Scorchers’ Legend Blazing Once Again

By Rev. Keith A. Gordon
Bone Marrow Magazine - March 1995
Copyright 1995-2004 Bone Marrow Magazine

It began, as legends do, quite innocently. The son of an Illinois hog farmer arrived in Nashville on the Fourth of July, following a rock & roll dream. The shy, unassuming young man had taught himself to play harmonica while wandering the tracks of the Rock Island Line. He had songs in his head and fire in his soul. Music City looked like the promised land.

Shortly after arriving in Nashville, Jason Ringenberg met some new friends - Warner Hodges, Jeff Johnson and Perry Baggs. Soon after, Jason And The Nashville Scorchers were born.

The foursome shared a singular vision. In a classic rock & roll move, they quit their individual jobs and hit the road. Over the next few years, they played every club, honky tonk and dive that would have them. The band slowly built a loyal following by delivering fiercely powerful live performances featuring a high-energy hybrid of country and rock that owed as much to George Jones and Hank Williams as it did to the Sex Pistols or the Clash.

The first record was a four-song, 7-inch EP titled Reckless Country Soul, recorded in the living room of their manager, Jack Emerson. The second album, a 12-inch disc titled Fervor, featured six monster rock tunes, furthering the band’s reputation as it made many critics’ Top 10 lists. Major labels heard the buzz, and the band signed with EMI Records. The “Nashville” was dropped from their name to make their appeal more universal, and before they knew it, the Scorchers were on a roller coaster run amok.

The next few years would see the hard-working, hard-rocking Nashville foursome tour the world, release a handful of critically acclaimed albums, go broke, get dumped by their label, sign with a new one, lose a member, gain two new members and tour some more. At the end of the ride, the Scorchers crashed and burned in a blaze of beer, bruised egos and broken dreams.

The band had been broken up for roughly three years when their original label, EMI, released a Scorchers compilation, The Essential Jason & The Scorchers. After that, original bass player Jeff Johnson hit upon the idea of reforming the band.

“After the Essential thing came out, I never gave it any more thought,” guitarist Warner Hodges says. “Jeff got it and hadn’t listened to the records in a long time, and started calling everybody, saying: ‘Let’s go out and do some shows while this thing’s out and actually make a little bit of racket.’ I had just sobered up, had been sober for five or six months, and hadn’t played in a year and a half. I kind of figured that part of my life was over.

“He called me five or six ttimes in one day, and I kept going, ‘No, Jeff, I don’t want to do this.’ Five minutes later, he’d be on the phone, ‘Have you thought about it?’ Finally, I agreed to it.” When he wasn’t on the phone with Hodges, Johnson was ringing up Ringenberg. Begrudgingly, the foursome found themselves back together as a band again.

“We got out, went at it real slow, and had fun,” Hodges says. “It was really surprising. About the fifth show, we really started to sound like a band. We hadn’t hit a lick with Jeff in six years at that time, rehearsed twice and went out and. Started playing. Classic Scorchers!”

The reunion tour stretched out to cover most of 1993. The band was recapturing some of its old magic, and fans were rediscovering a potent, entertaining rock & roll outfit.

“This whole thing, the reformation of the band, to me is a gift,” Hodges admits. “It’s the old ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.’ There were a few things that I’d done, knocking around after the Scorchers, that were fun, but nothing else ever came close.”

It was late in 1993 that the band began to think abut recording again. “When we originally did this thing, it was going to be play 20 shows and see ya!” Hodges explains. “There was a start and a finish, originally. We just didn’t realize, when we got the ball rolling, that nobody would want to stop rolling the ball.” So the Scorchers went back into the studio. Working without the safety net of a label, the group began to rediscover itself.

“When we started it, we had never done what we’re doing,” Ringenberg says. “There’s two or three new, different things going on. You’ve got everybody sober, you got no producer, no manager, no record company - just the four of you. With our last couple of records it was like, ‘Well, we need to make this big - this needs to be a big record, or we’re done.’ This time, it was, ‘Let’s just have fun and make a record.’

“We had to rebuild the creative process - the way that we thought about it; the way that we dealt with each other,” Ringenberg explains. “There were no more screens, no more filters. Without a filter, you’ve got to really be able to communicate with other people.

“I think that me and Warner had the best relationship making this record that we ever had. And all of a sudden, we had this Jeff guy - this guy that makes sense, who’s really concerned, who’s not afraid to get up on the soapbox and say what needs to be said. He was never really like that before. In the process, we created a new creative system for ourselves. I think that we had relied a lot on other people a lot more than we thought in the past, and all of a sudden that was all gone and it was just us.”

As the songs began to add up, an album was taking shape. “The way that we’d been recording - two days here, three days there - all of a sudden we had a record here,” Hodges says. “All of a sudden, there was this little cassette with 10 songs on it and it’s like, ‘Damn, this is a year.’ It’s an amazing thing. When we started, I never thought that I’d be sitting here with a cassette in my hand...ever,” Hodges remarks. “Watching us become friends again was a real important thing to me, because the Scorchers had fallen apart and I lost a lot of my friends.”

The CD that emerged from that year spent in the studio, A Blazing Grace, has just been released by Mammoth Records. The collection is vintage Scorchers. Musically, it’s tougher than they’ve been before, with the band’s classic lyric themes of hellfire and salvation tempered by hard-won wisdom, heartbreak and passing years.

The Scorchers were always ahead of their time. They were an indie rock act signed to a major label that didn’t know how to market them. In the current indie alternative-friendly climate, they may finally have found their place.

“I think that it’s going to put us back on the ‘music scene map’ - show the world that we’re back and that we’re a valid force again,” Ringenberg says. “By signing with Mammoth and the way that we’re going to market this record, I think that it will also bring us back to the Scorchers influencing the fringes of music again - the cutting-edge area of music.”

What it all boils down to is the band’s ability to grab an audience by the ears and make sure that they leave the club feeling that they got more than their money’s worth. The Scorchers have always possessed an incredible work ethic - a belief that on any night, in any venue, the only things that matter are their fans and the music. But as good as the recordings are, the band’s live performances have always been the rock on which the legend was forged.

“We played St. Louis for 13 people one weekend,” Hodges remembers. “But the next time we went back those 13 people brought some friends, because we still played as if there were 500 folks there. That’s how we created a fan base. We played to 13 people the first time, the next time there were 50 people and the next time there were 200 people, and then, at $2 a pop, all of a sudden you made a little bit of money. But we did the shit gigs first.”

“I can remember our first trip to New York, going up and having just enough gas in the tank to get there, a pound of bologna and a half a loaf of bread,” Ringenberg adds, picking up on the reminiscences. “We had four dollars between the band and the roadie when we got to New York. We got paid $500 and we thought that we had made it!”

“Do you know how many gigs we did where we [barely] had enough money to get home or go on to the next gig?” Hodges interjects. “But we went to the next gig. We always did.” “And we never have canceled a show, ever,” says Ringenberg.
Now that’s rock & roll. That’s Jason & The Scorchers. That’s a legend deserved.

© 1995-2004 — Bone Marrow Magazine— All Rights Reserved