Jason and the Scorchers

By Harold DeMuir
Reel To Real Magazine
Raleigh, North Carolina - September 1989

Copyright 1989-2004 Reel To Real Magazine

“This record’s kind of had a life of its own, and it just kind of pulled us towards it,” says Jason Ringenberg, as a thick fog descends suddenly upon the building that houses A&M Records’ Manhattan offices. “Sometimes it really felt like there was something beyond us controlling it.”

He’s talking about Thunder and Fire, the band’s long-in-the-works A&M debut, which ought to restore the faith of any observers who’d given up on the band after 1986’s Still Standing (the final product of an ill-starred association with EMI-America) failed to establish the Scorchers beyond the loyal cult that had sustained the Nashville-based combo since its days as a leading light in the early ‘80s roots rock craze.

“This is the first record we’ve ever done that I can still listen to and play the hell out of, and have a different favorite track every time I listen to it,” says Warner Hodges, the Scorchers’ guitarist and musical leader, sitting in a booth in a diner in the Queens, N.Y., neighborhood he now calls home when he’s not working with the band. “It’s also the first record we’ve ever cut where I was dead sober the whole time,” adds the recently-reformed (not to mention married) carouser. “I can remember everything that happened in the studio.”

Hodges’ newly found sobriety aside, Thunder And Fire hearkens back to the raw energy of the Scorchers’ early EPs and their first album, Lost And Found, rather than the more reserved, AOR-aimed production on Still Standing.

The group - now a quintet with original drummer Perry Baggz and two new recruits, second guitarist Andy York and bassist Ken Fox - is in fine fettle, fusing the original lineup’s rock n’ roll and country contrasts into a cohesive and direct style, and some stunning guitar work that more than lives up to the band’s incendiary moniker.

Jason’s lyrics, meanwhile, combine the explicit spiritual concerns of his previous work with the marital bliss of his current home life. “When The Angels Cry” (one of the two tracks co-written with Nashville tunesmith Don Schlitz) wraps its fatalistic message in a propulsive arrangement that’s one of the band’s most memorable. The twangy “Close Up The Road” and the metallic “Lights Out” present contrasting but complementary end of the world scenarios.

“Bible And A Gun” is a darkly menacing character study written by Jason with his backwoods neighbor Steve Earle. “Now That You’re Mine” and “Find You” are effective, good-humored love songs with spiritual applications. And a rollicking rendition of Phil Ochs’ “My Kingdom For A Car” (from Ochs’ ironically-titled Greatest Hits album, Jason’s all-time second favorite album after Highway 61 Revisited) reclaims the Scorchers’ status as a masterful cover band.

With a new label, a new lineup and a new album, the current mood in the Scorchers’ camp is decidedly upbeat - a far cry from the dark, uncertain period that followed Still Standing and the departure of original bassist Jeff Johnson.

“We got back from touring in July of ‘87,” Jason recounts, “and I sat down
with Jeff and kind of had it out with him. He wasn’t into being in the band anymore, and we weren’t into having him in the band.”

Warner elaborates: “Jeff and I were best friends for 10 years - the first nine were great, the last one was a bitch. When we first got together, Perry, Jeff and I were really good friends, and Jason and I didn’t really get along. And as Jason and I gradually became friends, Jeff and Jason fell out of grace, and there was a lot of weird tension going on. See, Jeff’s the type of dude who’s always three years ahead of everybody else, and he was bored with Jason And The Scorchers after Lost And Found. And by the time we did Still Standing, he was ready to bail, but he couldn’t find a way to tell us that he didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“After we got back from touring for Still Standing,” says Jason, “the band was completely burned out, and we were up to our necks in all these weird legal problems. Looking back on it now, we were really out there, but we never once sat down and said ‘Well, should we break up?’ We always intended to keep moving forward; that’s just the way it was.”

“Personally,” Warner confides, “I had a lot of doubts about Jason And The Scorchers. Not about the music, but about whether we’d ever get the chance to do it again. But we never talked about it, it was always, ‘Let’s move on.’ I had some offers to do other things, but I couldn’t walk away from this band.”

Though the Scorchers signed with A&M in mid-1987, the band’s trials weren’t quite over. “I wrote about 15 songs right away, and I was ready for us to go and make a record,” Jason recalls. “But the songs didn’t go over at all with the record company. I just didn’t realize how burned-out we were, and that the songs weren’t as good as I thought they were. So, after a lot of emotional upheaval, I went back to writing, I spent the next year and a half writing songs and doing demos - I did 40 or 50 demos and wrote a bunch more songs that didn’t get as far as the demo stage. I wrote more songs in the last two years than I wrote in my whole life, and the more demos we did, the more confident we got, and the better the songs got.”

Eventually, the band emerged from demo purgatory with a batch of first-rate songs, and with a new producer - Barry Beckett, a veteran musician whose production approach was considerably more sympathetic than those of his higher-priced predecessors Terry Manning and Tom Werman. “Working with Beckett was the coolest deal,” says Hodges. “It was the first time that, when we finished the record, I’d yet to raise my voice. It was always my job to fight with the producer, but that never happened with Beckett. I kept waiting for this big argument that never came. Everything just kind of flowed, because of the vibe that Beckett set up.”

“It was the best situation we’d ever had with producer,” Jason said. “The idea we started with was to record all the basics live, which we’d never tried before. When I was singing we tried to create the fantasy that it was a live show - we set up a PA and lights and stuff. On the basic tracks, there’s always at least two or three guys playing together at the same time, and on a lot of them, everybody’s playing live. ‘Lights Out’ is almost completely a live track; we recorded that the first night, and we got it right away. On Still Standing, we spent three days getting a drum sound, on this record, we were recording the first night. And maybe it doesn’t sound quite as polished as Still Standing, but it doesn’t matter because it’s got more energy.”

