Power ballads, in one form or another, have been a part of rock and roll almost since the genre began. But there’s no doubting the format hit a new high in the ’80s. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of this mini-genre than the stirring “Sister Christian” by Night Ranger.
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What is “Sister Christian” about? How did the band come up with its restrained-to-rocking arrangement? And what classic movie brought the song to a new audience via an unforgettable needle drop? Let’s go motoring back to the ’80s to find out all the answers.
Slowing It Down a Bit
Night Ranger came barreling out of San Francisco with their 1982 debut album Dawn Patrol, which trafficked in hard rock, albeit with enough hooks and harmonies to make it palatable to a pop audience. The single “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” just scraped into the Top 40, setting the stage for their 1983 sophomore record Midnight Madness.
“Sister Christian,” which the band included on Midnight Madness, was a song they had been playing in clubs for a while before they even started their recording career. Drummer Kelly Keagy wrote the song on acoustic guitar. When he did, he was already strumming a kind of instrumental buildup into the chorus, which would anticipate the way the song would sound when Night Ranger recorded it.
The idea of a hard-rocking band coming out with a sensitive ballad didn’t scare off Night Ranger, in part because of the subject matter. Instead of it being a love song (or love-gone-wrong song, for that matter), “Sister Christian” focused on a big brother’s concern for his younger sister as she navigated the pitfalls of her burgeoning maturity. Keagy explained as much to this author for the book Playing Back the ’80s: A Decade of Unstoppable Hits:
“I think that’s the reason why we liked it. It wasn’t lovey-dovey. It had some sort of edge to it. And it had a connection with people about growing up or moving ahead in life. That’s what I wanted it to be.”
By the way, the title that has confused listeners into thinking the song had some sort of religious subtext was an accident. When Night Ranger bassist Jack Blades heard Keagy singing the song for the first time, he thought he heard Christian, not Christy, which was Keagy’s sister’s actual name. Christian stuck.
Born to Boogie
With Keagy delivering a heartfelt lead vocal, and the way the somber piano of Alan Fitzgerald opens up into the thrilling guitars, “Sister Christian” was a no-brainer hit when released as a single in 1984, making it to No. 5 on the pop charts. If you missed it the first time, you might have caught it during a wild scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights in 1997, when it played during a drug deal-gone bad as part of the dealer’s mixtape.
“We were laughing in the theater,” Keagy said about when the band members first saw the movie. “Jack and I were sitting next to each other. And we were saying, ‘Yeah, remember that guy in North Hollywood? This could have been filmed in his house.’ We totally connected with that scene. Other than the firecrackers, it all happened to us. I mean somebody could have been following us around.”
The Meaning of “Sister Christian”
“Sister Christian” acknowledges both the narrator’s willingness to protect his little sister and his realization there’s only so much he can do. You know those boys don’t want to play no more with you, he warns, suggesting that their intentions have changed. It’s touching to hear him deliver his advice: Sister Christian, there’s so much in life / Don’t you give it up before your time is due.
The refrain is one of the most misheard and misunderstood in all of rock. Keagy is singing You’re motoring, not You’re Motor-Ann, or some other derivation. The lyric serves two purposes. It refers to Christian going out at night in cars with her young suitors. And it also describes the way that she’s moving through life at a pace which makes her big brother uncomfortable.
“Sister Christian” arrived at a time before it was expected that every hard rock band should have a ballad lying in wait to follow up the heavy stuff. As such, it set the tone for the many, many power ballads to come in the second half of the decade. But good luck finding any one of those later songs that pack the same emotional punch as the Night Ranger classic that influenced them in the first place.
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Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images for NAMM
