Geek Love: Night Ranger

It was a slow weekend, and I wound up looking through some of the old files on my computer, and I found some writing of mine where I had written a submission (never sent it or intended to) for the magazine CMJ. One of my favorite features of that magazine was the guest column at the end of every issue called "Geek Love", where the writer would spout off on some embarrassing youthful music obsession. The subject of mine is predictable, but I enjoyed reading it again, and I'm busy today, so in lieu of a new post...

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Everyone has their own party tricks; little things they do that are only impressive when everyone is drunk. Some people can twist their tongues around in different shapes (I can do this), some people juggle and are then immediately shown up by someone else who can juggle more, and I once had a friend who could blow bubbles out of her eyelids. But my best party trick is that, from pure memory and without having to think about it for one second, I can draw the Night Ranger logo perfectly.

And that’s just the start, because there’s no a person alive who, after witnessing this impossible feat, can resist asking me, “How the hell do you know how to do that?”

It’s not something that comes easily, I tell them. This isn’t for novices, I tell them. There’s only one way to get where I am today, and that’s to spend 2 long junior high years practicing, comparing the imitation to the original on the cassette cases (note: I wasn’t even cool enough to buy vinyl) and then repeating this work on every available space: book covers, guitar cases, the back of the desk in front of you, your gym locker. Dedication is the name of the game.

Of course, the logo drawing had its origin in actual fandom of the music, and I’ll swear to whoever you want that I’m not exactly sure how it happened. My best guess is this: when I moved from Athens, Greece to Houston, Texas halfway through the 6th grade, my letters to my old friends always included a long list of bands that was compiled solely to impress them with my musical knowledge, and for some reason, I thought they’d be impressed if I mentioned Night Ranger, who, at that point, I’d only seen on MTV. At some point, I backed up the letter’s boasts and actually bought a Night Ranger album. I’m not sure whether to say that it was all downhill or all uphill from there, but that was the start.

And once those cassettes were bought, it was only a matter of time until the tennis racket came out of the closet and lived the life it was meant to as a fake guitar playing Night Ranger songs. In my hands, this tennis racket was a guitar that rocked stadiums of standing-room-only crowds of 2 million (note: was not yet aware of stadium’s actual capacities). My stage name was Rick James (note: was not yet aware of THE Rick James), I fronted and played shredding guitar solos in the band Phoenix, and I had accomplished staggering success at an amazingly young age, selling a billion copies each (note: was not aware of typical album-sale success) of Phoenix’s albums Dawn Patrol and Midnight Madness. My fantasy included my junior high classmates somehow being oblivious to Phoenix’s massive success until they were assembled in their homerooms one day to watch a documentary about how EVERYONE in the world loved Phoenix and their hits “You Can Still Rock In America” and “Sister Christian” (the real version of which I had followed up the Billboard charts only to watch it stall at number five. In the alternate universe I had created, Phoneix took it to #1, where it stayed for, oh, about a year). The boys of Memorial Junior High nearly exploded with envy, the girls all swooned, and everyone felt a near-crippling regret for ignoring me for so long.

My love for Night Ranger finally came to a head in the fall of 1986, when I found out that they would be bringing their 7 Wishes tour to Southern Star amphitheater at Astroworld, Houston’s sleazefest of an amusement park. The tickets went on sale on a weekday, and I had to get my Mom (you heard me) to “stand in line” to buy the tickets. In this case, “stand in line” means that she stood ahead of the one other guy who showed up to buy tickets, and read her romance novel while she waited for a couple hours for the tickets to go on sale. I called home from school at lunchtime to get some of the best news I’ve ever gotten in my life: second row, center. I was ecstatic.

My friend Lyle, in a spectacular show of friendship that I’ve never forgotten, went with me, and spent a half hour before the show convincing me to get on Greased Lightning, a one-loop coaster, my first intentional trip upside-down. Starship opened (technically, it was a co-headline, but no one was there to see Starship) and they bookended their set with “We Built This City” (yes, they played it twice), before Night Ranger took the stage by “magically” appearing out of a box in the center of the stage. And there I was, second-row center, in front of thousands of people who liked Night Ranger just like me (if not quite as much as I did). I spent half of the show turning around to look at the mass of people who were cheering right at me (or at least in my general direction), validating my choice of favorite band.

I walked back to the Astroworld pick-up circle where my mom (there she is again. She’s the greatest) was waiting to pick up Lyle and me. I had my ticket stub (wish I still did), I had my t-shirt with the baseball sleeves, the 7 Wishes cover on the front and the tour dates on the back. At that moment, there was no way in the world that Night Ranger would ever, EVER stop being my favorite band.

But like most of the shows that I had been to up to that point, it had the strange effect of making me lose interest in the band a few months later. And not long after that, I got into Simple Minds, then INXS, then REM, then the Smiths and it wasn’t long until I was completely ashamed of my faux-metal junior high years.

Still, the scars of my Night Ranger fandom actually look pretty great: I top anyone in the Who Had The Worst Music Taste When They Were Young game, and I can still impress people with my logo-drawing prowess. If I ever forgot how to draw the Night Ranger logo, I’d assume it was the beginning of the end, that I’d forget everything I’d ever learned, and I might as well just curl up into a ball, pull the quilt over my head, and start dying.