Still Scorching – Jason Ringenberg
Hugh Wilson meets his teenage hero
Jason Ringenberg is probably the most profound man in music. “Never go to the UK,” he opines, “without your wellies.”
And with that pithy sentence the alt. country pioneer and man of a million Stetsons pretty much nails it. His advice to any musician who might usually reside in the Nashville area (or anywhere, to be honest) is to be prepared for the weather. Whatever your over-optimistic British contacts may tell you, the UK in August will be like the Bible Belt in December. An umbrella is probably a good idea, too.
But despite the weather, Ringenberg loves it here. He’s been coming for the best part of 30 years, and speaks with the passion of a genuine anglophile.
“Any musician you speak to will tell you they love playing, you know, wherever they are,” he says, “But I genuinely love it here. No matter what you’re after from an audience, you get it. That can be a physical reaction during a rock show but then you come as a singer-songwriter and the audience gets the jokes, gets the nuances of language. It‘s great to have that. And then there’s that distant cousin thing too. We’re kinda related…”
Ringenberg is currently touring as both singer-songwriter Jason Ringenberg and as alter-ego kids’ entertainer Farmer Jason. Farmer Jason plays to families in the afternoon. Jason Ringenberg plays an adult show in the evening.
But mention of a “rock show” is a nod to a third incarnation of Jason Ringenberg, the singer and main songwriter for “cowpunk” rabble rousers Jason and the Scorchers. The Scorchers hit the UK in the mid 1980s as part of a short-lived invasion of indie Americana, along with bands like REM, The Replacements, the Meat Puppets and Green On Red. I’ll declare an interest. In 1985 and 86, I thought the Scorchers the coolest band on the planet.
If you don’t know them – and there’s every chance you don’t – the nearest British equivalent to Jason and the Scorchers is probably The Pogues. Not that the two sound alike but they share a formula that mixes traditional folk music with punk attitude and produces something entirely new. The Scorchers wrote gorgeous country tunes and played them very fast indeed. Their songs made you want to cry into a whiskey glass and jump into a bouncing crowd, pretty much at the same time.
But though their sound was unique, the band’s trajectory was not. At their creative height, the Scorchers produced two albums of brilliant, melodic, sometimes anarchic country rock (1984’s Fervor mini-album and 1985’s Lost and Found) and a live show with the energy of an early Clash gig (though none of the gobbing). They won plaudits, a hardcore fan base and the admiration of contemporaries. And of course, they didn’t make much cash.
“For a while there we thought we might go mainstream,” Ringenberg admits. “But looking back, there was no chance. Could you see a voice like mine on pop radio? No, it was never going to happen.”
And inevitably, after a couple of less well-received albums, the band drifted apart. He is, nevertheless, proud of what the Scorchers achieved, in a modest kind of way. “It was an explosive, happening event and you maybe only get that once in a lifetime. I have fond memories of that time and a few bad ones too, but yeah, I think some of what people said about us was true. We were a pretty good band.”
At best, they were a great band and their influence on what’s now called alt. country is, perhaps belatedly, being acknowledged. Last year, they were honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance by the Americana Music Association. One critic recently noted that, “the band and Ringenberg are the closest things Nashville has to rock ‘n’ roll legends.”
And their story is not quite over. Next year Jason and the Scorchers are releasing a new album, their first new material for the best part of two decades. It could be a triumph or it could be a disaster – the recorded equivalent of your middle-aged uncle pogo-ing to the Sex Pistols at a family wedding.
Ringenberg admits to a few nerves over the project. “But you know, it’s turned out much better than I expected it to,” he says. “I kinda wondered if guys around 50 could make a rocking record. But it’s good.”
Halcyon Times will be out in February and the band will be touring next spring. Anxiety about the quality of the album should be assuaged by the quality of Ringenberg’s solo material, recently celebrated with the release of the Best Tracks and Side Tracks compilation. It showed again what a good songwriter and fine balladeer Ringenberg is. Mix that maturity with a bit of the old Scorcher’s fire and Halcyon Times might just be a very fine record indeed.
In the meantime, he’ll continue touring his excellent solo material, and promoting the increasingly popular Farmer Jason. If the overall-wearing originator of songs like Punk Rock Skunk and He’s A Moose On The Loose started out as a way for a hard touring musician to make a little extra on the side (and I don’t know if it did), it’s now become something of a passion.
“I think Farmer Jason has legs,” says Ringenberg. “We’ve won a regional Emmy for it, and it’s one of the few areas of music where America is a little bit ahead of the UK. There’s a tradition at home of making really cool music for kids, and that doesn’t seem to exist here yet. I’m touring Farmer Jason all the time now and he’s getting a great response. This is what I’m focusing on at the moment.”
The kids probably don’t know how lucky they are (in my experience, they never do). But in February, the adults are borrowing Jason Ringenberg back.
