Keel finds fun in country

Ron Keel isn’t your average performer in a tribute show. Most people who perform as Elvis, Prince or Madonna haven’t toured arenas with bands bearing their real names.

In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that if the ’80s metal band Keel had caught just a couple of more breaks, somebody might be putting on wigs and imitating them today.

Instead, Keel portrays country superstar Ronnie Dunn in “Country Superstars Tribute,” which he also co-produces in a small showroom downtown at Fitzgeralds.

But those expecting a sob story about the riches to rags of show business should go cue up a VH1 “Behind the Music.” “I don’t have time for reservations. I’m too busy having fun,” Keel says.

“I’ve got a group of fans that are going to support me no matter what, and there’s a ton of them out there that think I’m absolutely insane,” he admits of his current enterprise. “I can’t go out there and shake everybody by the shoulders and say: ‘This is fun. This is what I really like to do.’ “

Keel first went to Nashville as a long-haired teenager in 1979 and won a radio battle of the bands with a group called Lust. He gathered momentum in the rock world with another band called Steeler before assembling the group Keel in 1984.

“Things happened really quickly for Keel,” he recalls. An independent album led to a record deal with MCA and the 1985 pop-metal anthem “The Right to Rock.”

“All of the dreams came true all at once,” he says. “I do take a lot of pride in the fact that I had an act that did compete, (even if) we didn’t always get the breaks that other bands got.”

The group opened shows for the likes of Van Halen and Bon Jovi. “We never had enough arena dates in the United States to break huge, but we did see the world.”

Keel believes MCA Records dropped the ball on promoting a second and third single that would have put the band over the top. As it was, the group rode out the hair metal era of the ’80s. Ron Keel even milked a few extra years out of it by surrounding himself with female rockers in a band called Fair Game.

Things unraveled for him in the early 1990s when he lost his record deal and endured strains on his family life, “though I never fell into the drug thing.” He left Los Angeles for Arizona to reinvent himself in the country genre as Ronnie Lee Keel.

Impersonating Dunn came first by covering Brooks & Dunn songs, then by working up an act after learning how much money tribute acts pulled down during the six years he spent trying to break a “country metal” band called Iron Horse.

“Success is measured in different ways,” Keel says. “If you measure it by the amount of fun you’ve had and the different stuff you’ve been able to do, I think I’ve been successful. I’ve had a little piece of everything.”

Mike Weatherford’s entertainment column appears Thursdays and Sundays. Contact him at 383-0288 or e-mail him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com