Interview with Jack Blades (Part One)
Jack Blades is undoubtedly best known to most people as the front man bassist/vocalist for Night Ranger, but he’s had a long and varied career outside of that band. In the late Seventies Blades was the bassist in a funk rock band called Rubicon, started by former Sly and the Family Stone sax player Jerry Martini. The band released two albums and one mildly successful single, and performed to 250,000 people at Cal Jam 2 before breaking up in 1979. Blades went on to a short-lived group called Stereo, which then morphed into Ranger. That band became Night Ranger, releasing its eponymous debut album in 1982. There followed a string of hits singles like “When You Close Your Eyes”, “Sister Christian”, “Four In The Morning”, and “Sentimental Street”, multi-Platinum albums and headlining tours before Night Ranger broke up in 1989.
Blades returned to multi-Platinum status with Damn Yankees, a “supergroup” consisting of himself, Ted Nugent, Tommy Shaw from Styx, and drummer Michael Cartellone. That lasted for two albums and yielded the mega-crossover hit “High Enough”, which may rival “Sister Christian” as the song included on the largest number of Monster Ballad collections. Blades then recorded a side project with Shaw (entitled, appropriately enough, Shaw Blades) before rejoining Night Ranger, which he has pursued since 1996. He has also recorded with TMG, released a solo album, and performed with Ringo Starr on VH1’s Storytellers.
In addition to that Blades has been an in-demand songwriter and producer. He has written for artists as diverse as Cher, Alice Cooper, Roger Daltrey and Aerosmith, and produced Ted Nugent, Great White, and many more.
I interviewed Jack Blades on Friday, October 15, 2009 by phone from his ranch in Northern California. I had met Jack once before, in the very early days of my writing career, when I was reviewing a Damn Yankees show in Atlanta for a local publication there. I remember him as being very engaging, and that’s exactly how he came across in interviewing him. One interesting side note to this discussion: during the actual interview Jack was his usual high-energy, very talkative self, but what I found most interesting about him is that before I began recording and we were just talking, he was much more soft-spoken than I had anticipated. Not at all standoffish, just not nearly as animated as he is in an interview.
I came away with the feeling that there’s a lot more to Jack Blades than meets the eye, and that perhaps his public persona has been crafted in such a way as to allow him to go out and sell his work while still preserving a quieter side that might not be as suited to public consumption. It’s not hard to see why Blades has been so successful in so many different settings; he has so much natural, unaffected enthusiasm for his various endeavors that it’s infectious. I’m sure that helps him to motivate people to want to work with him in moving things forward; in fact, I barely know the guy, and if he called me up right now and asked me to drop everything I’m doing to come help him with a new project of his, I bet he could talk me into doing exactly that.
This is Part One of a two-part interview. In this segment we discuss the upcoming Night Ranger/REO/Styx tour; the set list for that tour; what songs he and Tommy Shaw have been working on for another Shaw Blades record, Influence II; Jeff Watson working with Dennis DeYoung; Jack’s forthcoming second solo record; his philosophy of songwriting and trying to grow musically while balancing that against fan expectations; producing Vince Neil’s upcoming solo album; and why being an artist, singer and musician is an advantage to him as a producer.
Special thanks to Carol Kaye for arranging this interview.
