by Tommy Womack, 1996 -- http://www.tommywomack.com
Where do you start when talking about
Jason and the Scorchers? It's like trying to explain love, or God, or
Hank Williams. I could talk about the first Scorchers show I saw, and
how it had to be the most homicidal show of their career, but then again,
everyone else is certain they saw that finest Scorchers show another
night someplace else, because this band has left so many people in so
many cities walking out of clubs dragging their jaws in the broken glass
and muck on the floor, convinced they saw THE SHOW.
It can't be rote routine to be that incandescent, can it? If you first saw them at Cantrell's in Nashville, you know what I'm talking about. Or Tyrone's in Athens. Or the Beat in Louisville. Or Dingwall's in London. The kind of place where the stage is the size of a panel truck, beer's a buck and these freaks from Nashville with a cowboy in front got up there and basically scared the dixie-fried living shit out of everyone in the room.
They were unlike anything that had ever been, twanging like Merle Haggard one second and getting in your face like Iggy the next. They'd come out, level the place and then leave again before you had the time to think about how you'd just seen the greatest rock and roll show of your life.
Over and over again, in town after town, for fan after fan, they've left dropped-jawed, first-timer memories like a burning calling card. What's more, they're still doing it, because Jason and the Scorchers are the greatest live rock and roll band ever to come out of the modern American south. They stand alone. No one else comes close.
Their names are Jason Ringenberg, Warner E. Hodges, Jeff Johnson and Perry Baggs - vocals, one of the top rock guitarists of the past twenty years, bass and drums respectively. They were the first band ever to throw equal handfuls of Johnny Cash and the Sex Pistols into the same stew. It is impossible to imagine the current alternative country music scene, and a great deal of the alternative rock scene, had they never existed.
They've made seven records of, by and large, the best meeting of hardcore country and breakneck-paced rock and roll that has ever been done. And who'd have ever thought, after all the bourbon under this bridge, that Jason and the Scorchers would now be plunging into their fourth year of a two-week reunion tour? With a new record out on Mammoth/Atlantic October 1st, '96, and a world tour in the works, it's a "Clear Impetuous Morning," indeed.
From this point, if you want to know more about Jason and the Scorchers, what happened when and who paid the damage, you might save your eyes (and your online bill) and print it out, or download it to your desktop. I'll still try to keep it brief and blow-by-blow, but hey, we have fifteen years to run down here. Just a suggestion. And with that said, here's the JASON AND THE SCORCHERS STORY.
Jason Ringenberg came to Nashville in 1981, a nice kid from a hog farm in northern Illinois, a Lefty Frizzell and Bob Dylan fan who dreamed of fronting a great American rock and roll band with musicians who sounded like they had dirt under their fingernails.
He came to Nashville for the traditions: the Opry and Music Row, perhaps to shake up said traditions, to be sure, but still, he came for the institutions, and not because he suspected that Music City was harboring a phalanx of young, spiky-headed, disaffected sons and daughters of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" who thought Kenny Rogers needed to be shot and didn't give a damn what Mickey Gilley and Charly McClain were singing about.
Jason stumbled whole and pure into that dark world, a surly, hip knot of non-C&W mold spores huddled together for heat in the gargantuan shadow of Music Row. There was genuine punk-rock in the town, along with dance music, reggae, art-noise and other flavors. All the young dudes carried the news, commingling with the Opry's grandkids and the smelly, suspect bastard children, too.
Warner E. Hodges grew up playing USOs all over the world with his parents' country band. He became the drummer as soon as he was old enough to reach the pedals, then he switched to guitar. He could sing, too. He got good like you get when you grow up with it; and he grew up liking rock - the faster and louder, the better.
Warner's family act got off the road when he was a teen, and they all settled back in Nashville, where Warner met two native Nashvillians: Jeff Johnson, a young rocker, and Perry Baggs, a drummer and son of a gospel singer.
The three of them played together in various short-lived combinations like young rockers will do, making a small, anarchic name for themselves among Music City's disaffected, possessing, as young men, inordinate energy and a prodigious capacity for good times, eating speed and rocking like crazy white punks for twenty people on a Friday night in some dive, three young guys who knew country music like the back of their hands because they grew up with it.
But they grew their hair down in front of their eyes and hung out at Phrank n' Steins and Rooster's and Cantrell's, places that were fast, loud, drunk and punk. They were physical performers, especially Warner, who jumped around so much while performing that he once leapt and put his guitar neck through the Cantrell's ceiling over the stage, a hole that was never repaired and from then on referred to, succinctly enough, as "Warner's hole".
