The year is 1982, on the Sunday before Labor Day; the place is Cat's Records, on West End Avenue in Nashville. A thousand people have packed the store's parking lot to see Jason & the Scorchers, who in the past year have taken the city by storm with their shotgun marriage of country music and punk rock.
"We had flatbed trucks pulled up in the parking lot," remembered Steve West, who promoted the Cat's show and now runs Nashville's 328 Performance Hall and Go West Presents. "We didn't have backdrops or anything -- just a P.A." The lack of pageantry only heightened the immediacy between audience and performer, emphasizing the anything-could-happen mood that marked Scorchers shows at the time. On this particular night, the crowd's excitement was at fever pitch; the band had just pulled back into town after a series of road dates promoting the release of their debut EP, Reckless Country Soul.
"During the first song," West recalled, "Jason slammed the microphone into his mouth and broke his tooth off."
Adrenaline must have masked singer Jason Ringenberg's pain, because he performed like a man possessed, even by his own maniacal standards. During one of guitarist Warner Hodges' lead breaks on "White Lies", Ringenberg shot up the store's signpole, an American flag in tow, like an explorer who had just discovered some uncharted frontier.
Jason & the Scorchers' historical moment had come and gone long before "Americana" became a radio format and No Depression became a magazine, but the Nashville-based rockers have as much claim to being founders of today's alternative-country movement as any group to emerge in punk's wake. No other band boasts the Scorchers' country pedigree, none rocks as savagely, and none has a recorded legacy that can touch the mid-'80s triptych of Restless Country Soul, Fervor and Lost and Found.
The Scorchers' influence on Uncle Tupelo, the Bottle Rockets and countless others is undeniable. It may be commonplace now for roots-rockers to perform cover versions of classic honky-tonk songs, but back when the Scorchers were running Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and Eddy Arnold through their punk blender, it just wasn't done -- it might even get you hurt or run out of town.
"Literally, you could go into certain places and do what we were doin' with country music -- forging it, melding it, slamming it together with punk rock and rock 'n' roll -- and get beat up. And we almost did several times," said Ringenberg, recalling the band's early '80s heyday during an interview in the back room of Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville, two weeks before the early October release of the Scorchers' inspired new album, Clear Impetuous Morning (Mammoth/Atlantic).
Whereas A Blazing Grace, the Scorchers' 1995 reunion album, proved that the band could still rock and still had something to say, their new record finds them kicking their way back to the top of the cowpunk -- or, in today's parlance, alternative-country -- heap. Raging with affirmation and insight, and playing with relentless mid-'80s intensity, Clear Impetuous Morning is the Scorchers taking command of the musical subgenre they all but invented. While the new album finally may earn them the recognition they're due, Ringenberg isn't exaggerating about the hostile receptions the Scorchers often encountered back when they were taking early-'80s Nashville by storm. At the time, many believed the Scorchers were poking fun at country music. Little did they know that the foursome were devoted to the sounds they grew up listening to on the Grand Ole Opry. Nor were they aware that guitarist Hodges' parents played with Johnny Cash, or that drummer Perry Baggs' father sang old-timey gospel.
Others, like the Vanderbilt coeds who almost booed the Scorchers offstage when they opened for the Talking Heads in 1982, simply missed the point. But nothing, not even the prospect of getting their asses kicked, could stop Ringenberg, Baggs, Hodges and bassist Jeff Johnson from unleashing the glorious noise they heard banging around inside their heads.
"Mixing country and punk seemed a natural thing to do," Ringenberg said. "Warner, Jeff and Perry -- they knew country music and played it a lot. But they were also fierce, ferocious rock 'n' rollers. Then here comes this kid off an Illinois hog farm that's never even been south of the Mason-Dixon Line who still's got hog poop on his shoes," he continued. "You put all that together and it was just an outrageous chemistry."
