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.