Jason came into town wearing a cowboy hat and a silk western shirt, writing panoramic rock and country songs with classic themes of good and evil, destiny vs. free will, the politics of sin and of course dancin' with yer best gal on Saturday night. It all came out of him with a voice of shimmering innocence and utter conviction, conveying belief he could go out and not just play shows, but make a difference, make a contribution to country and rock traditions and heritage and all that music critic bullshit.
He formed a band immediately, an innocuous combo of non-serious types, with a young Vandy student, Jack Emerson, on bass. They called it Jason and the Nashville Scorchers, and from their first gig, opening for R.E.M, Jason Ringenberg made his presence known to young Nashville. As a matter of fact, he worked a stage in a way that rivaled Warner's own psychotic stage mannerisms. Jeff saw that show, and told Warner, who came to the next Scorchers show, when they opened for Carl Perkins.
Warner, who'd circled the world many times and seen it all by the age of twenty, was impressed but also bemused, because Jason never dropped the rosy-colored "carry the country banner" vision on or offstage ever, not even slightly. What's the deal with Huck Finn here?, he asked. Jason was equally bemused with Warner, not to mention wary, as the guitarist was by now a muscular, boisterous, chain-smoker capable of looking like he stepped right off the post-office wall. The two were different as whiskey and milk, their favorite respective beverages at the time.
Jason, Warner, Jeff and Perry decided to meet for an afternoon with their instruments and ideas, to mix it up and settle for themselves that it wouldn't work and that they had nothing in common. They failed to prove that. As a matter of fact, it ranks as one of the more glitteringly brilliant failures in the annals of rock and roll. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
Jason wanted a band that sounded they had dirt under their fingernails and he got one all right. He got one with dirt, blood and frantically-clawed bits of skin from the attacker. The very first rehearsal stank of whiskey like early Skynyrd but with the adrenaline minute-rush of punk. It was "Deliverance", Andy Griffith, "Never Mind the Bollocks" and "The Fightin' Side of Me" all at the same damn time. And nobody else in the world had ever done it before, either.
Jason, Warner, Jeff and Perry did something that day that very few rock and roll groups get to do. They invented something. They got tired of being called "country-punk," eventually, but they did come up with it. That day. And it was and still is a wonderful thing.
There is much myth making about those early days now. Did Perry really audition as drummer with a broom handle? For that matter, at least two thousand more people have claimed to have been at those early shows than really could have been. But enough were, and they told friends, and it was a matter of weeks after first ever meeting that Jason and the Nashville Scorchers (the ones you know) were the biggest buzz in town. It happened that fast.
They recorded a record immediately, the quickest, cheapest way they could, on a four-track cassette-recorder in a friend's house, with Perry's drums in the living room and Jason singing in the hall. They did four songs, two of Jason's and two country classics that would not have been recognized by their creators.
It rocked. It rocked obscenely. As Jason so presciently puts it at the beginning of the record between nervous giggles, "Look out London, here come the Scorchers!" He would, in time, make good on that boast.
Reckless Country Soul came out directly thereafter as a 7-inch vinyl EP on the new Praxis label, created by Jack Emerson, who had quit Vandy to start this label and manage the band. It's rare to come across a band that is instantly and obviously worth quitting Vandy for, but this was that.
Fifteen years later, listening to that record they made in one day, hearing Jason's first grand-theme masterpiece, "Broken Whiskey Glass" (in which the girl forsakes her churching for the wilds of the city), or their brutal re-working of "Jimmie Rodgers' Last Blue Yodel", it's worth Jack quitting college all over again.
It was a different world back then, with a lower drinking age and lots of little clubs to play, so the Scorchers hit the road, their ferocious, take-no-prisoners act inspiring one of two things everywhere they went: either pandemic applause or pin-drop silent, clinical shock.
They opened a lot of shows for R.E.M., who were still eating meat and mumbling at the time, and these days inspired one of the best early Scorchers tunes, "Hot Nights in Georgia". When they recorded that tune, the Scorchers had to kick in out of pocket to buy an extra hour of time in the studio, and then they nailed it in one take because they had to.
They did a show in Nashville at Cat's Record Store in the parking lot on West End Avenue. Warner spun like a top, raking his guitar while Perry and Jeff rocked away and Jason tore into the mike stand with a ferocity that took his two front teeth out.
