Veteran band not letting go of this tiger just yet

By Walter Tunis, Contributing music critic
The Lexington Herald-Leader
Lexington, Kentucky - July 9, 1998

Copyright 1998-2004 The Lexington Herald-Leader

“As Rudyard Kipling said, ‘He who rides the tiger finds it difficult to dismount.’

So sayeth Jason Ringenberg at the onset of Jason & the Scorchers’ new concert album, Midnight Roads & Stages Seen. Maybe that’s because at 39, dismounting from the career-long tiger that is post-punk country music simply isn’t in his plans.

“It’s hard for me to picture life without Jason & the Scorchers,” he said. “To me, to watch a band like this grow old would really be kind of neat. There’s only a few bands who have done that with any sense of grace. But here we are, 39 years old, and still doing it with that same level of intensity we had 10 years ago. Jerry Lee (Lewis) managed it...I saw (guitarist) Link Wray recently. He’s 74 and he was simply scary.”

Skeptics who doubt whether Ringenberg can still cut it onstage after nearly two decades’ worth of touring need only click on the album or home video versions of Midnight Roads & Stages Seen. The album was pulled largely from the first of a two-night Nashville club engagement last November. The video came exclusively from the second night.

Here you witness Ringenberg - or, as Scorchers’ guitarist Warner Hodges calls him in the liner notes, “the wildest cowboy this side of Mars” - in all his glory. He injects Bob Dylan’s Absolutely Sweet Marie, the 1982 high-octane honky-tonk charmer Broken Whiskey Glass and (on the video only) a blazing reworking of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads with the gusto, edge and sheer vocal stamina of a newcomer.

“How to keep the music fresh is sort of the million dollar question,” Ringenberg said. “That’s what separates the people who can last from the people who become parodies of themselves. Luckily, we’ve been able to maintain that edge. I’m not really sure how. It helps that all four of us in the band (Ringenberg, Hodges, longtime drummer Perry Baggs and bassist Kenny Ames, who joined the Scorchers last year) are real performers by nature. Our first priority at a show is to get the audience off. So that’s where it helps doing a lot of the old songs. You’re not really doing them because you want to. Obviously, no one can want to do a song they’ve played 400 times.”

But there’s another reason Ringenberg still has the tiger by the tail as he chases down 40. It’s attitude. A positive one. He possesses an air for the upbeat that extends beyond the stage.

“I guess that’s one of the biggest challenges of doing this, no matter what level you’re at,” the singer said. “It’s ‘to be or not to be,’ I guess. The music business, you see, has a little higher percentage of jadedness than most businesses have. That’s because the expectations that artists have are so high. When artists get into it, they find out that very, very few - a minute percentage — ever reach ‘the top.’

“There arc really two kind of performers. There are the ones who only do it for themselves to get some kind of internal buzz, and there are the ones that are out there to turn on an audience. And, fundamentally, the latter is what we’re all about.”

Of course, there is also an inevitable byproduct that has come from staying in the game as long as Ringenberg and the Scorchers have. The band’s self-described “reckless country soul” has influenced many younger bands and contemporaries alike. Groups as diverse as R.E.M., BR5-49 and The Mavericks have gone on record citing the Scorchers as an inspiration.

“That’s one of the things we can point to and be proud of,” Ringenberg said. “There are only two or three bands from the early ‘80s that experienced this third renaissance of American country. The first one was, of course, the original wave (which included pioneers such as Hank Williams). The second one included Gram Parsons and, later on, The Eagles. The third one was us and people like Steve Earle.

“Now, how does that make me feel? Well, sometimes it can make me feel really old because I’ve never really thought of myself as an influence. I remember how I used to listen to and be influenced by Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons. But then I would go, “Hey, I’m not in that league.’ But groups that now say I’m an influence are simply doing the same thing I used to. And, you know, that’s pretty cool.”

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