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Singing Cowboys,
Updated Copyright 1987 The Washington Post
Maybe it was the way he sang about the "Harvest Moon" and "Lost Highway" as if he had actually loaded grain bags on a truck and ridden a lot of dirt roads. Maybe it was the brooding fatalism in his songwriting that seemed to spark the hyperkinetic desperation of his performance. He might sing forlornly that "killing frost takes all hope of choice," for example, but he leaped about the stage as if he were a rodeo rider. Jason and the Scorchers, who return to the 9:30 club tonight and tomorrow, were the first rock band to break out of Nashville in nearly three decades. They were the forerunners of the "cow-punk" movement that is now blending rock 'n' roll and country music in a far more frenzied fashion than the Eagles ever imagined. "There's no truer adage," he now says, "than, 'You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy.' It's just so true. Journalists always ask who your influences were, who you listen to, but I think I was influenced more by where I grew up and how I grew up." Ringenberg grew up on his family's "pig and grain farm" outside Sheffield, Ill. All the kids chipped in from the time they were old enough to walk just to keep things going, he says. When he wasn't feeding the pigs or driving the tractor, he was fishing, canoeing or ice skating. "More than anything I listened to, that shaped what I do today. There's a strong sense of the cyclic nature of life in my songs; there's a sense of expansiveness in my lyrics. I don't tend to write much about myself but about all the stories that have come through my family." Jason and the Scorchers have released four records, garnering stacks of critical praise and keeping them on the new wave club circuit most of the year. Nonetheless, the quartet's new album, "Still Standing," is still images from the rural Midwest: a grandfather's hunting gun, a flooded prairie road, a front porch in Iowa. "A lot of farm kids I knew wanted to escape the farm life," he admits, "but I wanted to dig deeper into it for some reason. Both sides of my family had lived in Bureau County for several generations. Nearly every farm around there had been farmed at one point by one of my ancestors. "I spent my teen years driving around the dirt roads on my motorbike, talking to all the older people. They remembered coming over from Europe on the boat and starting their farm. They remembered farming with horses and the first time they turned on electricity in their homes. They remembered the sense of optimism after World War II that's gone and won't ever come back. I'm so lucky to have that history with me, because now it's gone forever." Like most of his peers, Ringenberg was pushed off the family farm by an increasingly centralized agribusiness. He went to Southern Illinois University to major in forestry but found the pull of music too powerful to resist. During the summers, he relived the Jimmy Rodgers story: He worked on railroad gangs and played music in redneck bars. "They'd round up a hundred guys from the nearby farms and off the streets of Chicago," he recalls, "and we'd go out to repair tracks. We went around to all the little railroad towns along the Mississippi, and we'd camp out on the levee. It was great for a boy off the farm like me, because I got to meet all these illegal Mexican immigrants and learn everything a young boy could possibly want to know." The bands he played in were "diluted, undeveloped versions of Jason and the Scorchers," he says. In their combination of country and rock, he found a way to connect the past and the future. So he headed for Nashville to pursue music more seriously. "When I arrived in '81," he recounts, "I was surprised by how little was going on here. I couldn't believe there weren't any bands like the one in my head. There weren't even any rockabilly bands. All there was really were new wave bands, and they were two years behind everyone else." After a few pickup groups, Ringenberg quickly assembled the Scorchers current lineup: an Army brat named Warner Hodges, who had evolved from his parents' USO country shows to aggressive rock guitar, and two Nashville natives, drummer Perry Baggs and bassist Jeff Johnson, who are the local scene-makers. They showed Music City how country craftsmanship and new wave energy could reinforce each other. The band made its reputation with wild and woolly versions of old songs like Bob Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet Marie" and Hank Williams' "Lost Highway." At the same time, it began to work in originals that sounded like obscure old country songs played real fast and real loud -- just like their cover versions. "Just being in this band forced me to write tougher stuff and better stuff," Ringenberg explains, "because this band was rawer and harder than anyone I'd ever played with. These guys didn't just read about or talk about the wild side of life -- they had lived it. "At the same time, there's a sense of songwriting craftsmanship that you get here in Nashville that you don't get in New York or L.A. or London. This is Song City: It's in the air and in the water; you just soak it up. I'm proud that every song we do I can play for my grandmother on an acoustic guitar." GRAPHIC: PHOTO, JASON RINGENBERG, LEFT, AND THE SCORCHERS, WHO PERFORM AT THE 9:30 CLUB TONIGHT. (JASON RINGENBERG AND THE SCORCHERS)
© 1987-2001 The Washington Post — All Rights Reserved |
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