Jason and the Scorchers ‘Blazing’ Again

By Jay Orr
The Nashville Banner
Nashville, Tennessee - February 2, 1995
Copyright 1995-2004 The Nashville Banner

Their live shows are the stuff of legend in Nashville rock history, and 10 years ago Jason and the Scorchers celebrated the release of their major label debut, Fervor, with a concert at the Exit/In. Saturday night the band’s original lineup - front man Jason Ringenberg, guitarist Warner Hodges, bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Perry Baggs - returns to the same venue for their first local performance since October 1986.

Beginning in 1993 the band played a yearlong reunion tour, carefully skirting Nashville until it felt ready to come home with a new record deal and their chops finely honed. A new album, A Blazing Grace, hits stores Tuesday, and the band has high hopes for the Saturday night show.

“It’s kinda cool that we’re going back to where we started again,” says Hodges, sitting with Ringenberg in a local coffee shop. “That’s what we tried to do in doing the record, just go back to ‘point A’ again. I’m always scared playing Nashville,” he admits. “I don’t know what it is, London doesn’t scare me, Paris doesn’t scare me, New York, L.A., no big deal. Nashville, I’ll spend the day in the bathroom. I’m from here. Once we get the first song under our belt, I’m all right. But when we play Nashville, I’m like the 15-year-old that’s never played before.”

Maybe it’s coffee-induced jitters that make Hodges say this. Nashville has loved Jason and the Scorchers (first known as the “Nashville Scorchers”) since the beginning. “I guess the town was ready for a band like us when we started,” Ringenberg reflects. “I remember the first show we did was packed.”

Truth be told, though, no one was ready for a band like Jason and the Scorchers when the quartet began making noise with a little record titled Reckless Country Soul, cut in December ‘81, just five months after Ringenberg arrived in Nashville from his parents’ Illinois pig farm. At the time, punk showed signs of going limp, and country had its head in the feed trough, bloated on the after-effects of Urban Cowboy pop success. Jason and the Scorchers reached in, pulled out the best of both genres and forced the feuding musical styles to live together like fussy sisters.

The group released Fervor first on independent Praxis Records, then in a different version on EMI. Lost & Found, their full-length album debut, followed in 1985, with Still Standing appearing in 1986. Johnnson dropped out before 1989’s Thunder & Fire, their last release. The band fell apart after that, Hodges says, playing their last Nashville gig in October 1989 with a couple of new members.

“It left such a bad taste,” Hodges says of the way the band finally collapsed. “I didn’t play guitar for a year and a half. I just quit. For years on end, I blamed the band for everything bad that happened to me.” It was Johnson, in 1993, who started encouraging the others to think about regrouping after buying a compact disc compilation of the band’s first two albums.

“He had the feeling in his heart that if we got back together for a reunion tour
that it would be a good thing for everybody,” Ringenberg says. “He started calling us up, and calling promoters up and calling press people up. He got a good reaction from everyone except me and Warner.”

Participating in a recovery program, Hodges had been sober for six months. “I kinda figured the music thing was gone, and that was OK,” he says. “I’d rather be sober than end up back in bars, doing what I used to do.” Ringenberg was still in the middle of an ill-fated foray into the world of country music, thanks to a solo record deal with Liberty Records.

So persistent was Johnson, himself a recovering alcoholic, that Ringenberg and Hodges finally gave in, agreeing to perform - provided Johnson would book the shows and do all the support work required to make them happen. To the surprise of singer and guitarist, the gigs drew well. Scorcher-heads came from everywhere to hear the band play again. “People were singing the words, sometimes better than we were at that particular point,” Hodges says with a chuckle.

A couple of months into it, Jason figures, things started feeling like a band to him. About the same time, his Liberty commitment ended. “The fifth show of the reunion tour was Atlanta, and that was when I felt, ‘We’ve got to be doing this again,’” Hodges says. “All of us found it at different times. That night just sticks out in my head.”

Both men marvel at how things “fell into place” for the Scorchers’ second start. When more dates got booked, they started itching for new material. “Jeff didn’t tell us he was booking 90-minute shows,” Hodges recalls. “If we do every song we knew in the old days, that was about 90 minutes.”

Baggs had some songs saved up from the years off. Ringenberg had a handful he had gathered for a second Liberty release that never happened. The two of them found that working together paid off. “On the reunion tour we roomed together and drove together,” Ringenberg says. “It was an exciting time to be around (Perry) because he was really hot. He had a lot of great ideas. Not a day went by when he didn’t write a song.”

Enter Jozef Nuyens, owner of The Castle, with an offer of cheap studio time when the band felt ready to lay down some new tracks. The Scorchers took him up on it, producing the album that immersed them, with help from Nuyens and engineer Mike Janas, from November ‘93 to April ‘94.

“I think we needed it to get to know each other again,” Jason says of the record. “We had a limitless amount of time. We went in there when they didn’t have it booked and stuff. We would just work when we could.” “I wanted to do a record that the four of us would love and be proud of in the end; that was the main thing,” says Hodges. “If we took anything else into consideration, it would be, ‘What would our fans want?’”

When the record was finished, Ringenberg phoned Jay Faires, owner of red-hot independent Mammoth Records and a longtime supporter of the band. Faires invited him to send a tape, then to come over to his office in North Carolina to discuss a deal. Ringenberg drove the distance himself. “I came back with a record deal,” he says. “It was literally that simple. We pitched it four or five places and had a little interest, but it seemed like Mammoth, a high percentage of the people are old Scorcher fans.”

A Blazing Grace has all the elements of the Scorchers’ classic sound: Jason’s hillbilly yawp and Hodges’ Johnny Ramone-meets-James Burton guitar, supported on the bottom by Baggs and Johnson. Covers of Country Roads (the first single) and Why Baby Why bump up against highly charged band originals, including One More Day of Weekend, Hell’s Gates and American Legion Party. His voice all a-crack, Jason infuses Somewhere Within with Hank Williams-esque pathos.

It’s hard to believe any of the band’s longtime fans would be disappointed in the effort. Later this year or in early ‘96 Mammoth plans to release Reckless Country Soul, now a collector’s item.

“We don’t use the word ‘career’ anymore around this band,” Jason says. “As long as we can continue to make quality music and do quality shows, and as long as a healthy number of people are getting something positive out of it, then we’ll keep doing it. That could be another record or two, or that could be 20 records, but we’re definitely back. This is not just a one-comeback or reunion record.”

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