Still Standing:
Jason and the Scorchers then and now

By Peter Cooper
Creative Loafing
Atlanta, Georgia - March 2, 1996

Copyright 1996-2004 Creative Loafing

Fifty years from now, when music historians and rock fans trace the beginnings of punk rock and its various offshoots, they will point to Jason and the Nashville Scorchers’ Reckless Country Soul EP as a turning point: a bridge between country and rock and between tradition and innovation.

Singer Jason Ringenberg downplays such a notion - just a bit. “A certain amount of that record was just youthful exuberance,” he says, though acknowledging that “it’s deeper than just that. We were standing on the shoulders of a whole bunch of pretty cool giants - Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Gram Parsons - and we were takin’ it a step further. Some people might listen to this record and think we were being disrespectful toward classic country music, but we weren’t really making fun of it; we were just having a hell of a great time with it. When you’re 21 and you’re just off the hog farm, that’s the kind of thing you do. I think a lot of people are just now starting to catch up to what we did 15 years ago.”

And Ringenberg is right. Early ‘80s Nashville was as stale as last week’s day-old bread and ruled with banal benevolence by the likes of Kenny Rogers, the Oak Ridge Boys and Crystal Gayle - not exactly the stuff Music City, USA was founded on. Ringenberg arrived in Nashville as a 21-year-old on July 4, 1981, straight off an Illinois pig farm and in no mood to dawdle.

Within six months, he gathered together three young rock n’ rollers and recorded a wild, four-song EP that came on like a pie in the face and went out like an assassination attempt on the insipid Nashville aristocracy. The record, Reckless Country Soul, was sold mostly from the stages of Jason and the Nashville Scorchers’ gigs, and it disappeared altogether after the 1984 release of Fervor, the band’s EMI Records debut EP that stands as one of the best rock releases of that dismal decade.

However, Reckless, recorded in three hours, four tracks and one Tennessee living room, had neither the sonic high-gloss nor the broad thematic scope of its major-label follow-up. But its manic melding of punk energy and hillbilly roots served as a blueprint for bands that joined the Scorchers in an attempt to, as Ringenberg puts it, “take tradition and blast it into the 21st century.”

Long out of print, Reckless Country Soul was reissued this month by Mammoth Records. The revived version features the original four songs plus seven bonus tracks: one from the original session and five from a two-day recording stint at Sun Studios in Memphis.

The album opener, “Shot Down Again,” begins with a cross-continental warning from Ringenberg (“Look out London, here come the Scorchers!”), who then sings like Johnny Rotten raised on fatback and country sunshine while the Scorchers play hard, fast and loud. After two breakneck verses, the song shifts to a tender waltz-time as the lyrics describe a lover’s ill-fated encounter with his darling: “When I tried to kiss her/Jerry Falwell shot tear gas in my eyes/In my eyes, Lord.” Then it’s back to the original pace, as Warner Hodges takes a guitar solo while Jason shrieks, “Pick it, Warner,” laughs and then plays a blistering harmonica lead.

In the other tracks from the original EP release, the Scorchers first caress, then slap around Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome (I Could Cry)” and unleash an exultant, frenetic cover of “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Blue Yodel.” The bonus tracks are in some cases stronger and wilder than the first four songs, especially a swamp/rockabilly rendering of Fervor favorite “Help! There’s a Fire” that betters the EMI version, and a manic, hear-to-believe-it take on Carl Perkins’ “Gone, Gone, Gone.”

Ringenberg says discovering and listening to the long-lost tape of “Gone, Gone, Gone” was “one of the most humorous and exciting moments that me and Warner ever had in music. By the end of it, we were on the floor laughing out of joy.”

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when no one involved with the Scorchers was laughing. The band’s critical and popular successes of the early 1980s gave way to two heavily produced, less-focused efforts that took the band far away from its intensely original sound. At the end of 1989, the group was dropped from their second major record label after just one album.

“I called Warner and told him we’d been dropped,” recalls Ringenberg, “and he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.” After we left EMI, we had our choice of labels: we could have gone anywhere we wanted to go. A&M just poured it on as to what they were gonna do for us and then they delivered none of it. I don’t know that anybody could have, looking back. I don’t know if the timing wasn’t right, but it all fell apart and just broke Warner’s heart. It was too hard for him to handle.”

Three and a half years after calling it quits, a well-received reissue of their first two EMI releases prompted the Scorchers to reevaluate their situation and attempt a comeback. Best expectations were for the band to inch slowly back to form, but they sprang immediately forward like a kitten on a fat man’s seesaw, playing to packed houses and quickly securing a contract with Mammoth Records that resulted in A Blazing Grace, an album that returned the band to its revved-up, roots-rock style.

As for the kind of thing they do now, Jason says, “We’re concentrating on making a new album; we want to make a really great Jason and the Scorchers record. We have a lot more to draw from now, in terms of musical chops. There’s more soul involved in the Scorchers now and just about as much energy as in our punk rock heyday. Enough, anyway, that I think we could walk onstage with any of these young punk rock or alternative bands and give them a run for their money.”

© 1996-2004 — Creative Loafing — All Rights Reserved