, Night Ranger regrouped with the band's classic lineup beginning in 1996 and now makes music on its own terms. The group has released seven albums to date since the reunion, including 2021's ATBPO , and continue to tour regularly.

Top 100 '80s Rock Albums

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The Night Ranger albums you should definitely own

Still going strong after more than 40 years, AOR cult crew Night Ranger have sold millions of albums on the back of some all-time classic songs

In any genre of music, there are those who become superstars, those who never make it big, and in-between, those who climb that greasy pole almost to the top, only to slip back down into relative obscurity.

Such was the fate of Night Ranger , one of the great all-American rock bands. They couldn’t quite reach the level of success that was enjoyed by the giants of AOR : Boston , Journey , Foreigner , Survivor, Toto. But while many great melodic rock bands were destined to remain cult heroes – bands such as New England, Balance, Valentine and Diving For Pearls – it was a different story for Night Ranger.

In the mid- to late 80s, these guys sold ten million records worldwide. They had five Top 20 hits in the US. Among those was the mega-hit Sister Christian , one of the all-time classic power ballads, and a song that resonated so powerfully in the American psyche that it was later voted No.32 in VH-1’s 100 Greatest Songs Of The 1980s. It also featured in the hit movie Boogie Nights and the bestselling videogame Grand Theft Auto: Vice City .

It was in 1980 that Night Ranger formed in San Francisco. Originally named Ranger, the band comprised Jack Blades on bass and lead vocals, Brad Gillis and Jeff Watson on guitars, Alan Fitzgerald on keyboards and Kelly Keagy on drums and lead vocals. Their influences were varied: Deep Purple , Van Halen , Journey. Their twin-guitar attack was inspired by Thin Lizzy . But as Blades said: “Our sound was distinctly American, because that’s who we are.”

That sound was perfectly realised on the band’s first album, Dawn Patrol , which sold a million in the US. The follow-up, Midnight Madness , was an even bigger hit, thanks to Sister Christian . But the hits dried up after Seven Wishes in 1985, and by the end of that decade the band split up.

Jack Blades subsequently formed the supergroup Damn Yankees with Ted Nugent and Tommy Shaw of Styx. They had two platinum albums. But in 1996, the classic Night Ranger line-up reunited. And while there have been various personnel changes since then, this great band have continued making music, with 2021's ATBPO their most recent release. 

Back in ’84, they laid their cards on the table in the anthem (You Can Still) Rock In America . And as Blades says: “That song is as true today as it was back then.” He and Night Ranger are still living the dream.

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Dawn Patrol (Boardwalk, 1982)

Right before the band started recording this first album, guitarist Brad Gillis left to tour with Ozzy Osbourne as a replacement for Randy Rhoads , who had died in a plane crash in March 1982. Gillis promised he would return to Night Ranger. The other guys feared he might not. But he was true to his word, and what the band created was the best American hard-rock debut since Van Halen’s.

A supercharged, ultra-melodic sound was defined on brilliant songs such as Don’t Tell Me You Love Me, Sing Me Away, Eddie’s Comin’ Out Tonight and Young Girl In Love . The album quickly went platinum. Night Ranger had hit the ground running.

Midnight Madness (MCA, 1983)

After selling a million copies of Dawn Patrol , the band ended up broke when Boardwalk, their label, went bust. But a new deal with MCA quickly arrived, and with their second album Midnight Madness came the biggest hit of Night Ranger’s career.

Drummer Kelly Keagy had written a song about his sister, named Christy, and how, as a teenager, she and her friends loved to cruise around their home town. The song, retitled Sister Christian and sung by Keagy, soared to No.5 on the US chart. And there were other great songs on the album, from the gonzoid (You Can Still) Rock In America to the beautiful Let Him Run .

Seven Wishes (MCA, 1985)

Jack Blades describes the band’s third album as “a really classy record”. It was also the last genuine hit of the band’s golden era. During a tour with ZZ Top , Blades received some simple career advice from ZZ guitarist Billy Gibbons: “Just do what you do. Make another great record.” And they did exactly that with Seven Wishes .

The album’s two classy power ballads, Sentimental Street and Goodbye , reached the US Top 20. So too did masterful AOR song Four In The Morning . And there was also plenty of muscle in some of the album’s deeper cuts, in particular Night Machine and This Boy Needs To Rock .

