COUNTRY WITH CALLUSES; JASON RINGENBERG SINGS WHAT HE KNOWS -- AND REALLY MEANS IT

By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Critic.
Chicago Tribune
January 12, 2001 Friday

Copyright 2001 Chicago Tribune Company

Jason Ringenberg was putting the twang in punk rock with Jason and the Scorchers two decades ago, long before the term "alternative country" was a glimmer in some marketing guru's bloodshot eye. Now he's back with his second solo album, "A Pocketful of Soul" (Courageous Chicken), a shot of hard-core rural music that comes closer than any of his previous releases to telling us exactly what makes Ringenberg tick.

The grandson of a Belgian immigrant who settled in Sheffield, Ill., near the Rock Island Line railroad tracks at the turn of the last century, Ringenberg grew up working the family farm and singing country songs like Johnny Horton's classic "Whispering Pines." On the singer's new acoustic album, the longing of the Horton original becomes an ode to Ringenberg's first daughter, from his first marriage, who lives out West with her mother.

Lost love, the land and the Lord -- those subjects have informed traditional country music since the Carter Family first began harmonizing over the plaintive strum of an autoharp, and "A Pocketful of Soul" finds Ringenberg reshaping those timeless themes in terms of his own life. "I'd gone through a divorce, started a new family with a new wife and bought a farm in Tennessee," Ringenberg says. "I wanted to make a record about my family and heritage. I feel like with the Scorchers I had explored the place where high energy rock 'n' roll meets roots country, and now I wanted to go back further."

Ringenberg ended up putting out "A Pocketful of Soul" on his own Courageous Chicken Records (www.jasonringenberg.com). In the spirit of this modest enterprise, Ringenberg paid multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin for his contributions by building him a picket fence. Ringenberg, who will perform solo at Schubas on Friday, is the real deal -- a country boy whose calluses are on his hands rather than his heart.

What keeps drawing you back to the country well?

I guess if you're going to stay true to yourself, you've got to be yourself. I've always listened to that music, and yet what I'm talking about is almost bigger than music. Rural America is like a spiritual ideology. To me it was a shock to find that other people didn't live that way. It wasn't till I left home in the early '80s to come to Nashville that I discovered that I was an anomaly and an anachronism.

The country you're talking about is almost gone now, though. How do you keep it from being merely nostalgia for a life that very few people live anymore?

It's not something that will [ever] be in vogue. The stuff I do, and the family of artists that I live in, the maximum sales are about a quarter-million for someone like Steve Earle. Once you let the idea go that you're in some kind of race to sell millions of records, it's very liberating. I find I'm relating more to people like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Hank Williams Sr., who never thought about those things. I don't think those guys thought about making money. I think they got into the process of making music.

But you've got a family and a farm. You have to think about money.

It's always a challenge. If I have to, I can do carpentry, and I have in the past. I now have two identities: One as an artist and one as a music business guy, an owner of a record company. I found I can make a lot more money doing it myself. It's a lot of work, but it's not as much work as having to take bad gigs or having to take day jobs to support yourself.

This "family of artists" you talk about -- is songwriting the common bond?

Absolutely. Our attitude is, "I'll write my own songs, by God."

But Garth Brooks writes his own songs too. What's the difference between your approach and mainstream Nasvhille's?

I think our group of songwriters tries to write as big as possible. We're not afraid to take on big ideas, and we're pretty ambitious about what we want to write about. The big-time country writers write as small as possible, try to appeal to a narrow market that also happens to be a huge numbers market. Their whole world exists for that narrow suburban country market.

Have you ever caught yourself writing for a specific market?

We did that for [the Scorchers' 1989 album] "Thunder and Fire." I bet we wrote 50, 60 songs for that record because we were trying to write a quote-unquote "hit" song to pay off the record company debts we had. We wrote a lot of bad songs trying to get that one song. In contrast, for this record I used every song I wrote. There were no leftovers, because it was done for me and my family, no one else.

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