(You Can Still) Rock in America

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a song that still sounds like somebody kicked the doors off the arena and told the critics to take a hike. "(You Can Still) Rock in America" opens Night Ranger's second album, Midnight Madness, and it was written on a day off in a hotel room in Springfield, Illinois, right in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln's house. Jack Blades, the band's bassist and one of the lead singers, was out on the road with Sammy Hagar when he walked into town and picked up a stack of music magazines. Page after page was telling him rock was dead, that the kids had moved on to new wave outfits and the party was over. He looked at those headlines, then he looked at the rooms they had been filling night after night, thousands of people screaming and jumping, and the whole thing just did not add up.

The chorus came first. Blades sat down and said it out loud, you can still rock in America, because that was exactly what he was seeing from the stage. He and guitarist Brad Gillis share the writing credit, and Blades has told the story more than once, including in a Songfacts interview and again in a long piece with Louder. The verses came from the kids who stuck around after the shows. One girl in Missouri told him she had snuck out, grabbed her boyfriend, peeled out of the driveway with her dad running after the car, and figured she would catch hell when she got home. She did not care. The band knew how to rock, and that was enough. Blades took that little confession and turned it into the verses, a running commentary on what he was actually seeing while the magazines were writing the obituary.

He has been clear that the song was never a joke and never a political speech, Cold War or otherwise. He wrote it from the heart. Ted Nugent later told him he wished he had written it, and read it as a middle finger pointed at half the map. Blades just laughed and let him have that reading. The line he keeps coming back to is simpler. The song was true when he wrote it, and it is still true. Rock can mean the music, or it can mean kicking a little tail in your own life when somebody tells you the ride is over.

MCA put the track out as the first single from Midnight Madness in the fall of 1983. It climbed to number 15 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and number 51 on the Hot 100, a solid radio hit that did not yet tell the whole story of the record. The label's next pick caught the band off guard. They went with the power ballad "Sister Christian," written and sung by drummer Kelly Keagy about his little sister Christy. The guys heard the lyric wrong in the studio and talked him into keeping Sister Christian because it sounded cooler, even if his sister was going to kill him. That second single went top five and blew the doors open. When the Midnight Madness tour started they were playing theaters of about three thousand. After "Sister Christian" hit they were selling out arenas of ten thousand. Blades has called that the moment they knew they had arrived. The fast one had thrown the first punch. The ballad finished the job.

Midnight Madness itself landed in late October 1983, produced by Pat Glasser, the same hand who had guided the debut. The five who cut it were Blades, Keagy, Gillis, second guitarist Jeff Watson, and keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald. Gillis and Watson were a twin-guitar wrecking crew on that record. Gillis was already known for riding a Floyd Rose like a dive bomber, a trick he had sharpened on the road. Watson was working out eight-finger tapping, treating the fretboard like a piano with both hands. You can hear that fight in the solo section of "(You Can Still) Rock in America." It is not just speed. It is two players who refused to play the simple anthem chords and leave it there.

The road that got them to that hotel room started in the Bay Area, and it did not start as a rock band. In the late seventies Blades and Gillis were in Rubicon, a funk-leaning outfit led by Jerry Martini, the saxophone player from Sly and the Family Stone. Rubicon cracked the Top 40 in 1978 with "I'm Gonna Take Care of Everything" and played California Jam 2 on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and Foreigner, but the group ran out of gas. When Martini pulled the plug in 1979, Blades took Gillis and touring drummer Kelly Keagy with him and formed a hard-rock trio called Stereo. They played small rooms around San Francisco, including the Palms in the Tenderloin, and they were not in any hurry to be famous before they had songs worth hearing.

Fitzgerald came aboard in 1980. He had played with Montrose and was working with Sammy Hagar, and at the time he was Blades's roommate. He brought in Jeff Watson, a young guitar hotshot from Sacramento who already had his own band up north. The name on the poster changed to Ranger, pulled out of a hat according to Gillis, and they started opening for Hagar. Then a country act called the Rangers turned up with a trademark and a long history, and a two-page ad in Billboard made it plain the rock band had to move. They already had a song on the debut called "Night Ranger." Blades rang everybody up and said they should just use that. The rest of the guys thought the name was terrible. They were stuck with it anyway.

Right before the first album came out, Gillis got a call that sounded like a prank. Sharon Arden, managing Ozzy Osbourne, wanted him on a plane to New York to audition. Randy Rhoads had died in a plane crash in March 1982, and Ozzy needed a guitar player who could hold the live set together. Gillis thought somebody was messing with him until Ozzy got on the line and told him there were eighteen songs to learn. He took the gig for the spring and summer of 1982, then came home to the band. Boardwalk Records put out Dawn Patrol that year, with "Don't Tell Me You Love Me" as the calling card. By the time they rolled into the studio for Midnight Madness, most of the songs were already written, including the two that would end up defining them.

That is the long ride behind the three minutes the Zoo Crew just played for you. A funk band breaks up, three guys start over in the clubs, a roommate brings in a keyboard player and a second guitar slinger, a country band forces a name change, one of them fills in for Ozzy, and then a stack of magazines in Springfield says rock is finished. Jack Blades writes the answer in a hotel room, and the Zoo Freaks are still singing it back. If you want more of this kind of freeform album rock, deep cuts, and the stories behind the records, pull up a chair with the Zoo Crew over at THE ZOO. The station is listener supported and commercial free, the way rock radio ought to be.

Night Ranger keeps the doors open at the official Night Ranger website, where Midnight Madness is still listed with "(You Can Still) Rock in America" sitting at track one. You can also find the band on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans who want a room of their own have gathered at the Facebook group Night Ranger fans across the world unite, and the long-running fan podcast and tribute circle Fans In Motion keeps the stories moving at Fans In Motion and in their own Facebook group. Blades said it plain. These can be tough times. You can still rock in America.