Warner Hodges Interview - Part Two
October 19, 2002, Nashville, Tennessee
............ continued from pg. 5 ............

And I had a question that’s kind of started bugging me just recently. Who was the woman on the cover of “Clear Impetuous Morning?”

Warner: I don’t know. Just someone we kind of hired, it was a model type of woman. We wanted Emmylou Harris, but she wasn’t going to do it.
The photos and video things, oh, God. That’s like root canal. I absolutely despise photo shoots. The only thing worse is a video shoot. It lasts longer. I worked in videos for a couple of years when I was in LA. There’s nothing that sucks worse than a video. I’m not trying to get down. I don’t like our album covers, I hate video shoots, I don’t like any of our videos. I don’t know what to tell you.
I was going to try very hard to stay away from the negative, but there’s nothing enjoyable about them. They’re fake, they’re no fun. Photo shoots are generally band argument time, so everybody looks even more miserable than they feel. I don’t enjoy doing them. I hate ‘em.
James: Well, Jeff has another question about you and Jeff Johnson, and your – you and Jeff helped with the production of the first couple of albums.
Warner: Yeah.
James: And then, before you had outside producers, and then you co-produced “Clear Impetuous Morning.” Jeff’s question is: “Was yours and Jeff’s sonic vision of the band very similar? Did you ever diverge on any points? Were songs simply dealt out, or was it more democratic discussion?”
Warner: Well, there’s a weird way to look at the Scorchers. To me – you can’t do it this way, but it should have gone “Reckless Country Soul,” “Fervor,” Lost and Found,” “Clear Impetuous Morning.” Now, there’s a bunch of time in between there. But “Clear Impetuous Morning” was the last time – we had fourteen great songs – the last time we had all that much good material all in one place was “Lost and Found.”
And Jeff and I fought a little bit during “Clear Impetuous Morning,” but not much. Usually over guitar sounds, guitar tones. Jeff was really a guitar player playing bass. When I met Jeff, I sang in the band that he played lead guitar in. And I think our sonic vision of the band was pretty close. Mine and Jason’s sonic vision of the band differed drastically. But Jeff and mine’s was probably pretty close to the same thing. I probably overplayed a little bit more than Jeff would have liked me to. Jeff was always interested in “What are you not playing?” Not “What are you playing,” but “Where the hell are your rests? Why do you have to play every note you know now?” Which is a good thing, from a production standpoint.
We had one spat where he left the studio and didn’t come back for a couple of days, but in general, yeah. Jeff and I saw eye-to-eye musically pretty well. I love Jeff. I miss Jeff. From that standpoint – creating the music.
James: He was a real important asset to the band, because he helped produce bands, too, in the eighties.
Warner: One of the most important aspects of the band.
Chris: Okay, this is from Jack Kolmansberger of Newtown Square, PA: “What is the funniest story you have from a Scorchers gig?”
Warner: There’s a bunch of funny ones. (laughter.) I don’t know. The Jason dress thing is a good one. There’s a debatable thing about a Kansas City show with a German shepherd dog on it, that Jason swears is a different show, but I don’t remember it. But we ended up with a German shepherd on stage with us, at some point. I think it’s Kansas City, but there might have been a few beers involved, and it might have been somewhere else. But this poor dog got on stage and just went apes**t, because he couldn’t find a quiet spot on stage, and it was kind of funny. And we had a pretty big crowd – I remember it as being the Opera House in Kansas City. But Jason’s got it in a completely different town, and I could be wrong.
James: Sean Tierney did an interview – it’s up on the website – he did it in 1993, and he asked Perry the same question. Perry said there was a soundcheck one time, where you slipped on a banana peel, and just went totally off the stage.
Warner: At Vanderbilt, yeah.
James: He said it’s the funniest thing he ever –
Warner: At Vanderbilt, yeah. I actually did that during a show at Vanderbilt.
James: Oh, was that not soundcheck? It was during the show?
Warner: Yeah. Come running out there, all fired up, hit a banana on stage. And the next thing I know, my ass was in the middle of the audience. ‘Oh, great.’ Yeah.
James: Well, that interview that Sean did is so funny. There’s the story of the brakes going out in San Francisco, when Jason was asleep.
Warner: Oh, yeah. The tour bus. Yeah.
James: It’s kind of like the Status Quo story. It almost seems like the more horrendous it was at the time, the funnier it is now.
Warner: Oh, the thing that was really wild about it – Jeff had just said, “Goddamn, if we lost our brakes on this hill.” And it was like, ‘Boom.’ This bus driver – I don’t think we lost our brakes. I think he had it out of gear and couldn’t get it back down in gear.