He jumped up with blood spurting out his mouth and shrieked "Wal, If I wuddn't ugly before, I sure am now!" and proceeded to burn a stage in a way that hadn't happened in Nashville for a long, long time. Maybe ever. He climbed up a billboard in mid-show and sang from there, blood still spurting down his chin! I heard about that show. Everybody heard about that show.
I first saw them at the Alternative Jam '83. Alternative Jam was young Nashville's bird-flipping to Charlie Daniel's Volunteer Jam and all its tobacco juice and Wrangler Jeans over at Municipal Auditorium that same evening.
I came down from Bowling Green, Kentucky, where I was a sophomore college-puke. Cantrell's was the Music City punk dive at the time. It's the Jamaica Restaurant now, on 21st near the Broadway/West End Split, and if you knew what a shithole it was then, you wouldn't eat there now.
All night at Cantrell's for something like five bucks, I think. Six bands, and the headliner was Jason and the Nashville Scorchers. Young Grey Ruins played that night. Oh, OK played. Some band I'm told Matthew Sweet was in played that night.
Some band I'm told Michael Stipe's sister was in played that night. A synth-pop thing called Factual played that night. Cantrell's was a fascinating and dangerous world. I remember drinking some beers. I remember seeing the woman who would later wind up my wife.
I remember braving the bathroom. I remember a mod-looking, black headed, sharkskin-suit-wearing Rick Champion, who emceed, saying "yeah, fuck you too, buddy" to someone down front and exhorting everyone to "bounce off the walls", tacitly approving the audience's prediliction for ramming one another like rutting moose.
After Factual, the people began pressing forward and getting good spots. Warner came swaggering out on-stage with a battered Fender Jazzmaster slung across his torso, jeans, spurs on his boots and some sleeveless T-shirt. His black hair was very long on one side and short on the other, the long side pulled out into a cockeyed ponytail sticking out the front left side of his head.
He had a cigarette burning and five Bud Lights hanging by the plastic rings from his teeth. He peeled one off and dropped down it to me in the front row. I'd never been to a show where the lead guitarist gave me a beer. That was pretty cool.
Then it started! And Warner spun in the air and landed on the ground with a burning cigarette jammed up his nose and playing the DEADEST-ON chunka-chunka rhythm and lead guitar, and by now Jason was already in the front row and the audience was a human popcorn popper and Jeff and Perry were playing the coolest merge of punk rhythm and genuine rockabilly I'd never heard before.
It was fifty-odd minutes of insanity punctuated by things NO OTHER group ever did, like a slow country weeper and Warner bringing his parents out for two numbers.
They had insane grins like hitmen who enjoyed their work too much, and all I could think between getting pummeled by slammers and holding onto Warner's vocal monitor for dear life was that this was something unbelievable. I rode all the way back to Bowling Green just shaking my head, not sure of what I had just been a part of.
They played on campus up in Bowling Green a couple of months later. They started with "If Money Talks", and I remember they did "Blue Moon of Kentucky", "Harvest Moon", "Pray for Me Mama", "Broken Whiskey Glass", "Amazing Grace", "You Win Again", "Ring of Fire" and I don't know what else.
It was the same kind of blitzkrieg fifty-minutes and they were gone again. Yep, I saw it all right. They're for real, all right. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Fervor was their next record, a manly 12 inches of vinyl, six tunes, released on Praxis July, '83, and I heard it for the first time coming out of Skot Willis's stereo, an immense, megawatt instrument of destruction and the ideal medium for such an experience. Much has been written about Fervor, and that's as it should be. The original Praxis vinyl master is very nearly perfect.
From the kick-off, with "Hot Nights in Georgia", all the best elements of Jason and the Nashville Scorchers were on an immediate best-case display: the innate, propulsive groove, Warner's impossible, yet bell-clear, cluster of hammer-ons and pull-offs climbing all the way up the neck, harkening guitar influences from Don Rich to Keith Richards to Billy Gibbons and Rick Neilsen, and a classic vocal performance from Jason that incorporates a lyrical view of America spanning from Sherman's March to the 40 Watt Club.
After that came the original version of their chilling classic honky-tonk weeper, "Pray For Me Mama", about the morning after a murder, setting up that this is not just a thrasher band with one volume setting. Then to their cover of Tim Krekel's "I Can't Help Myself", which pummels like few rock groups would dare to dream of with another white-hot signature guitar lick. Anything on side two would have been gravy from that point.
