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Jason and the Scorchers ride high again By Scott McLennan Copyright 1996 Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Inc.
Born in Nashville, Jason and the Scorchers captured some hearts and minds with its first two records, but for the last 10 years the work has been pretty thankless. Yet unlike the other two bands mentioned above, Jason and the Scorchers remains standing. "Clear Impetuous Morning," the band's latest album, shows the band not only holding its ground but making great leaps forward. It's Jason and the Scorchers all right, playing hard-driving, twang-bent rock with an authority few others can. Yet an unmistakable scar of maturity runs down the work. This is the record where the band takes stock after episodes of dashed expectations, drug habits, divorces and families started anew. The lineup responsible for the group's most noted works, "Fervor" and "Lost and Found," reunited last year after beginning to fall away in 1989. With singer-songwriter Jason Ringenberg always at the helm, it was the regrouping of guitarist Warner Hodges, bass player Jeff Johnson and drummer Perry Baggs that made Jason and the Scorchers really cook again. First Album Last year's "A Blazing Grace" was the first album released by the band after Jason took a three-year sabbatical. "Clear Impetuous Morning" is the righteous follow-up with all the kinks straightened or tightened as need be. "We had more of a good time making this record than any other," said Ringenberg when reached recently at his home in Nashville. "Our personal lives are together, and we were just excited to set out and do something big. We said "Let's make a career record or go down trying.' Face it, we were getting a little tired of playing all the songs off "Lost and Found' and "Fervor' in our live shows and having nobody care about anything else." True, the interim albums, including a solo Jason project, never sparked a level of interest equal to that of the early records. Ringenberg said the band never went away, it was just ignored. But the times may be right for Jason and the Scorchers to ride high again. Not only does the band play and write with an incisive edge found on its initial outings, but there is a friendly environment for radical country music. Jason and the Scorchers' screaming-guitar grit rock and Neil Young-informed balladry can find cousin sounds in the honky-tonk and hard-core country styles being plied by a handful of bands emerging now as Ringenberg and Co. did a decade ago. Hard To Shake Another bonus for the band is that its fans are hard to shake once hooked. The college crowd that embraced the band in the early '80s has held on, keeping track of the records and concerts, "and starting record labels," said Ringenberg, noting that the guys running his band's current label, Mammoth, were first fans of the band before being its patrons. Never darlings of the Nashville music scene, Jason and the Scorchers fires back at the country music establishment that scorned them with Graham Parsons' "Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man. " It's a Parsons classic about the music industry losing touch with the music it purports to support. "We wanted to do a Graham song, and that one just seemed right for us. It's his anti-Nashville, anti-corporate one, and that story fits us perfectly," Ringenberg said. When told Joan Baez also covered the song, using it as an anti-war number at the original Woodstock festival, Ringenberg laughed and confessed he didn't know that. "I had no idea how radical I was being." Actually the "radical" stuff comes in musical terms. Still possessing a clear-eyed tumbleweed tenor of a voice, Ringenberg is nothing short of haunting on the album's ballads, particularly "Everything Has a Cost," sung with Emmylou Harris, "Jeremy's Glory," a Civil War inspired country folk tune. Tagged at the end is the galloping
"Sticking With You," as fine a piece of raucous optimism
as one can find. Scratchy acoustic guitars slip in and out of howling
electric leads and pounding timpani for a sweeping effect. "It
was an interesting song to do and probably my favorite on the album,"
Ringenberg said. "It sounds really good, but was awfully nutty
for us to make." Most of the 14 tracks on "Clear Impetuous Morning" are true to the sound Jason and the Scorchers was founded on. But with the opening whoop of "Oh what a rush" that launches "Self-Sabotage," there is no denying the band is fired up for some fun. "Cappuccino Rosie," a tale of weird and wild love, is aimed for the younger set, Ringenberg said, noting the debt owed college radio support. More telling of the band's growth, though, are "Victory Road," which ponders what it takes to be at peace with oneself, and "Kick Me Down," a defiant statement of survival. Material success is held suspect in "Everything Has a Cost," and the spiritual paucity plumbed in "To Feel No Love" is a bit more than one would expect from a roadhouse rock outfit. Recalling excesses from his own past, Ringenberg offers "Tomorrow Has Come Today" as a cautionary tale for those using drugs. Once the decision was made to make a "career album," the songs flowed and were completed in three months, he said. With the finished product delivered to stores earlier this month, Jason and the Scorchers is now doing what it knows best: touring. Jason and the Scorchers performs Saturday at Mama Kin, 36 Lansdown St., Boston. "We're touring a giant circle of the states in three weeks. It's crazy, but we're charged up to do it, and then we're off to Europe," Ringenberg said. While Jason and the Scorchers first emerged in the company of R.E.M. and U2, but never scaled the present-day commercial heights of those two college-radio-coddled acts, it can be safely said that these Nashville upstarts are still fighting the good fight. Jason and the Scorchers
© 1996-2001 Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Inc. — All Rights Reserved |
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