Big Life (MCA, 1987)

In a year when so many huge rock records were released – including Appetite For Destruction, Hysteria and Whitesnake ’s 1987 – Night Ranger’s fourth album was lost in the shuffle. The first single from it was The Secret Of My Success , the title song for a hit movie starring Michael J. Fox. But while the movie lived up to its title, the single bombed. And so did the two that followed – acoustic ballad Hearts Away and bouncy rocker Color Of Your Smile .

Big Life is a fine album. Love Is Standing Near and I Know Tonight are two of the best songs Night Ranger ever recorded. But with their popularity in decline, the writing was on the wall.

Man In Motion (MCA, 1988)

At the end of the 80s, Night Ranger couldn’t get arrested. There were some great songs on Man In Motion – just not that one big hit they needed.

Although keyboard player Alan Fitzgerald had gone, replaced by Jesse Bradman, the band’s sound remained unchanged on finely crafted songs such as Restless Kind, Reason To Be and I Did It For Love , the latter written by Russ Ballard. But after four singles flopped, Man In Motion stalled at No.81 in the US. In 1989, the band split up. And when they re-formed two years later, Jack Blades was otherwise engaged with Damn Yankees. Without him, Night Ranger would be lost.

Somewhere In California (Frontiers, 2011)

What Night Ranger delivered in 2011 with Somewhere In California was their best record since the 80s. Although Jeff Watson had left the group, new guitarist Joel Hoekstra fitted in perfectly. And among the 11 songs were some genuine late-career classics.

On the sort-of title track, Growin’ Up In California , the Night Ranger story is transformed into a sun-kissed, kick-ass anthem. And the ballad Time Of Our Lives is one of their very best.

Neverland (Columbia, 1997)

Ten years on from Big Life , Night Ranger’s classic line-up returned on Neverland , but in the era of grunge and nu metal, the album failed to chart in the US. On a purely artistic level, however, Night Ranger were back on track. The band’s previous album, Feeding Off The Mojo , had been recorded by the trio of Brad Gillis, Kelly Keagy and bassist/vocalist Gary Moon. 

It was Night Ranger on half power. But with the five original members together again on Neverland , their signature sound was restored. The album’s title track is heavy with plenty of melody, a real humdinger. And among several ballads is a masterpiece: As Always I Remain .

Seven (CMC, 1998)

The title of the band’s eighth album was an attempt to rewrite history: an acknowledgement that their 1995 album Feeding Off The Mojo – featuring only two original members – was best forgotten. Adding to the confusion was the similarity between this title and that of their 1985 album Seven Wishes .

For all that, the music on Seven is straightforward. On the two standout tracks there are nods to classic British rock: a shout-out to the Stones on Sign Of The Times , and Beatles-style psychedelia on Don’t Ask Me Why. Seven proved to be the last album ever made by Night Ranger’s original line-up. Good that they ended it on a high.

High Road (Frontiers, 2014)

More than thirty years into their career, Night Ranger still had plenty of gas left in the tank. Their 2014 album, High Road , is proof. Its title track has a killer chorus and a feelgood vibe crystallised as Blades sings: ‘ It’s a beautiful day to be dreaming .’ Knock Knock Never Stop is ballsy rock’n’roll, and there’s a clever left turn on L.A. No Name , an acoustic guitar instrumental brilliantly played by Gillis and Hoekstra.

Following the album’s release, Hoekstra left Night Ranger to join Whitesnake, and the man he replaced, Doug Aldrich, hooked up with Blades and Journey drummer Deen Castronovo to form supergroup Revolution Saints. It’s a small world.

...and one to avoid

Feeding Off The Mojo (Drive Entertainment, 1995)

In the early 90s, a new version of Night Ranger was launched: a power trio in which Brad Gillis and Kelly Keagy were joined by bassist/vocalist Gary Moon, who’d been in Three Dog Night in the late 80s. This line-up made only one album – and it was just as well. Despite a couple of good songs – Precious Time, The Night Has A Way – the album lacked both energy and the sizzle of two guitarists, while Moon’s hammy singing didn’t help.

Feeding Off The Mojo ? On the contrary, Night Ranger had lost it. And it was only rediscovered when the original band reunited for 1997’s Neverland .

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q . He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar . He lives in Bath - of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

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