KEEL TRIVIA
Trivia
Keel headlined a tour of Japan in 1986. Ron Keel picked it out in a 2014 BraveWords interview as one of the band's high points, a tour that sold out, and Marc Ferrari remembers a welcome as big as any band could hope for, with Beatlemania-style scenes at the airport and at the hotels. The band's 2026 biography still counts the 1986 Japanese headline tour among the highlights of its heyday. A year earlier, touring all through 1985 behind The Right to Rock, Keel had teamed up with Loudness, Accept and Helix, according to Ferrari.
In March 1984, the month Keel was formed, Ron Keel was announced as the new singer of Black Sabbath. On his own site he recalls driving through Hollywood when a DJ on KLOS read out the news, then getting home and switching on MTV to hear Martha Quinn report that he had replaced Ian Gillan. He had signed a contract, sat through long meetings with Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler (and, he told BraveWords in 2020, with their manager at the time, Don Arden) and was rehearsing the set list they had given him. Spencer Proffer, fresh from Quiet Riot's Metal Health, was lined up to produce the next record, but Iommi and Butler pushed back against pressure to go more commercial and Ron Keel was caught in the crossfire. No Sabbath record came of it. Instead his own band Keel got its deal with A&M, with Gene Simmons producing its major-label debut. Since he had never released anything with Sabbath, he says, for years he left the episode out of interviews and off his biography.
Marc Ferrari owes his place in Keel partly to a thief. As he tells it on his own site, he flew from Boston to Los Angeles in January 1984. He knew Shrapnel's Mike Varney from Varney's column in Guitar Player but had never met him, even though Varney had given him the Steeler album as a holiday present the month before he left. Barely a few months into his new life, out on Melrose looking for a replacement for a stolen leather jacket, he ran into Varney in person, and Varney introduced him to Ron Keel. Keel was formed in March 1984, and by June the band had recorded its first album, Lay Down the Law, for Varney's label.
It took Keel less than six months to land a major-label deal. Marc Ferrari recalls the band quickly building a fierce following, headlining Perkins Palace, the Roxy and the Country Club and playing several nights in a row at the Troubadour. Those shows brought it to the notice of Danny Goldberg, a former president of Led Zeppelin's label Swan Song and an organiser of No Nukes, whose Gold Mountain Records signed Keel in August 1984, with Kiss's Gene Simmons brought in as producer. Ron Keel told Blabbermouth the same story in 2025: within six months of putting the band together, Keel was signed and in the studio with Simmons producing.
The title track of The Right to Rock was taken up as an anti-censorship anthem. According to Marc Ferrari, groups campaigning against censorship quickly rallied behind the song and what it said, and it turned into a battle cry for fans up and down the country. A well-received video on MTV helped a great deal too, and Ferrari writes that it carried the album close to gold. Ron Keel's official biography still names "The Right to Rock" first among the band's MTV and radio hits.
Keel was named Best New Band in several rock magazines' polls for 1985: Marc Ferrari's own site and the announcement of Streets of Rock & Roll that BraveWords ran in February 2010 both name Circus and Metal Edge among them. According to Ferrari, the band came out ahead of names like Bon Jovi, Dokken and Metallica.
The Final Frontier, which came out in early spring 1986, is dedicated to the crew lost in the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Marc Ferrari writes that the tragedy, which shook the world before the album came out, moved the band to pay tribute by dedicating the record to them.
Keel's first tour of Europe came as special guests of Dio. In 1986, the year of The Final Frontier, Marc Ferrari writes, the band toured Europe with Dio and crisscrossed America with Krokus, Quiet Riot and Queensrÿche. On his own site Ron Keel credits Ronnie James Dio, once Black Sabbath's singer himself, with taking Keel under his wing, and recalls the two bands touring all over Europe together.
In 1986 Keel played the Texxas Jam with Van Halen, in front of 81,000 people by Marc Ferrari's count, and when BraveWords asked Ron Keel about his standout memories in 2014 he named opening for Van Halen there alongside that year's Japanese tour. Ferrari adds stadium dates with Aerosmith the same year. The show Ron Keel singles out most warmly, though, is a homecoming: opening for Mötley Crüe in Phoenix, the city he grew up in, in the very arena where he used to fight his way to the front row and dream of one day standing at centre stage himself.