Instead, there were main courses yet to come, like "Help! (There's a Fire)", which illustrated the band's great rockabilly understanding at the same time it gave Jason opportunity to toss off zen-humor lyrics like a midwestern David Byrne ("Buy myself a POPsicle, take 'er to the DIS-co BAY-beh!").
Then came "Harvest Moon", showcasing Perry's and Warner's harmonies meshing behind Jason's great take on the Jerry Lee/Gram Parsons' "rockin' with the devil when you know what's best for y'self" dilemma.
And then that same theme of sin-Vs.-redemption all blew up in your face, with the devastating, pipe-blowing catharsis that is "Both Sides of the Line", a manic, zero-to-ninety shift back and forth in dynamics that ended the record.
Then the unthinkable happened. A genuine big-ass label, EMI-America, bought Fervor and re-released it with an extra cut, the band's cover of Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet Marie", which became a fairly successful MTV video. They took the "Nashville" out of their name, becoming EMI Recording Artists, Jason and the Scorchers.
The New York Times named Fervor the EP of the year because it was. They got national magazine articles you wouldn't expect, like People. Critics talked about "country punk" and suddenly several other bands were doing it, too.
Then Jason's London boast came true, as they played there and it was so jammed that Bill Wyman couldn't get in. A British journalist called them one of the top five live rock and roll bands of all time, because they were. They were gone for almost a year, rupturing the world, leaving those first-show memories everywhere.
Along with R.E.M. out of Athens, Jason and the Scorchers rolled back the notion of what a southern band could be, or that all rock stars had to be unapproachable icons that appeared to us all in great barns and then sped away before their humanity was revealed.
The Scorchers, by their very up-close and accessible natures, made it all look like it was a plausible to be in a rock and roll band and make it big. Before long, other bands were coming out of town with record deals and starting doggedly to tour in little vans to little dive clubs all over the south. The Scorchers changed everything.
Lost & Found premiered in January, 1985 and made a genuine splash, the Scorchers market having been primed by worldwide gigging. The album came with a few new major-label caveats, perhaps, being less anarchic than its predecessors, more palatable-sounding, more big-budget; but it still rocked like hell.
Lost & Found included a re-worked "Broken Whiskey Glass", Perry's "White Lies" (their second video), "Shop it Around" and their pummeling of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway" (soon to be a semi-obligatory show-opener). They hit the road again before the pressed copies had cooled off.
They ruptured the world all over again, and then, in September of '85, they returned to that Cat's records parking lot. Lost & Found had sold over two hundred thousand copies. The whole world knew who they were now.
KDF carried it live that night as they hit the stage with "Lost Highway" and the crammed parking lot erupted. Jason climbed up that billboard again and hung an American flag while the crowd went bats. The Scorchers were up there on-stage, beautifully murderous.
We'd all heard things by this point. They weren't getting along offstage, we heard. The guy who signed them to EMI had gotten fired and the rest of the company wanted them to drop the country licks and be Whitesnake or something like that. Jason was drinking milk and reading his bible in his own motel room while Warner, Jeff and Perry were taking to pop stardom like ducks to water in all sorts of licentious ways in their own rooms.
We heard the rumors of expensive tour buses and elaborate crews and more going out than was coming in. We heard rumors of track marks and white lines. But that all had to be bullshit. They were JASON AND THE SCORCHERS.
They were unstoppable. It was written in the stars for them to be huge. They were bigger than money troubles, bigger than drugs, bigger than everything. Nothing could stop them now. Surely. Surely.
Still Standing was released in October of '86. Produced by Tom Werman, it had a denser sound, with lots of guitar overdubs. There were some great moments on it, to be sure, including the hit "Golden Ball and Chain", "Crashin' Down", the beautiful "Ocean of Doubt" and "Take Me To Your Promised Land", but something was wrong.
EMI was winning because the big label always wins, and the Scorchers' sound was being substantially messed with, gearing them towards a mainstream rock sound. It was a good record, but there were things taken away that shouldn't have been.
The tempo on everything was a bit metronomic for the Scorchers, to the point that you had to wonder who was playing the drums, and it was whispered that not everybody played on everything; that there was a lot of lying around on motel room beds, counting tiles, wondering what city this was.
They kicked off a world tour with two shows at the Cannery. I saw the first one. Were they great? Yes, but for the Scorchers, merely "great" was a chin-bumping slalom five or six rungs down the ladder from where they'd been.