Early live dates at Nashville punk clubs such as Cantrell's, Phrank 'n' Stein's and the Cannery were more like explosive chemical reactions. "Those shows were totally spontaneous," Ringenberg said. "The rock community in Nashville was just discovering itself and the Scorchers were discovering what we were. Some of those shows were really bad and some of them were transcendent, brilliant." The Cat's Records show in '82 certainly fell into the transcendent category, as did a second performance there in 1985, which drew 5,000 fans and brought traffic to a halt on the city's major East-West corridor.
Ringenberg's electrifying Jerry Lee Lewis-meets-Iggy Pop stage attack was what attracted Johnson and Hodges -- and, later, Baggs -- to the singer in the first place. Johnson was the first member of what eventually became the Scorchers' classic lineup to see the edition of the band Ringenberg assembled upon arriving in Music City during the summer of 1981. The fledgling Scorchers were sharing a bill at Cantrell's with then-regionally acclaimed indie-rockers R.E.M. Immediately after the show, Johnson called Hodges and invited him to Ringenberg's next gig. This time, it was a slot opening for rockabilly legend Carl Perkins.
"I went to the Carl Perkins show and thought, 'God Almighty, this guy is nuts,' remembered Hodges, referring to Ringenberg's incendiary performance. "He spent the entire night in the crowd with this long guitar cord. Everybody else up onstage was scared to death. But Jason, man, he was the show."
It wasn't long before Hodges and Johnson had replaced the Scorchers' original guitar and bass players. Several weeks later, Baggs took command of the drum kit, and the classic -- and still current -- edition of Jason & the Nashville Scorchers was born.
"We went real fast in those days," admitted Ringenberg. "In a couple of months we were gettin' songs together and fillin' rooms, and we said, 'We need to get a record out.'" Hodges adds: "It was like you had to have a record to play."
Former bassist turned manager Jack Emerson was very insistent, explained Ringenberg. "Jack said, 'We gotta get a record out to prove that you guys are the founding fathers of modern country. And we gotta get it out now. We gotta get it out before the first of the year so that we have a 1981 date on the record.'"
The EP, Reckless Country Soul, didn't hit stores until the second week of 1982, but it immediately sent shock waves through the Nashville rock underground. Originally released on the Praxis label, it featured gonzo covers of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers classics and an early version of "Broken Whiskey Glass," a song the Scorchers later recut for Lost and Found, their first and finest full-length album. The band also tore apart the Willie Nelson-penned Faron Young hit "Hello Walls", though the recording didn't see the light of day until Mammoth reissued the EP, along with outtakes from the Fervor sessions, earlier this year.
"We cut Reckless Country Soul in four hours in somebody's living room live to four-track," Ringenberg recalls. "We had to hurry because Perry had to go to work at the bowling alley that night. It was five songs, four hours, just raisin' hell." If the record didn't quite live up to Emerson's claim that the Scorchers had founded modern country music, definitive proof came with the release of Fervor and Lost and Found, two of the finest marriages of id-driven punk and hard-core country music ever recorded.
"They called themselves Scorchers for good reason: They kicked butt," commented country music historian Robert K. Oermann, who was the senior music writer for The Tennessean, Nashville's morning newspaper, at the time the Scorchers burst onto the local scene. Oermann also penned a USA Today story that helped break the band to the rest of the nation.
"Their shows were so physical," said Oermann. "Jason acted like a guy who had been attacked with a cattle prod. And I still maintain that Warner Hodges was one of the most charismatic lead guitarists of his generation. The two were like twin poles of electrical energy. You could almost see the bolt of lightning that connected them. The Scorchers never sold more than a million records, but nobody who saw them will ever forget it."
"If Hank Williams were alive today," observed Scorchers co-manager Andy McLenon back in 1984, "he would be playing with the same intensity as Jason & the Scorchers, because for the pre-rock era, Hank Williams' music was equally as intense and on-the-edge."
