Oct 152010
On behalf of Townsman hrrundivbakshi, who I believe is vacationing in England with the love of his life, and at the request of Townsman cdm, I am moving Townsman jungleland2‘s posted Night Ranger live performance of “Rock in America” to The Main Stage for our latest edition of If You Can’t Say Anything Nice About…
The rules are simple:
No potshots allowed at all the obvious targets in this clip. Rather, say something nice about the band, their performance, and anything else you may see, hear, or feel while watching this video. If you don’t have anything nice to say, that’s OK; Rock Town Hall offers the occasional thread to post a snarky comment.
Thanks.
None of the guitars have pointy headstocks.
It is nice to see the local community theater spotlight ace getting some work.
The keyboard player’s Look — knit cap with beard — was ahead of its time.
The placement of the drummer to the side rather than in the back was innovative.
The singer/bassist is very energetic.
The tempo of the song is as fast as a Ramones song, but they still fit a lot of tasty licks in there.
They are not lying — you CAN still rock in America.
The keyboard player is not shilling for a product. His giant gray fort blocks all product logos. Also the other band members cannot possibly see him.
The guitarist with the red strat has invented time travel. He has an iPhone from 24 years in the future duct taped to the back of his guitar, seen at 3:56.
The vocal harmonies, if “real”, are very, very accurate and on-pitch. Overall a very tight performance.
Around the 2:20 mark the lead guitarist somehow manages to nicely wring some really high notes out of the 4th fret position of his fretboard…Or maybe the other guitarist picked up the solo and the camera man was just being nice by focusing on that guitarist and his Knots Landing-worthy hairdo.
Good call, BTW, BigSteve and trigmogigmo on the indisputable signs of time travel.
“The vocal harmonies, if “real”, are very, very accurate and on-pitch.”
Yes, the harmonies starting at 2:34 are so expertly mixed by the soundman that the lead singer’s sporadic additions to them seem to make no difference at all. It’s awesome how quickly the soundman adjusted to that.
Neat trick at 2:05 when the lead guitarist drops his left hand off the neck and makes an upward motion while stretching the string with the whammy bar. And he only looks at the audience to see who noticed for like a second before returning to playing.
It was very nice of them to take the two couplets that end on the same word and put them back-to-back early on, so we didn’t have to wonder whether they’d be able to pull off the feat of two same-word couplets in one song for very long.
The shirt that the guy with the red guitar is wearing would look very nice on a similar era Justine Bateman.
They are very kinetic. Indeed the overall ferocity of their attack on this song is so potent, that I felt completely satisfied after only 20 seconds. It felt like a full serving of Night Ranger. As they inexplicably say about many different sports on TV, they really came to play.
I enjoyed the stage set-up with the drummer & key player facing each other between a wall of Marshall amps. Almos’ make me nostalgic for High School. Almost…
Night Ranger is definitely the best band from the 80s who had a sideways drummer. They are also all attractive enough and only one career-degree away from The Nuge. I agree that this is a ripping rendition, and their shows of this era were probably a lot of fun.