And we came down that hill – rush hour traffic, top of California Street, doing this, running red lights. He hit fifteen, twenty cars. I mean, it was like something out of a f**kin’ Schwarzenegger movie. He was sideswiping parked cars, and s**t, trying to slow that bus down. And when he got it stopped, that bus was tore to hell, there was just a melee behind us all the way up the hill. And he’d hit a car leaving LA that morning, getting on the interstate. Should have been sign number one. Sideswiped a car getting on the damned interstate as we were leaving LA.
But that was surreal. And it was actually, when it was all said and done, nobody got hurt. I don’t know how that happened, because by the bottom of the hill, he was going forty, fifty miles an hour, and it was five o’clock, downtown, San Francisco. It was something out of a movie.
That one wasn’t really funny to me, though. It was just amazing that God willed it that nobody got hurt, because somebody could have really got hurt bad.
James: Perry also has the story, in that interview, of the ‘beetle bug’ that stung him in the van, he said.
Warner: Oh, this is the East Coast –
James: The East Coast beetle bug.
Warner: Yes, yes. And the mayonnaise, and the whole deal? Is that the one where we stopped at the cemetery?
James: Yeah. (laughter.)
Warner: Perry was always gullible for that kind of s**t. But that’s more a road story. Perry was always gullible for that kind of stuff. We had him putting mayonnaise in his hair for a while, ‘cause it was going to help turn the color black, and he did it for a while. Or, no – it was going to help it grow faster. Mayonnaise in your hair helps your hair grow faster. And he’d be riding down the road with a jar of mayonnaise in his hair, with us just laughing our asses off. God only knows. Had a lot to do with those kind of things. That’s called sheer boredom, and screwing with people. (chuckles.)
Chris: Okay, we have a lot of these following the same line. Well, I guess I can ask this one. This is a guy from Scotland [Colin Jamieson of Ayr, Scotland] who says, “The most important question of all is why oh why did the Scorchers never tour Scotland?”
Warner: Colin.
Chris: Yeah.
Warner: That’s probably the biggest stupid mistake we ever made. Mammoth actually tried to get us to do – we could just never get up there in the eighties. And Mammoth tried to get us to do this 23-city tour of the United Kingdom, but we were going to lose twenty grand doing it, or whatever. And Jeff put it to them: it was going to have to be some type of tour-supported thing to make it fly. And Jeff told them, well, we’ll work for free, but the tour support can’t be recouperable. We’ll do the work for free, we just don’t get paid. And when they found out that we weren’t going to basically borrow the money from them to do it, that we’d eventually pay back, then the tour just magically went away.
And we probably should have done that one. But we didn’t, and that’s the way it goes. I’d love to get up there. I’m sorry, Colin.
Chris: I wanted to ask this one, which is from Wayne: “Your favorite country to play in?” Along those lines.
Warner: Oh, God…Wow. (pause.) There’s a lot of ways to answer that. Fan-wise or tourist-wise. (chuckles.) (To Deborah) What do you think, honey?
Deborah: You know what my favorite place is.
Warner: What, Norway?
Deborah: Yes.
Warner: I like Norway. That’s one of ‘em. Scandinavia. I can’t take it down to a country. Scandinavia.
Chris: Well, I’d be interested in this one, which is from Wayne. “What do you remember as your favorite Scorchers show?”
Warner: I don’t. I mean, I can’t. There’s not one that’s like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the greatest thing in the world.’ I don’t mean that badly. There’s a whole bunch of favorite shows. But I don’t have one that’s like, well, ‘That’s the greatest show we ever did.’
The biggest one, I guess, because this was cool: it was the Roskilde festival we played that Link Wray played with us. It was the first time we ever played – it was another of those hundred thousand people – we haven’t done a lot of those in our career. But, that day, the gods just lined up, or whatever, with us. And you could watch the crowd – it was like we painted the crowd. It started out at the front, and as the band went, the crowd got – because the crowd went as far as you could see – as far as, it was daytime, but it went as far as you could see people. And by the end of the show, we had a hundred thousand people screaming ‘Yee-hi!’ and all that s**t.
And normally, in those type of situations, that just doesn’t happen for the band. There’s three, four thousand people that want to hear the band, and seventy thousand people who’d be real happy when we shut the f**k up. So, that was kind of – I remember that as being this – on-stage, that’s the only analogy – it was like we painted the crowd. I watched it get bigger and bigger and bigger, and more into it.
But there’s a whole bunch of good – hell, the last one was a lot of fun. And it was a weird gig. A lot of ‘em.

This is part two of three installments of the 2002 Warner Hodges Interview -- Keep posted at the J.A.T.S. home page for an announcement of part three of this interview to come soon!

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