Midnight Madness by Night Ranger

Midnight Madness, Night Ranger's second album, came out on MCA in October 1983, and it's San Francisco hard rock with its hair teased high and its heart pinned to its sleeve. The band was barely a year past forming, a quintet built around Brad Gillis's guitar, Kelly Keagy's drums and Jack Blades's bass, with Jeff Watson also in the lineup, and they play like they've already got the arena booked.

The record threw off three charting singles, and the one that stuck was "Sister Christian", the power ballad that became the band's signature and climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1984. On the rowdier side sits "(You Can Still) Rock in America", a fist-in-the-air shout for the cheap seats. Nothing else they made ever sold like it: more than a million copies in the US, still their best-selling album.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.