Hodges also gives high marks to engineer Justin Niebank, whose experience recording blues bands for Chicago’s Alligator label came in handy for Thunder And Fire’s live-in-the-studio approach. “You’re taking a big chance recording this way if you don’t have a great engineer, and Justin deserves all kinds of credit for working around our mistakes and getting a good-sounding record. We did the record in 35 days, and we thought we’d breezed through it. And Justin goes, ‘Man, I could have done 17 records in 35 days.’”

“I’m real proud of the writing on this record.” says Jason. “I tried to strike a balance between the sort of concepts I’ve always dealt with - the apocalypse and all that - and the feeling that there’s still hope. At least there can be personal hope, and that it’s possible to find love if you’re ready to fight like hell for it. I don’t accept the idea that the apocalypse is an absolute necessity. There’s still a part of me that feels like mankind can still get it together. I don’t think it’ll be our generation, because we’re just too decadent, but I think it’s possible. There’s a lot of apocalypse on the record, but there’s a lot of hope too. It’s a pretty precarious balance, I guess.”

The sense of balance also applies to Thunder And Fire’s stylistic approach, as Hodges points out. “We’re not wearing the country thing on our sleeves anymore. We used to have country songs, and then we’d have rock ‘n’ roll songs. Now the country thing is just on influence on our rock n’ roll songs. It feels like we’re starting to get influenced by our own stuff. Lost And Found was a big influence on this record.”

Much of Jason and Warner’s current optimism is a result of their satisfaction with the new Scorchers’ lineup. “The feeling in the band is completely different now,” Hodges says. “The last three or four years of the old band, the four of us would never be in the same room together unless we had to be. But now everybody in the band wants to be there, and we all look forward to getting together. Everybody’s real happy, everybody’s on the same wavelength, and the A&M thing is real cool. It’s almost like we’ve got the chance to be a brand new band - only we’re not as dumb as rocks because we’ve got seven years’ experience.

“Ken and Andy are happy as shit - they feel like they’re in Led Zeppelin, because they were both big Scorchers fans before they Joined the band - and their enthusiasm rubs off on us. Whenever I start feeling jaded, I just try and look through their eyes. And having another guitar player in the band opens it up a whole lot - now we can actually play the stuff that’s on the records.”

Like Hodges, the new band members live in New York City, while Ringenberg and Baggz remain in Tennessee. “It causes ungodly problems logistically,” says Jason, “but in some ways it makes it easier for me, because I can step away from being a rock n’ roll guy when I’m not working with the band. It also makes things a lot more intense when we get together.”

The partnership of sensitive, devoutly Christian farm boy Ringenberg and gregarious rocker Hodges is a fascinating study in contrasts. “We’re opposites in almost every sense,” says Jason. “But we really do love each other. I’m a total space case, and Warner - despite his image of being out of control - is actually really together and on top of the game. I’ve got incredible respect for Warner, because we’ve been in the trenches together for all these years, and I know he’s got this inner toughness that nothing can crack. He’s a remarkable person, and he’s extremely talented. He’s a genius in the studio, and he’s gonna be a monster guitar god sometime soon.”

“Jason is a really deep guy,” Hodges reciprocates. “I’m amazed that he can write songs about the things he writes about, and it’s great that we can make them rock.”

“Sometimes I feel like a walking pile of contradictions,” says Jason, contemplating the cycle of promotional handshaking that will accompany Thunder And Fire’s commercial shelf life. “The first days away from my wife and the farm are always nightmares, because that’s when I start to notice the contradictions. At home, I wake up and have wheat germ for breakfast and read the Bible and work in the garden and feed the chickens. And then I come out here and it’s completely different and completely unreal. I’m a totally antisocial person in a very social job, and I think I handle the social stuff well, but it’s very difficult to deal with when those two worlds collide. I don’t think I’ll ever work it out, and I don’t know if I should, because it’s one of the things that makes the band what it is.

“I know that when the band is really happening, I feel the presence of God and I feel like I’m doing God’s work. And then there’s other times when I’m definitely not feeling the presence of God, and that’s when it gets scary.

“There’s no way a fundamentalist Christian could ever say that rock n’ roll comes from God, but you can say it’s a force that’s from somewhere in the middle. We’ve grown up with music, and we’ve seen what it is and what it isn’t, and it’s not the same thing you think it is when you’re 21. Rock n’ roll is one of the things that’s destroyed the heart of the West in the last 30 years, but at the same time, it’s also freed up so many people’s latent energies too. And I think that what will ultimately save me from the dark side of rock n’ roll is the fact that I have such a healthy disdain for it.”

Back on the subject of Thunder And Fire, Jason says, “We felt all along that this would be a very important record for Jason And The Scorchers. It’s one of two things: it’s either the first record of a whole new phase for us, or it’s our last record. It’s either the beginning of the middle, or it’s the beginning of the end. I think it’s the beginning of the middle, but somewhere in the back of my mind there’s a little voice going, ‘You only got 14 adds this week, maybe this is the end...’”

Hodges expresses no such reservations. “We’ve rectified our past problems, and now we’re ready to claim what’s rightfully ours. This record doesn’t have to be huge, it’s just got to feel like we’re moving forward.”

“I still believe that this can be a monster band, that we can be as big as
anybody out there,” says Jason. “The fundamental difference between us and a lot
of bands if that we can combine the good-time high energy sell-your-soul rock n’ roll spirit with something a little bit more spiritual. I don’t want to be a pop craftsman, and I don’t want to be clever. I just want to write real songs that affect people on a real level.”

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