COWBOYS AND BAD MEN

Club notes by Ben Rayner
The Toronto Star
July 16, 1998, Thursday

Copyright 1998 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.

Now that so-called ''alternative country'' is cool, perhaps its finally time to give Jason and the Scorchers their due. The battle-scarred Nashville-based quartet has been bashing out rip-roaring, hellbent-for-leather cowpunk on the fringes of mainstream acceptance for something like 17 years now. That's not only longer than we've had convenient terms like alt-country to frame their genre-hopping mix of honky tonk and pogo abandon. That's a good 10 years ahead of the unexpected commercial success of bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana, which ushered in the whole ''alternative'' moniker in the first place.

''I guess we're kind of the kings of the hill right now, us and Steve Earle,'' chuckles head Scorcher Jason Ringenberg, on the line from TNN's Nashville studios, where the band is preparing to tape a live performance for Prime Time Country.

The TV appearance is sweet revenge, of sorts, for the band. Way back in 1981, an enthusiastic young producer fought to get the young 'n' scrappy Scorchers - part of an early alt-country movement that included such now-departed bands as Lone Justice and Rank 'n' File - on the same show, with disastrous results. The performance was fine, mind you, but staid Nashville didn't quite know how to take a blast of roof-raising punk-rock energy, and the producer nearly lost his job over the deal.

''Last time we played on this thing, (then host) Ralph Emery just about had a heart attack,'' recalls Ringenberg. ''He was like, 'What is this? We need to go to a commercial.' ''That was one of the high points of our career.''

Country audiences never really did warm to Jason and the Scorchers (as Ringenberg puts it, ''We don't have too many Garth fans in our crowd''). Nor, truth be told, have rock audiences on a large scale. Still, a loyal core audience has kept them playing to packed clubs for the better part of two decades, as they'll likely do Monday night at the Horseshoe Tavern.

Fittingly, the band went back to one of its old proving grounds, Nashville's Exit/In club, when it came time to record its first-ever live album - the recently released Midnight Roads And Stages Seen - in a whirlwind three-show session last year. The Scorchers are as satisfied with the high-energy output ''as a group of 40-year-old, nit-picky, family-type people can be,'' reports Ringenberg.

''I'm not sure there's any one thing that keeps us in the ball game,'' he muses, ''but we really do legitimately love playing live. And that buzz that you get when you play with this band is a pretty magical thing when it works.

''I went home to visit my family in Illinois, and my nephew was there - a young, 'alternative' sort of kid, 13 or 14. He'd watched a tape of us on Conan O'Brien, and the first thing he said was 'You have a lot of energy for a bunch of old guys'...''I think we're pretty proud of that, especially since the music is essentially pretty violent and pretty energy-based. It's based on conflicting energies coming together, and to maintain that clash of energies is very difficult to do.''

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