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Scorching new
'morning'; By Michael Gray; BANNER MUSIC
WRITER Copyright 1996 Nashville Banner Publishing Company
Fifteen years into its career, Jason and the Scorchers seem jazzed as ever. The title of the band's seventh album, Clear Impetuous Morning -- which hits stores Tuesday -- hints at the the band's secured impulsiveness. As does the lead-off lyric, when Jason Ringenberg spews "Oh, what a rush!" "The last record harkened back to the past," says Ringenberg, seated next to cigarette-chomping guitarist Warner Hodges at a local coffeehouse, "but Clear Impetuous Morning is just a forward-looking record all the way." Anyone who has caught the Scorchers live lately can testify that the band continues to gush with atomic energy and kinetic inspiration. In fact, the Scorchers' hometown resurrection at the Exit/In during Extravaganza '95 is, no doubt, one of the most-talked-about Nashville concerts of the decade. Ringenberg, Hodges, bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Perry Baggs -- who don't play 'round here as often as you might expect -- bring their frenzied hoedown to Music City once again when they appear at 328 Performance Hall on Oct. 5. The band has embarked on an ambitious tour that won't likely wrap up until next summer. As always, Ringenberg will work the crowd -- whipping his microphone chord as intensely as Jerry Lee Lewis works his piano -- and, like usual, heads will bob and sparks will fly. Somewhat comparable to the current buzz in town surrounding honky-tonk heroes BR5-49, there was a stir about the Scorchers from the get-go. With its edgy fusion of honky-tonk and punk, the Reckless Country Soul veterans are considered pioneers of the budding alternative-country movement. Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, as they were then called, played a major role in giving Music City a rock scene it could call its own about the same time Martha Quinn began dishing out Adam & The Ants and Men At Work on MTV. During its decade-and-a-half gravel road trip to Clear Impetuous Morning, though, Jason and the Scorchers faced personnel changes and lengthy hiatuses, only to bounce back from the ropes each time like a boxer with refueled strength to knock out his opponent. According to its frontman, Jason and The Scorchers thrive on pressure. The band's last reentry came last year, when the original line-up -- in tact for the first time since Johnson dropped out before 1989's Thunder & Fire -- released A Blazing Grace. "A Blazing Grace was basically just about getting the train back on the track," says Hodges. "This time around we wanted to push the envelope. We wanted to surprise a few people, surprise ourselves. We tried to up the ante a little bit. "I love playing (the Scorchers' classic) White Lies every night, but we need to move forward, too. We had to find a way for it to become creative again, and feel like it's blossoming and moving forward. I don't want it to be like 'Hi, we're Jason and the Scorchers, and it's 1984.' With this record we've come up with a way to do that. "For the first time in 10 years the band is hitting on all four cylinders," adds the lanky lead singer. "Everybody was totally into it, we were totally committed to making a brilliant record." From Gram's closet Clear Impetuous Morning was self-produced by Hodges and Johnson, a first for the Scorchers. The album was engineered by Johnson's buddy, Jeff Bakos, in Bakos' vintage amp repair shop in Atlanta. "The place looks like hell, but sounds like a million bucks," says Hodges. The group went there initially planning to just lay some demo tracks, but by the second day of recording they realized the shop-turned-studio had just the vibe they wanted. "There is no cutting room to speak of," continues Hodges. "It's basically a big storage room. Two of the walls are amps he uses as diffusion. Rather than putting in fancy studio stuff, he just stacked up amps to the ceiling to deaden the wall. "We wanted to make something that sounds good in the '90s, but we don't need 72 tracks to do Jason and the Scorchers." This kind of punk ethos is what separates the Scorchers from most other countrified acts coming from Nashville. It's also the reason Gram Parsons' Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man -- a tune Ringenberg describes as "an anti-Nashville music business kind of song" - was an obvious choice for the supercharged band to include on the new album. While Ringenberg acknowledges that Nashville, in general, has been very supportive of the Scorchers, he is also candid about being "slammed by Ralph Emery and all the rest of those kind of guys at one time or another." Another connection to Parsons on the project, be it a roundabout one, is Everything Has A Cost. Written by Baggs and Ringenberg, it's a duet with with Emmylou Harris, who was Parsons' right-hand musical partner before his death. "I finally came out of the Gram Parsons closet," Ringenberg says, "admitting what a profound influence he's had on me and pretty much on everything that's happened in country rock -- today, yesterday and tomorrow." Enjoying Cheese Another reason for the band's renewed feeling: Ringenberg says he has hit a streak of inspired songwriting that he hasn't felt in a long, long time. Some of his inspiration came from co-writing three songs on the new