Perry sounded like he was trying to prove he was every bit the steady-tempoed musician as any other '80s click-track poseur. He apparently did not realize he was already more. Jeff looked like he was on another planet. His bass clanged to the floor at one point and he just looked at it like he didn't know what to do about it.
Warner was laughing to the crowd and then spinning around to shriek at the monitor man. And in the middle of it all was Jason, well-dressed and all grown up now, still living clean, still just wanting to shake country-rock to its roots, and he dealt with microphones failing right and left, the look on his face suggesting what was happening. There was trouble in River City.
They got it together on the road, though, and the stories came back, more rupturings, more awestruck first-show fan memories, I mean, it ain't brain surgery after all. They would hit the stage with fire in their eyes and Jerry Lee Lewis playing through the PA. Jason would grab the microphone stand and Warner would leap fifteen feet across the stage and you'd know again that no one came close to what they did on a rock and roll stage.
Warner routinely sheared off tuning keys in the sheer force of his manic stage presence. There was a night somewhere when Jason and Warner were so out of control that they slammed right into one another and knocked each other out. Perry and Jeff played on while Warner and Jason lay both unconscious on the floor, and more and more people came to know what an incendiary live show they were.
But that was on-stage. If only life could always be on-stage. On-stage was wonderful. Offstage was a lot of time to kill in a strange place; and one of the best ways to kill time on the road is to slowly start trying to kill yourself. You stop talking to the other guys. You stop doing a lot of things. You look out the bus window a lot. You wonder about your record deal, your wife, your bank account, and whether it has anything in it.
Still Standing sold about as well as Lost & Found but no better, and record companies always want better. The death watch began.
One night, Jeff was playing a side gig, doing Alice Cooper covers with a headful of pink hair and goopy thick eye shadow on, looking thin, sallow and waxen. The Scorchers bus waited outside Elliston Square for him to finish up playing so they could leave on the road, the rest of the band onboard, wondering when they were going to have to say something.
Eventually Jason, Perry and Warner were on one side and Jeff was on the other. They had to make very hard decisions and say the last thing they ever wanted to say to each other. Bye.
And then, EMI said the same thing.
It wasn't for three more years until A&M released Thunder and Fire in '89. This was a five-piece Scorchers, aided by new guitarist Andy York (currently with John Mellencamp) and bass player Ken Fox. It wasn't a bad band, and it's not bad record, packing a wallop on such nuggets as "When the Angels Cry", the Jason/Steve Earle composition "Bible and a Gun" and a cover of Phil Ochs' "My Kingdom For a Car", but it wasn't the Scorchers either. It also didn't sell.
The band went out to open for Bob Dylan and weren't gone long before all the years of vice and whimsy caught up with Perry. It was diabetes. Jason and Warner finished up some dates as an acoustic duo and then went home on separate planes. They didn't talk anymore. A&M dropped them. There was no farewell gig. There was no end-of-the-road party for the good times. There was no newspaper article, no announcement. No wake.
They were just...gone, shot out of the sky, like all the bands that don't wind up like the Rolling Stones. There was nothing to bury, nothing to mourn, nothing but memories of what had been such an intense rock and roll ride. It was over. It was all gone.
They all stumbled ahead with their lives like Barrabas the first day they let him out of the dungeon and the light was too bright to see. "What happened? Who am I?"
Jason made a solo country record called One Foot in the Honky Tonk for Capitol in '92. It was an attempt to fully ingratiate into that Music Row system he'd led a peasant insurrection against. It all went nowhere. Marriages folded. Pizza was slung. Grass was cut. Memories were dealt with.
Things happened over time to change who they were. One night, Jeff showed up to visit backstage after one of Jason's solo shows. The shock on Jason's face was palpable. Jeff Johnson was...sober! Not just for the night, either.
Warner, coincidentally, had also decided he had to kick everything. Everybody said yeah, right. He'd tried before. But this time stuck. It's been five sober years now so far for Warner E. Hodges. Perry followed suit as well.
The original four got back in friendly touch over time, all of them older and wiser and just happy to be around, really. Not great lovers of nightclubs anymore, they warily agreed on a short, two-week reunion in the summer of 1993. The old haunts near home once. For the good times. Once!
They didn't expect the reaction they got. Fans packed clubs at every stop and the phones rang off the hook with more offers. With all four present, healthy and sober, they had the old spark. The bookings kept coming in from club owners who were incredulous to learn that the original Scorchers were back together.
