Interview with Night Ranger

Back in January I was in an elevator at Macworld Expo with Jack Blades of Night Ranger and Tommy Shaw of Styx, headed down to the Apple booth to do a Shaw-Blades photo shoot for iProng Magazine issue #3, and at one point I thought I saw Jack pull out an iPhone and check his email on it. But in my haste to get the photo shoot wrapped before Apple could change their mind about letting us use their booth, I never got a chance to ask him about it.

Half a year later, Night Ranger has just released their new album Hole in the Sun, and I’m given the opportunity to interview Jack Blades about the band’s present and past. Jack is the band’s bass player and co-lead singer, and even in the band’s third decade, he speaks as passionately and enthusiastically about Night Ranger as ever. But first things first: did I really see you with an iPhone?

“You better believe it,” he says. “What I love the most about it it’s like all in one, man, everything. The fact that it can just sync it up to my laptop, you know, cause I’ve been an Apple guy forever. That’s what I do. I’m an Apple guy. You know, musicians, artists, they’re all Apple guys. So I’ve been on Apple, you know, with all my computers.”

Hole in the Sun is Night Ranger’s first new album in a decade, and the band best known for hit songs such as “Sister Christian” and “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” has a lot of history to live up to. So how do you deal with the expectations from your entrenched fanbase, along with those who know you from your hits and those who are just encountering your music for the first time?

“If you think about all those kind of things, you can trip yourself up. I mean years and years and years ago, when we had out Midnight Madness album out and it sold like four or five million copies, and then the label of course wanted us to get right back in after we toured for like two years straight, like ‘get back in there and do another record,’ and I was like, you know, there’s a lot of pressure on there. It’s like you’ve got to follow up your second record that was like so huge with your third record.”

“And I was freaking out about it, and I was talking to Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, who’s a good friend of mine, and we were just sitting around and I said man, I got all this, you know I’m thinking I’ve gotta write hits, we need to have hits, we gotta have that, and you know what he said to me? He says “Jack, man, I gotta tell you, you just go in and make another record. You just do what you do. You just go in and make another record. And after that, you make another record then. And you just keep just making records. And if you get all caught up in your head, it’s not gonna be right. You just make the record that’s in your heart at that time. You just go in there and do it. And it seemed so simple to me, and I’m like, oh! You know what I mean? And I went okay, so we went in there and had a real successful third album too, but I mean I have to hand it to Gibbons on that one, you know? He made me just slow down and go wait a minute, just go in there and do what you do, make another record.”

“So expectation-wise, all we can do is write songs that are in our heart, you know, and that are where we are. I mean here we are in 2008 and the record Hole in the Sun is where we all are right now. This is the music we’re playing right now, this is the music we just created, this is the music that’s coming out of us right now, and so be it, you know what I mean? I mean there’s always expectations, and I’ll never be able to make a record that sounds like our first album Dawn Patrol or our second album Midnight Madness, cause those records were made in the early eighties. I mean it’s like if I did that, I would be lying to myself because that would mean that twenty-something years of experience amounted to nothing, and no forward progression. Can you imagine that? Look at the iPhone. Why don’t you just make another iPhone like the old one, you know? How about me make something new and different and exciting, and let’s keep growing, you know that I mean? And it’s the same thing with out music, that’s kind of the way we feel.”

So is that mindset that’s led to your longevity in the industry, both with Night Ranger and with your other projects? “I think so, I think it’s that and just being fresh to everything and playing with a lot of different people. I mean you know, playing with the Damn Yankees and with Shaw-Blades with Tommy and I, you know, you saw us down there at Macworld in January, and just all those kind of, all the different people that I play with, man I’ve jammed with and played with Roger Daltrey from The Who, and all these people. You know, this is what my life is. I played with Ringo Starr, I did Ringo’s VH1 Storytellers, you know, I just love it.”

“This is my chosen field, I’m a musician. Its just like a doctor, after twenty years of doing something, doesn’t just decide hey forget it, you’re not a doctor anymore. No, that’s what you do. And my chosen field is as a musician. And I’ll just keep playing music, I don’t care where it is or who it is or who I’m playing for, that’s what I do. And that’s what I’ll keep doing for the rest of my life.”

It seems like rock bands stereotypically have a built-in hierarchy in which the lead singer is nearly irreplaceable and therefore the top dog, with the lead guitarist perched just beneath him, and the rhythm section not necessarily allowed to speak. How does that work with Night Ranger, where the two lead singers just happen to be from the rhythm section?

“”It’s funny. I thought about that, and it’s like [drummer Kelly Keagy] and I learned that long ago. I mean the bass player and the drummer are the first two guys to get fired, right? And we’re like okay, listen, we can get job security. What if we write the songs and sing them, we’ve got a little job security here, you know what I mean? And so we went for the job security. It just worked out real well for us.”

And just how did the band end up with two lead singers, when most bands only have one? “We never even thought about that. When we started playing and singing together, we were just like okay, this one sounds better for your voice, you do this one, okay this one sounds, I’ll do this one, you do this one, and I think, you know that? I think that when we were starting out in Night Ranger and all that kind of stuff, Kelly and I were always such big Beatles fans, and so it was a natural thing for me to think that it would be okay to have two lead singers, like John Lennon sings and Paul McCartney sings.”

Back at Macworld Expo, Jack shared the story of how Night Ranger’s biggest hit song, Sister Christian, actually began life with a different name:

“We were doing it, and Kelly wrote the song about his sister whose name is Christy, and she grew up in a small town in Oregon where they would just, you know, on Friday and Saturday night they’d be cruising up and down the streets, or what they called motorin’. You know, so they’d be, let’s go motorin’ up and down the streets. And so one day, we all thought that Kelly was singing ‘Sister Christian’ and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, because he was going ‘Sister Christy oh the time has…’ and I always thought, when we were just rehearsing it and jamming it out and stuff, I always thought he was saying Sister Christian. And one day he wrote down the lyrics, he said ‘Sister Christy’ and I’m like what? What do you mean Sister Christy? And he goes no, that’s my sister’s name. And I said dude, I thought it was Sister Christian. And he goes no, no, my sister’s name is Christy, it’s not Christian. And I said man, we’ve gotta call it Sister Christian. And he’s like, well I can’t do that, my sister’s name is Christy, how can I call it Christian? And I’m like dude, poetic license. We can change it. I mean Sister Christian, that sounds so much cooler. And he goes, you really think so? And I’m like yeah man, for sure it should be Sister Christian. And he was like okay, so we changed it to Christian, and that’s what happened, I mean with apologies to his sister Christy.”

But the story got even better, as one fan tried to interpret the song: “We had just finished the soundcheck in Rochester, Minnesota and we were going through the, you know, getting some food before the show and the lady that was dishing out the food for us said, you know my daughter, she’s been listening to that Sister Christian song over and over and over. It was right in 1984 when the song was a huge hit, and you know, the show was sold out, and we were like well yes ma’am, that’s really great. And she says, ‘Say, is that about a nun who sells dope to school kids? And we look at each other and we’re like ‘Yes ma’am, it is.’ And then we just walked away. This poor lady, you know, never destroy the dream, right?”

So what can new and old fans of the band expect from Hole in the Sun? “It’s the hardest rocking Night Ranger record since Dawn Patrol, since our first record. And I think the fans are gonna be, everybody’s gonna be really excited about it, just the fact that it’s twin blazing lead guitars, twin vocals, you know, lots of big choruses, just everything you expect from Night Ranger circa 2008. And I think that once people check out the record they’re gonna be very happy at what they hear. And we’re excited about playing all summer and we’re looking forward to seeing everybody out on the road with us.”