Scorchers deliver fired-up music

SERIES: Pop review
By Mikel Toombs; Toombs is a free-lance writer.
The San Diego Union-Tribune
August 2, 1989, Wednesday

Copyright 1989 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Jason and the Scorchers blazed a trail in the early '80s with a pioneering "cow-punk" sound as fiery as the group's name. By 1986, however, the band was in danger of burning itself out.

"Looking back, it's lucky we even survived those days," said Jason Ringenberg, the Scorchers' upfront singer and principal songwriter. "We had severe problems within the band, severe problems legally and severe problems with the record company, and severe personal problems. It's lucky we even made Still Standing,' really."

That album found the Scorchers on shaky ground personally and musically. Bassist Jeff Johnson, a member since the group started, was disenchanted with the band and its music and left in 1987. The remaining trio -- Ringenberg, guitarist Warner Hodges and drummer Perry Baggz -- tried to capture on record the energy found in their incendiary live shows.

The result is an expanded band, with guitarist Andy York and bassist Ken Fox, and the Barry Beckett-produced "Thunder and Fire." Recorded with few audio tricks, the excellent new album shows the band going back to its roots in country and folk and the hard-charging approach that made it famous. ("It's still not going to be a Scorchers live show," said a justly proud Ringenberg, who performs with the Scorchers at the Bacchanal tonight.)

It was that approach, inspired by the punk movement of the late '70s, that first won praise for Jason and the Scorchers. "We were reacting against a lot of things," Ringenberg recalled. "It was down with techno-pop and down with heavy metal and down with unemotionalism and down with technical stuff, and up with roots and up with America and up with country and up with all that stuff. "It's funny to look back and think -- in those days it was revolutionary, musically speaking, to wear a fringe shirt and a cowboy shirt. In those days it was a real statement. Now it's just status quo."

The Scorchers' roots-conscious approach also seems status-quo by now, even if the band hasn't always shared in the success achieved by such Jason-come-latelies as the Georgia Satellites, San Diego's Beat Farmers or Ringenberg's countrified Nashville neighbor, Steve Earle. Ringenberg said he thought the Scorchers opened some doors for those musicians, and they in turn have helped the Scorchers.

Earle in particular helped out the Scorchers on "Thunder and Fire" by co-writing a song with Ringenberg, the quietly spiritual "Bible and a Gun." Equally impressive, the band turns Phil Ochs' "Kingdom for a Car" into one of its trademark romps, much as it did with Bob Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet Marie."

"We wanted to get away from (the image of) the Scorchers as just another Southern redneck band," Ringenberg said of the song choice. "By doing a sort of leftist folk singer from the '60s -- anti-war, and all that stuff that was going on then -- I thought it was kind of a neat statement."

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