That two-week reunion tour became four-weeks, two months, four months. It all seemed to good to be true. And since it had been so long, they were leaving first-show calling cards again, and jaws were on the floor again. It couldn't be happening. But it was.
I saw them at Tewligan's in October of '93. I didn't expect the old fury. I figured, hell, they're old and fat now, but it'll be fun. They took my head off. Warner got me on-stage for "Route 66". I can die happy because of that. For five minutes, I was a Scorcher, and that old feeling was back in town.
In January of '95, they released a new record, A Blazing Grace, on Mammoth. It wasn't great, but it far from sucked. We finally had a recorded version of them raping John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" as well as the fiery "200 Proof Lovin'" and the elegant "Somewhere Within."
They played the Exit/In, their first Nashville appearance in seven years, and in twenty-degree temperatures, hundreds lined up outside the block five hours before they played. It'd been twelve years since the Alternative Jam, and to look at them you'd think it had been a week. You think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. I thought it had to be my mind playing tricks on me. Sure, they're back, but they can't be THIS back!
Then they played 328 Performance Hall in May. This was the show. They took my head off in Louisville, they reaffirmed everything at the Exit/In, but this show, on a stage that reached 120 degrees in a packed, very humid room, the Scorchers were the best I'd seen them since Cat's Parking Lot.
There they are. They're back; and they're every bit as vicious as they ever were. By this time, I'd seen Warner spin on one foot a million times and seen Jason sling his mike cord like a lasso two million times, and I'd heard all the songs over and over. And they made it NEW! I walked out feeling twenty years old again, just shaking.
Mammoth released Reckless Country Soul (with a wealth of extra cuts) in the spring of '96, making that classic available on CD for the first time.
And now Jason and the Scorchers grace the world with Clear Impetuous Morning, which is brand-new. I personally think it's the best record they've done since Fervor. I'm also biased as hell, so I'm glad others are saying the same thing. From the first tune, "Self-Sabotage", it slams like nothing since Fervor has. They've already completed the first video for "Victory Road".
I've got so many favorite tunes on this record; and I've got to be careful how I phrase this, because I co-wrote some of them. Check out "Everything Has a Cost", a duet in which guest Emmylou Harris drills a hole through the center of the tune. Or Jason's "I'm Sticking with You". (Yes, that's a tympani.)
Or "Cappuccino Rosie" and "Going Nowhere". (My two favorites. What WRITING!!!) Their slam-dunking of Gram Parsons' "Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man." You know what's a cool thing? Playing a brand-new Jason and the Scorchers record over and over, for the pleasure of it! Damn! They're back. They're really #$%^& back!
With such a record as this available Tuesday, October 1st, and with EMI re-releasing Fervor and Lost & Found as one CD, re-titling it Both Sides of the Line on their Acoustic Highway reissue series the very same day, it simply must be time for Jason and the Scorchers to tour the world yet again. You wanna get backstage this time? What kind of coffee you packing?
Is it just like the old days? Of course not! No one's eye's are rolling back in their heads, for one thing, except maybe in the crowd. Their equipment is way too well-maintained and reliable for them to sound exactly like they once did, and they're different people now, with different things they want to sing about, but it's just so amazing how they remain such potent evidence of who they are, and why, pound for pound, when all are present and off the injured list, they're still the greatest live rock and roll act in the history of the modern American South, not to mention one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time.
They invented stuff. It's their thing. Jason Ringenberg and Warner Hodges are all-time great live performers as well as complete individuals. Jeff Johnson and Perry Baggs are a classic rhythm section, adding in solid power now what one loses in youthful chaos along the way.
They are who they are. They paved the way for everyone from Son Volt to Social Distortion. They stand alongside the Del Lords, the True Believers, the Blasters, the Beat Farmers, the Georgia Satellites and all the other bands who've slogged through the last decade, and into this one, carrying the flags of twang and crunch together in one mighty hand.
They were the first at what they do, they remain the best, and, all these years later, I'm proud to be able to call them my friends. When they come to your town, and they will, you need to see them. They are Jason and the Scorchers, the finest rock and roll live act in the history of the modern American south. They stand alone. No one else even comes close.
© 1996-2002 – Tommy
Womack — All Rights Reserved
(Tommy Womack is the author of "Cheese Chronicles: the True Story of a Rock 'n' Roll Band You've Never Heard Of". He currently fronts his own band, Tommy Womack and the Geniuses, and is recording a solo album.)
