SCORCHERS AIM BEYOND THEIR CULT FOLLOWING

By Jack Hurst
Chicago Tribune
April 5, 1987 Sunday, FINAL EDITION

Copyright 1987 Chicago Tribune Company

When Jason & The Nashville Scorchers arrived on national stages five years
ago, they were unforgettable before they played their first note.

Distinguished by a lead singer wearing a western hat and cowboy suits, they
also featured a bass guitarist in a dyed Mohawk haircut, a lead guitarist
wearing no hair at all except a lock in front and a drummer who between songs
might jump offstage to chase girls. Their like, good and bad, may never be seen again.

"Nobody's got videotapes of any of those shows," regrets Jason Ringenberg, an
Illinois hog farmer's son who supplied and still supplies much of the creative
impetus for the group. "Nobody videotaped any of them, and it's really a shame. They're just gone. But I have friends who saw us then who say, 'The best rock show I ever saw--period--was the Scorchers in Champaign, Ill., in June of '82. Or in Athens, Ga., in February of '82.'

"We had some really BAD shows, too. There were sometimes personality problems and big drug and drinking problems, which every band has, and when it was bad, it was so bad you just wanted to quit and kill yourself. But when the energy was happening and everybody was not fighting or drunk, it was incredible."

The Scorchers--Ringenberg, electric guitarist Warner Hodges, drummer Perry
Baggs and bass guitarist Jeff Johnson--are still the same people, more or less.
For our interview site, for instance, Ringenberg picks Mack's Country Cooking, a
blue-plate-special Nashville restaurant with a very nasal jukebox; he arrives
there crash-helmeted, riding a motorcycle.

But he and his musical associates no longer look quite so publicly dangerous. They're also no longer overtly "Nashville," having agreed to shuck
that part of their name when they signed with EMI Records, and they no longer
burn with energy quite as white-hot as they did in the early '80s. But then they
no longer have any of those flame-out nights, either.

Seeking to progress from their former reputation as the scene's "coolest" band to a future one as one of its most successful and enduring, they've turned
their emphasis inside-out. "We're pushing more of the personalities of the band and the songs, the REAL things, as opposed to the sort of surface, crazy, transient things," Ringenberg says. "We're looking for a longevity thing, which is a real challenge today."

Ringenberg thought the Scorchers' current EMI album, "Still Standing," would
finally break them out of their cult-leader status to one of true national popularity. It has yet to happen, and Ringenberg thinks the reason is, the band's management picked their cover of the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards song "19th Nervous Breakdown" as the album's initial marketing tool. It "didn't do
anything," he notes.

"That was the only time I ever listened to someone else as far as material
is concerned," he says, with obvious feeling but no apparent malice. "Everyone
was thinking 'Breakthrough hit, breakthrough hit,' and it's quite possible--although we'll never know, because you can't relive the past --that it
COST us a breakthrough.

"Because that was the first track they pushed to radio, and it didn't go at
all. Totally stiff. And it caused us major problems with the momentum of the
whole record. 'Golden Ball and Chain' (which reached No. 16 in Billboard
Magazine's Album Rock Tracks chart but never dented its pop Hot 100) saved our
butts. If that or one of the album's other songs--'Good Things Come To Those Who
Wait' or 'Crashin' Down'--had been first, it's hard to say what would have happened. I believe it cost us a gold record."

A gold record would have fittingly crowned a quest that has taken Nashville's burgeoning rock scene into the national consciousness. Ringenberg, now 28, a liberal-arts graduate of Southern Illinois University, went to Nashville--rather than New York or Los Angeles--around 1980 to launch a rock band, and in so doing became the spearhead of a regional phenomenon.

Together he, the rest of the Scorchers and their 26-year-old manager, Jack Emerson, have godfathered a Nashville rock movement that is growing impressively
and getting other bands signed to major recording contracts. One that already
has come to national stardom out of this movement is the Atlanta- based Georgia Satellites. Through their three albums (the EP "Jason & The Scorchers," the LP "Lost & Found" and the current "Still Standing"), the Scorchers' material has moved little by little toward more mainstream considerations.

From mostly love-oriented lyrics in the two earlier efforts, "Still Standing" turns to images of guns, generals, soldiers, battles and what Ringenberg calls "the incredible violence of our age." He notes that manifestations of mayhem are everywhere now: "Every day on the news, there's one more bomb." With "Still Standing," on which he wrote or cowrote eight of the nine cuts, he "tried to be more general, less personal," he adds.

"I thought if there was any criticism of our early work it was that some of the stuff was a little too oblique lyrically. I tried to generalize more, and there'll be a lot more of that on the next record. I think if we're ever gonna break out of the cult thing, I have to become a little more universal in what I write. I think the next record will be a mix of all three of our past records. I think we'll take all we've learned, but on the whole it will probably be a lot more high-energy, more basic and hard-hitting."

It won't, however, go so far as to follow fashion and deal lyrically with the small-town themes so much in vogue--and so much a part of Ringenberg's own past. "All my people are farmers, and yet I have yet to write a song about the farm situation," he reflects. "I just can't bring myself to do it. It's TOO personal. If I had to sing a song like that onstage, every night I'd be tearing a piece out of my soul."

This year, in a major change of tactics, the Scorchers went after large concert audiences on a consistent basis. Ringenberg says an early tour of Texas with The Ramones--during which they were booed and pelted with cans --left them "a little bit gun-shy," and for years afterward, they concentrated on playing nightclubs.

But in the last 12 months, they began touring larger venues with such bands as the Fabulous Thunderbirds, 38 Special, Survivor and the Satellites, and in May, in their first venture Down Under, they plan to tackle a monthlong tour of Australia. "I don't think we were ready to go in front of a big audience and really project ourselves until this year," Ringenberg says. "Getting a couple of songs on the radio also helped, so people had heard a few of the songs.

"But we've also become much better players on this album, and you have to be great players to play arenas. You can dance around all you want to, but on a big stage nobody can see except in front, so you have to be able to deliver the music, pound it right into their hearts. We're more capable of that now." They are, in other words, a better band, although maybe not as exciting as they sometimes were in the early '80s.

They, like their nightclub audiences of those days, had to grow up or die. It's impossible to sustain such energy through the grueling tour schedules to which they have since become accustomed. "Most of the people who were into the club scene of the early '80s," Ringenberg says, with a wry grin, "have had nervous breakdowns or gone into real conservative lifestyles now."

© 1987-2001 Chicago Tribune Company — All Rights Reserved