Ringenberg, Johnson, Hodges and Baggs were as electrifying as they were outrageous. Looking back now -- and having experienced the visceral thrill of those early '80s shows -- there's no denying that the Scorchers, the first modern rock band out of Nashville to sign with a major label, galvanized a formative moment in the city's storied musical history.
But if in 1985 the Scorchers were poised to conquer the world, by decade's end the bottom had dropped out. Excess, personal problems, the fickle winds of the music business -- all contributed to a fall that was as dramatic as the band's rise was meteoric. It started with Capitol's ineffective marketing of 1986's Still Standing just as the record's first single, "Golden Ball and Chain", was getting some airplay. Soon Johnson left the group; by the time the band's lukewarm Thunder and Fire surfaced in '89, the Scorchers were all but finished.
"We worked on Thunder and Fire for two years," said Hodges. "Jason wrote like 70 songs and we demoed and demoed and demoed -- just busted our butts putting the band back together [after Johnson's departure]. I didn't think it was that bad a record. Maybe not quite the direction we should have gone, but we gave the record company the record that they quote/unquote wanted. We put a lot of time and effort into it and then it just fell flat on its face. And then Perry got sick with diabetes and we said, 'The hell with it'.
"The Scorchers didn't break up, we fell apart," continued Hodges, who, after the split, moved to New York and then California, working in the video business. "I ran," he admitted. "I guess I hid and ran. I didn't know how we could try any harder and be any less successful. I seriously didn't know how we could put any more effort into it for so little return. We just couldn't play the game anymore."
"If you talked to each of us independently," said Ringenberg, "I think all four members of the band would tell you it wasn't a good time in anybody's life. I did a solo record for Capitol/Nashville, a watered-down Scorchers kind of record, and went through a bad divorce. It just wasn't a good time at all."
In 1992, EMI reissued Fervor and Lost and Found, along with a couple of B-sides and live recordings from the mid-'80s, under the title Essential Jason & the Scorchers, Volume 1: Are You Ready for the Country. Johnson was so far out of the Scorchers' loop that the label didn't bother to send him an advance copy; he had to go out and buy the record at Tower. Amazed at how vital the band's early music still sounded, he pushed for a Scorchers reunion. His former bandmates weren't interested at first, but Johnson didn't take no for an answer, and it wasn't long before they were practicing, putting a tour together and talking about making a record.
The Scorchers' 1995 comeback album, A Blazing Grace (Mammoth), symbolized their spiritual rebirth. It didn't break new ground musically or lyrically, but it rocked harder than either Thunder and Fire or One Foot in the Honky Tonk, Ringenberg's 1992 solo effort for Capitol. "What A Blazing Grace did for us, way beyond what it may have sold, was make people aware of the band again," Ringenberg said. "It also got us back together as a band." Indeed, enthusiasm for the record -- and for the Scorchers' reunion in general -- got the group's members looking again toward the future.
Today Ringenberg and Hodges, both nearing 40, exude an emotional and spiritual maturity that's almost disarming, coming from two of post-punk's wildest showmen. But both agree it is this newfound perspective on life that makes Clear Impetuous Morning -- recorded this past spring at Bakos Amp Works in Atlanta -- such an uplifting record.
"Clear Impetuous Morning was just a great labor of love," Ringenberg said. "We never talked about sales. We never talked about what we were gonna do with it until it was done. After it was done, we said, 'Okay, let's get this thing out there.' But while we were making it, we did it just for the pure joy of making it.
"That's not to say every song doesn't have its share of pain, heartache and suffering in it," he continued. "But there's an element of joy and exuberance behind every song and every lick on there. A Blazing Grace was an answer to the past. Clear Impetuous Morning is definitely charging into the future with very few inhibitions. It's remarkable for what we've been through, personally and as a band."
Indeed, the delight with which Ringenberg sings the phrase "Oh what a rush" to kick off the album is enough to get anybody's heart racing. Co-producers Johnson and Hodges sustain that immediacy and sense of abandon throughout. The rhythm section is devastatingly tight, and Hodges' guitar work, which avoids what he calls "pyrotechnic, whammy-bar crap," is as muscular and imaginative as ever.
