Jason and the Scorchers

Still raging against the light

By Richard Fausset
Flagpole Magazine
Atlanta, Georgia - August 12, 1998

Copyright 1998-2004 Flagpole Magazine

For a generation of kids who grew up thinking that 1976 was music’s Year Zero, the 1980s brought welcome surprises and welcome history lessons. That decade, a crop of U.S. bands well-versed in the New Wave married those sensibilities with deeper - and deeply American - traditions: groups like Arizona’s Meat Puppets, who produced an acid-tinged, painterly country and western; and R.E.M., who married a thousand new ideas with the oldest and weirdest of Appalachian folk traditions.

And then there was Jason and the Nashville Scorchers. While the Meat Puppets and R.E.M. played it more stone-faced cool, the Scorchers were out to tear up their hometown, cool be damned. Singer Jason Ringenberg was (and reportedly still is) a vision of wild-eyed gawk, a gaudy flash of Roy Rogers shirt-trim accenting your worst nightmare of a filling station attendant. He could play the sentimental poet one moment (singing songs with words like “gypsy” and “mama” in them), the raging, hiccuping testosterone punk freak the next.

His band sounded like a countrified vision of-outfits that never should’ve been countrified in the first place: Heart, AC/DC, The Ramones, The Sex Pistols. As guitarist Warner Hodges told Flagpole in a recent interview, “There’s no way to be living in Nashville and not have a country side. It’s hard not to be bombarded.”

The deep country roots of the Scorchers have acted as a sort of preservative: the band’s new double-live CD Midnight Roads and Stages Seen [Mammoth], though uneven in spots, is a surprisingly relevant, rough-shod document of a band who pioneered the rock-country train wreck. “I wanted it to be like you’re standing in the middle of the accident about 15 feet back,” Hodges said of the album. “If it’s out of key it’s out of key. So be it.”

The music remains funny and deep and dorky and poignant and - most of all - real. Warner Hodges’ family toured European military bases playing country covers, with young Warner backing up his folks on drums. Singer Ringenberg is the son of an Illinois hog farmer. He’s also the kind of rock and roll frontman who’s fond of quoting St. Augustine and Rudyard Kipling. It makes you wonder how much of the cowboy stuff is shtick and how much is the real thing.

“A little bit of both, I think,” Hodges said. “Jason doesn’t take himself too damn seriously. Then again, most of the nights when we walk onstage it’s all business. Everybody walks onstage with the same head - that this is gonna be the greatest show we’ve ever played. [Ex-Del Lord] Eric Ambel used to tell me, ‘It’s the most important thing in the world - now forget about it and the hell with it, let’s have some fun.’”

The best moments on the album are the ones that find the band raging against a fate that never granted them a big hit: like “Harvest Moon” and the old Michael Stipe collaboration “Both Sides of The Line” are delivered with the sort of bluster and sneer that big-time success, by its very nature, snuffs. But the staying power seems to stem from the Scorchers’ link to tradition: when Warner’s own mama comes out and revs through a cover of Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ the Dog,” all sorts of loose ends of American music connect.

“In country in general it seems it’s OK to get old,” Hodges said. “Even if you don’t tour, you’ve got the Grand Ole Opry, where you’re guaranteed two shows a week. Which is pretty cool - you just do it until you die.”

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