album with local musician Tommy Womack, formerly of hard-working indie bands Government Cheese and the Bis-quits. Ringenberg and Womack have been acquainted for some time. But it was after reading Womack's Cheese Chronicles: The True Story Of A Rock 'N' Roll Band You Never Heard Of -- an immensely readable account of what America looks like from the back of a van -- Ringenberg initiated a working relationship with him. Cheap hotels, splitting pocket change four ways at the end of a weekend, catching the middle part of the same movie on hotel Showtime 15 nights in a row and eating cold ravioli out of the can are a few of the tales Womack shares in Cheese Chronicles. It's a tale the Scorchers can relate to. In fact, the Scorchers are enshrined in the pages of the book. "There was genuine punk rock in (Nashville)," writes Womack, "and one band stood knees, hips, and shoulders above the rest of them: Jason and the Nashville Scorchers. Before them, rock bands had been unapproachable icons that appeared before us in great barns and sped away before their humanity was unveiled. The Scorchers, however, together with their friends in Georgia -- R.E.M. -- were, by their close-up and familiar natures, making it all look somehow realistic to want to do this sort of thing." "I was stunned by the writing in that book," says Ringenberg. "It's the best-written book about rock 'n' roll I've ever read in my life. So, I knew I had to write with this guy. In one afternoon, bam!, we walked out with Going Nowhere, one of the best songs on the record. It was just magic. We had a great time. Tommy Womack is one of the geniuses of Nashville." "I related to that book on three or four different levels," injects Hodges. "Somebody who knows absolutely nothing about the music business can read that and understand -- the names really don't have to mean anything. It's like, my God, we're like Led Zeppelin compared to those guys," he says with a laugh. "I thought we had a rough go of it, but those guys ... their problems made our problems really seem like no big deal. "Whether our record sells 12 copies or 4 million, we can go play shows. A lot of bands here don't have that option," the guitar slinger explains. "It's from all the work we pounded out in the '80s. We actually toured our brains out. A lot of our success from that area is from the amount of work we poured into it. "I can also relate (to Cheese Chronicles), because I know what it is like to pour your heart and soul into something only to watch it die -- the pain that comes with that. And there ain't a damn thing you can do about it, except just stand on the sidelines and watch. Who knows how many copies of that book I've bought and given away." 'Old man, look at yourself' "This is not a big money-making thing for any of us," assures Ringenberg. "We're doing this for the joy of doing it, for the pride that goes into it. I remember when I was growing up as a teen-ager looking at Neil Young, Bob Dylan and those people, seeing that they had achieved longevity. Now we are sitting on that. We have 15 years and seven albums (behind us). We've accomplished what I thought was something really special when I was a teen-ager." The longevity of the band and its body of work is also saluted in a separate album release Tuesday. That's the day EMI Records releases Both Sides of the Line, a compilation disc as a part of the label's Acoustic Highway series. Other artists saluted in this series include the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Don McLean and Townes Van Zandt. The title of the Jason entry -- a combination package of early albums Fervor and Lost and Found -- comes from a song Ringenberg co-wrote with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe. But just because it says "Acoustic Highway" on the packaging, don't expect anything less than the all-out vigor that helped lay the groundwork for Nashville's rock music scene. Hodges picks up the conversation. "Outside of U2 and R.E.M, there aren't a whole lot of folks -- from the days when we started -- who are still around with all the original members. And both of those bands have had some serious success -- there's a whole lot of money involved. "For us, at this point, the reward is hopefully doing great music. It is what bonds us together." Hodges is finally convinced that he's in the Scorchers for the long haul, something he wasn't sure of even one year ago, before the band began working on Clear Impetuous Morning. "Now I know we can do serious music again," he says. "Can we stretch the envelope? That was the big question. This time around, not only did we push the envelope, we had a blast doing it. It wasn't work. We had fun. That's the reward -- we had a good time making the record." Ringenberg agrees: "There is a lot of life in this band. Jason and the Scorchers really is on a serious second run." GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Nashville honky-tonk rock pioneers Jason and the Scorchers - Jason Ringenberg, Perry Baggs, Jeff Johnson and Warner Hodges (from left) "up the ante" in a new, forward-looking album that will hit the stores Tuesday. (b and w) (caption in first only); PHOTO: With new album and upcoming gig, Jason and the boys don't look back (color)
© 1996-2001 Nashville Banner Publishing Company — All Rights Reserved |
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