"I made a conscious effort to stay out of ground I've already covered," he said. "When Jeff and I were working on the guitar tracks, I said, 'If you hear something that you've heard 400 times before, just stop me.'" Songs such as "Uncertain Girl" and "Tomorrow Has Come Today" reveal that Hodges' playing has taken a melodic turn, at times reminiscent of Bob Mould's phrasing from the mid-'80s glory days of Husker Du. Elsewhere, he conjures the punked-up Chuck Berry aesthetic of kindred spirits Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders.
Ringenberg's singing and command of narrative are likewise undiminished. "Going Nowhere" and "Cappuccino Rosie", both co-written with Nashvillian Tommy Womack, exhibit as much humanity, humor and pathos as early Scorchers classics such as "Still Tied" and "Broken Whiskey Glass". But these new songs don't merely evoke timeless verities about longing and loss, they flesh out their themes with characters and stories listeners can connect with. Nowadays, Ringenberg sings less of sin than salvation: The resiliency and hope that can be heard on "Self-Sabotage" and "Everything Has A Cost" -- the latter a gorgeous duet with Emmylou Harris that seems a lock for Americana programmers' playlists -- are no doubt born of the band's own struggle and rebirth.
But the moral and musical high point of Clear Impetuous Morning is a demolition of "Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man", the Gram Parsons/Roger McGuinn sendup of Ralph Emory, the Nashville deejay-cum-veejay who in the late '60s dismissed the Byrds' visionary synthesis of country music and rock 'n' roll.
"We started playing 'Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man' during the A Blazing Grace tour," said Ringenberg. "We try to work up at least one or two covers for every tour. The song worked really well live. We had a lot of fun with it. Conceptually, it's a crime that the Scorchers never did a Gram Parsons song. But this one seemed like the perfect choice. We're from Nashville and we've been slammed by Ralph, you know, the whole nine yards.
"We sing it with a lot of pride," Ringenberg continued. "Because we feel like you have to have a lot of confidence in yourself to sing 'Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man' and to remake it. We're proud of the fact that people are saying that we've done the song justice."
The Parsons connection also rings true from a legacy standpoint: From the rock side of the equation, only Parsons can match the Scorchers' influence on today's alt-country movement. The Scorchers may have enjoyed plenty of acclaim during the mid-'80s, but if the Americana chart had been around back then, they likely would have reached a wider audience.
"I have no bitterness or darts to throw," said Ringenberg, referring to the lack of convergence between the Scorchers' heyday and the current alternative-country boom. "I'm kinda proud that people point to us as one of the pioneers. It's validation, and that makes us feel good."
Ringenberg has obviously kept up with the current crop of country rockers, some of whom probably formed bands in part because of the Scorchers' influence. "There are some awfully good people out there," he said, singling out Wayne Hancock, the Backsliders and Uncle Tupelo offshoots Son Volt, Wilco and Courtesy Move, among others. "Any time you have a form of music or movement, there are good bands and bad bands, people copying and people leading the charge creatively. But I've gotta hand it to folks who are trying to make something viable out of this, because it's hard for artists who are doing this kind of thing because you can't get on country radio and it's hard to get on rock radio. So I think it's a good thing.
"One thing I do resent," he added, "is how a lot of people in the alternative-country world still slam Nashville. That really bothers me because there's a lot of great music here. I mean, Hank Sr. came out of Nashville. Sure, there's been a lot of bad stuff. But there's also been a lot of brilliant, brilliant music that's come out of this town. Even lately, there have been some great things. Steve Earle came out of Nashville, you know. It always bothers me when people take this anti-Nashville stance and say that everything out of Nashville is corporate schlock. That's not the case at all. This is a great, great town for making music. The Scorchers are proud to be from here.
"We're from the other side of the tracks, no doubt -- but those are beautiful tracks."
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