Keel's self-titled 1987 album was made with Michael Wagener, the producer behind records by Dokken, Great White and Accept, with recording starting in December 1986. That summer, Marc Ferrari writes, the band got the biggest break of its career: the closing leg of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet tour. Landing it ahead of countless other bands took a little luck and a lot of initiative. Ferrari had known Jon Bon Jovi for a couple of years and kept in touch whenever he was in town; just after Keel came out he ran into him at a club in Los Angeles, they had a couple of drinks, and the next day Ferrari played him some of the new songs. The run included three nights at Madison Square Garden and three at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, and when Ron Keel was asked in 2014 for his standout memories of the decade, that tour came first, with three back-to-back nights at the Garden.
Keel's recording of "Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw" is on the soundtrack of the 1987 film Dudes. The song was originally Rose Tattoo's, one of the singles from the Australian band's self-titled 1978 debut, as its own site recalls. Ron Keel says Keel cut its version for the film's director, Penelope Spheeris, on a soundtrack that also had Megadeth, W.A.S.P., Steve Vai and Jane's Addiction. "Outlaw" became his signature song, was used twice in the movie and, he says, was where his Metal Cowboy persona really began. Marc Ferrari adds that the band shot a video for the single with Spheeris, a connection that later got him a part in Wayne's World, filmed in the summer of 1991, as one of the guitarists in the band backing Tia Carrere.
Keel's link with Pantera goes back to the summer of 1985 in Dallas. Marc Ferrari recalls that the first time Keel played the city, two young brothers from a local band called Pantera knocked on the door of the tour bus and asked whether they could come aboard and play him a few songs from their latest independent album, Projects in the Jungle. Ten seconds of the first track told him these were players far beyond their teenage years. Ferrari kept travelling down to Texas to see them, dropped their name in interviews whenever he could, and talked Keel's label at the time, Gold Mountain, into offering them a small production deal. That never led to a major-label record, but in 1990, almost five years after that first meeting, Pantera made their major-label debut with Cowboys from Hell.
"Proud to Be Loud", the song on Pantera's Power Metal, began life as a Keel recording. Marc Ferrari writes that in 1987 he played the band a song he had originally recorded for Keel, and they decided to re-record it for their next album: Power Metal, their first full-length with new singer Phil Anselmo. Ferrari co-produced the track with Vinnie Paul and played rhythm guitar on it, and he also added a short solo to another Power Metal song, "We'll Meet Again".
Keel's 2026 announcement is headed "The Keel/KISS Konnection Kontinues". It notes that 2026 is the 40th anniversary of The Final Frontier, and it names the occasion for celebrating that milestone and the band's close ties to Kiss: a special performance at the fan weekend KISS Kruise: Land-Locked in Vegas. The organisers' site announced the event for 13 to 15 November 2026 at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and its 2026 line-up put Keel alongside Kiss, Night Ranger, Bruce Kulick, Slaughter and Faster Pussycat. The members named in the announcement are the classic four, Marc Ferrari, Bryan Jay, Dwain Miller and Ron Keel, with bassist Geno Arce. Back in 2014, Ron Keel had told BraveWords that Keel never got to open for Kiss in the 1980s, however hard he begged.
In June 2019 Ron Keel wrote that there were no plans for another Keel album, though he would love to hear a new Keel song or two to mark the band's 35th anniversary. The new song arrived in 2024. According to RFK Media's materials, "Moving Target" appeared as the Keel track on Ron Keel's album KEELWORLD, released in August 2024, with Marc Ferrari and Bryan Jay on guitars, Dwain Miller on drums and Geno Arce on bass. KEELWORLD gathers new recordings by the bands of his career, among them Ron Keel Band, Steeler, IronHorse and Emerald Sabbath, and Miller also played session drums on its Steeler song. The band's 2026 announcement presents "Moving Target" as Keel's latest single.
The band carries its singer's surname, but Ron Keel has never treated Keel as his alone. In June 2019 a headline built on his remark that there were "no plans for another Keel album" caused some confusion, and he set the record straight on Facebook. No plans meant exactly that and not "never", a word he said he had learned not to use about his music; and he was protective of his 35-year friendship with Marc Ferrari, Bryan Jay and Dwain Miller and of the history they shared. The name might be his, he wrote, but Keel is their band, and he had always tried to honour that. Sleaze Roxx carried the post on 29 June 2019.
Keel grew out of Steeler, the band Ron Keel had fronted before. According to Blabbermouth, Steeler was born in Nashville in 1981, and Louder notes that Ron Keel moved the whole outfit to Los Angeles. Its only album, Steeler, came out on Shrapnel Records in 1983. By early 1984, Ron Keel told Blabbermouth in 2025, he had decided that Steeler was not going to be the band that made it for him, and he moved on at once: in March 1984 he put a new band together, called it Keel, and within a few months it was recording its debut, Lay Down the Law. As Louder points out, he stayed with Shrapnel for it. There was not much time to look back, he says.
