Jason and the Scorchernauts:

After nearly 20 years, Jason Ringenberg and his sizzling
Scorchers are still rocking in the country

By Brian Baker
The Lexington Herald-Leader
Cincinnati, Ohio City Paper - July 9-15, 1998

Copyright 1998-2004 The Cincinnati City Paper

Respect is a hard won (and hardly won) commodity in the music business. Jason Ringenberg is a case in point. Since the rise of his band, Jason and the Scorchers, in the early ‘80’s, he has been cited by a generation of new bands as a primary influence, continued to play a dizzying amount of live dates to support fairly consistent album releases and has generally been credited as one of the avatars of the Alt-Country movement.

So, with all that on his resume, the New York Times still managed to misspell his last name in a May 6 story heralding the band’s show at Tramps and announcing the release of their first-ever live album, Midnight Roads & Stages Seen. After billing him as Jason “Ringenberger,” they topped it off with this headline: “Old, for Rockers, but Still Shaking.”

“I liked the ‘Old Guy Still Rocks’ headline,” says Ringenberg from his Nashville home. “That’s the kind of thing you like to see. I think of old guys, I think of Jerry Lee Lewis, Link Wray, Carl Perkins. I don’t think...me.”

Old, absolutely not. Traveled, you bet. Ringenberg has rung up countless miles on the road during his 17-year stint with the Scorchers, a span that has seen the band come tantalizingly close to attaining their dreams of hitting it big in the music industry, only to have their dreams restructured to accommodate a more realistic expectation.

“I don’t think the broader, wider thing is going to happen,” Ringenberg says wistfully. “There’s too many problems getting into radio, for any band like us, really. There was a very brief time when radio flirted with it. They played one Son Volt song, and played us a little bit. As a rule, American radio is never going to touch this stuff. And without radio, you don’t sell big. There are benefits to it. By not making yourself a slave to radio, you tend to have a lot more fun with it. And you have a better chance at longevity, which we’ve proven.”

For a band that has always prided itself on its ferocious stage presence, and that has always been footnoted as being a better live act than studio presence, it seems odd that a live album hasn’t been forthcoming until now. Ringenberg is genuinely puzzled himself.

“You know, it’s funny, because all through the ‘80s we never even talked about it,” Ringenberg says. “We never even considered it. I don’t know why really. I think we were so hooked on the starmaker machine, that the new record is going to be ‘the one,’ that sort of thing. We just never considered having fun and making a live record.”

Considering their history, it’s not unusual. When the ‘80s didn’t produce the mass acceptance they believed was inevitable, the Scorchers and Jason parted company for a brief spell. By 1992, Ringenberg had released a pure Country solo album under the moniker “Jason.” The album sank with barely a ripple, and Ringenberg was understandably despondent. (To this day, Ringenberg doesn’t include any of his solo material in the Scorchers’ set list). By the time Jason reteamed with the Scorchers, original bassist Jeff Johnson had renounced music and gone into photography. Enlisting new bassist Kenny Ames, the Scorchers released two albums in short order - the reintroduction of A Blazing Grace in 1995, and a return to form with Clear Impetuous Morning in 1996.

“When we got back, A Blazing Grace was just a pieced-together record. We begged time, and it got us a record deal,” Ringenberg remembers: “We still didn’t feel it was the right time to do a live record, because we were still kind of minding the path. With Clear Impetuous Morning, we moved forward creatively, so we figured after that we could do it.”

A year and a half after the decision, guitarist and producer Warner Hodges began the monumental task of assembling the pieces to document a series of live shows for recording. The band settled on Nashville’s Exit/In for the venue, based on a number of good live experiences there. They also made the decision to utilize a mobile recording truck, rather than installing studio gear backstage. Ironically, the truck was equipped with the same console used to record the multi-platinum Frampton Comes Alive back in 1976. (An omen? “Only 13,990,000 more to go...we’re right on track,” Ringenberg predicts.)

Ultimately, there was more than just the immediacy of recording good performances for the live album to consider. Ringenberg’s wife, Suzy, was just weeks away from delivering their second child, and he was eager to wrap up the recording before the chaos of the new baby’s arrival. The band finally settled on three actual dates for recording - one night for a run-through and two live shows.

The resulting recordings were as magical as they were voluminous. Hodges was forced to cull a great deal of material from the final mix because of space limitations, even after the decision was made to expand the scope of the project to include a second disc. After much deliberation, the album’s set list represented every release in the Scorchers’ catalog but one.

“By being able to record three nights, we were able to get a lot of stuff on tape,” Ringenberg says. “I was really pro-’do as much as possible’ and then just wade through it later. That paid off. All kinds of things that we hadn’t played in awhile. ‘Ocean of Doubt’ is a perfect example. Man, I’d forgotten it. I don’t think it was that good on the record. We just hit it live.”

A number of guests show up on the album, including violinist Don Herron (BR5-49), Jerry Dale McFadden (The Mavericks) and Todd Snider, but the odds-on sentimental favorite has to be the appearance of Hodges’ parents, Blanche and Edgar, who sing and play guitar respectively on the Scorchers’ cover of Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ the Dog.” It is an amazing moment that almost didn’t make it to the album.

“They usually play with us when we’re in town, and sometimes even out of town, they’ll drive and play with us,” Ringenberg says. “Warner’s played with them all those years, and I used to sit in with Edgar and Blanche quite a bit myself and play bass. They have a little jam thing they do in their basement every now and then, and in the ‘60s they had a legitimate Country band called Blanche Hodges and the Swingin’ Strings. I think they had a few singles out. Anyway, I really had to fight to get that on the record. People just didn’t hear it. And I was like, ‘Man, I’m telling you, this is going to be a high point of the record.’ I had to fight just to get it recorded. I said, ‘We’ve got to bring them up to jam with us. We do it all the time.’ And everybody was saying, ‘We’ve got so much to do, we couldn’t possibly.’ I said, ‘Trust me on this, damn it. I’ll take the beating. Everyone will be mad at me, but we’re going to do this.’”

Another high point of the show is Ringenberg’s dedication of the Scorchers’ mid-’80s classic, “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait” to midwife Anne Miller, who eventually helped deliver Ringenberg’s new daughter, Addie Rose. As Jason tells the story, the unmistakable metronomelike clicking of an infant swing comes through the line.

“The pre-production part was pretty fun, the actual recording of the baby hit some snags, and it was a long process, but we got through it,” Ringenberg laughs. “It was funny, when we saw Anne, we never talked about the band, but she used to go see us in town. We didn’t know that when we got her as a midwife. Suzy went to meet her, and she said, ‘Ringenberg. You wouldn’t happen to be related to Jason Ringenberg, would you?’ And we never mentioned a word until I met her in person. I’m just in awe of those people. They command such respect. Being a Rock & Roll singer just doesn’t compete.”

But, of course, in an apples and oranges sort of way, it does. There is more than a passing resemblance between the midwife who delivers children into the world and an artist who must pull his creation kicking and screaming from within to present it to an often indifferent world. Jason Ringenberg and his Scorchers are originators of a whole subgenre of music, and he can’t get his name spelled right in the New York Times. Ringenberg is quietly philosophical about the whole discussion.

“I think we probably will get our due, simply because the Alt-Country movement is essentially an underground press sort of movement,” Ringenberg says. “It’s not a radio, huge sales sort of thing. In that sense, because it is word-of-mouth, and because so many people say the Scorchers started it, I think we do get what’s coming. I’m happy for it. You take what you can get.”

© 1998-2004 — The Cincinnati City Paper — All Rights Reserved