Gene Simmons produced two Keel albums, The Right to Rock and The Final Frontier. Ron Keel told BraveWords in 2014 that the make-up and the business empire hide a man with a real passion for music and a deep respect for rock history, and that what Simmons taught him about making albums still goes into every session he does. Simmons brought songs of his own for the band to record (Louder counts three of them on The Right to Rock) and had plenty to say about Keel's own material. No Kiss song ever came out of the partnership, though: the sessions left no room for sitting around with guitars and notebooks, Ron Keel explained, and time off meant a meal, a club, a concert or an evening at Simmons's place watching Kiss video clips. Eric Carr dropped by the sessions a few times, although the two never got to know each other well.
Gene Simmons put real effort into finding Keel support slots. In a 2014 BraveWords interview Ron Keel remembered Simmons on the phone to Ozzy Osbourne, telling him Keel should get his opening spot. Ozzy went with Metallica instead, but Simmons, Ron Keel said, had given it everything he had.
When Frontiers Records announced Keel's comeback album Streets of Rock & Roll in 2010, it paired it with a 25th anniversary edition of The Right to Rock. As BraveWords relayed the announcement, the reissue's two bonus tracks were a remix of "Easier Said than Done" and a brand-new recording of the title song, and the fans were in on the new one. Keelaholics, as the band's fans are known, could download a guide track, sing along with the chorus and send it in as an MP3 to be blended into an all-star chorus that also featured Paul Shortino of Rough Cutt and Quiet Riot, other members of the Las Vegas rock scene and even Air Supply's Graham Russell.
The Final Frontier was the record that took Keel from A&M to MCA. Billboard reported on 5 April 1986 that MCA Records had concluded a worldwide distribution, promotion and marketing deal with Danny Goldberg's Gold Mountain Records, moving the label from its original base at A&M; the pact was announced jointly by Irving Azoff and Goldberg, and the first album delivered to MCA under it was Keel's The Final Frontier. That album and 1987's Keel are the band's two MCA releases.
Black 'N Blue singer Jaime St. James turns up on Keel records more than once. Speaking to Sleaze Roxx in 2017, he said he had done a lot of work with Keel, and laughed that the first time, Gene Simmons simply threw him into the studio and told him to do something. Asked about cutting Keel's "Fool for a Pretty Face", he admitted he barely remembered it. He also sang on the band's 2010 album Streets of Rock & Roll, which, he confessed, he had never actually heard. It worked the other way as well: St. James had Ron Keel come in to sing "Best in the West" on Black 'N Blue's Nasty Nasty.
Streets of Rock & Roll, the reunion album, was produced by Pat Regan, whose credits run to Kiss, Deep Purple and Warrant. According to the announcement BraveWords carried in February 2010, Ron Keel's lead vocals were produced and recorded by Paul Shortino of Rough Cutt and Quiet Riot, and Shortino and Black 'N Blue's Jaime St. James sang guest backing vocals. The album held twelve new songs. Ron Keel said the excitement of the reunion fired up the band's creativity, letting him, Marc Ferrari and Bryan Jay write together as a team as they never had before, and he singled out the power ballad "Anybody Believe" as a song he expected to matter a great deal to the band.
Keel announced its reunion in 2008. The fans had never gone away, Ron Keel said: in six years and some 800 shows across America with IronHorse he kept running into Keel fans singing "The Right to Rock", "Because the Night" and "Tears of Fire". On his own site he credits the agent Sullivan Bigg with making the 2008 to 2023 reunion happen, and with bringing his career back to life. In 2009 the band played Rocklahoma, the M3 Festival, the South Texas Rock Festival and the MidWest RockFest and sold out headline shows in Hollywood and Phoenix, and that response led to new songs and a deal with Frontiers Records. Keel marked its 30th anniversary in 2014 on the main stage of M3 in Baltimore, and over the years it has sailed on several Monsters of Rock cruises and played the Frontiers Festival in Milan.
Ron Keel created Keelfest to put his whole musical family on one stage. According to Blabbermouth, the first edition took place in Columbus in 2019, when he sang nearly 40 songs with Ron Keel Band, Steeler and Keel for more than three hours without a break; it was meant to become an annual event until the pandemic got in the way. In November 2022 Keelfest 2 was announced for 18 March 2023 at Bowie's in Nashville, as the Saturday-night afterparty of the ROCKNPOD expo. Nashville was where Steeler was born in 1981, and Keel's drummer Dwain Miller was billed to join Steeler's set that night.