Radley Balko is a journalist who covers criminal justice and more for The Washington Post. He is author of the books The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist. With his ongoing series Nashville Byline, he’ll profile fascinating characters, businesses and other parts of Nashville.
It’s hard to imagine what must have gone through a 1980s audience’s collective mind upon seeing Jason and the Scorchers for the first time. There are video recordings of some of those shows. Guitarist Warner Hodges was typically dressed as if he were filling in for Black Sabbath. Bassist Jeff Johnson looked decked out for a gig with The Buggles. Drummer Perry Baggs looked as if he’d just subbed in for a Sex Pistols show.
And then there was frontman Jason Ringenberg. Clean-cut and skinny with trimmed sideburns, he was charming, with a farm-boy handsomeness, and would take the stage in a cowboy hat, bolo tie and a shiny shirt or jacket bedecked with Western flair.
In a video of a 1985 show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, N.J., the band begins with a kinetic blast of sound as Baggs and Johnson lay down a driving, Ramones-like rhythm. Hodges, dressed all in black, spins, kicks and and spits out meaty riffs from his guitar, all with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Ringenberg squawks, preens and flops around the stage, filling the mic with a tinny but charismatic voice that lands somewhere between Mick Jagger, Joe Strummer and Brian Setzer.
Just a few bars in, you can almost hear those in the crowd turn to one another. Are they playing … Hank Williams?!
People who saw the Scorchers play at places like Cantrell’s or Exit/In in those days will still insist they’re Nashville’s best band who never made it big. Those frenetic ’80s shows built the band a loyal following, and their early albums won raves from far-from-Nashville publications including The Village Voice. But the band never had a breakout hit.
“We actually make more money from reunion shows than we ever made back then,” says Ringenberg. He’s speaking via phone from his farm west of Nashville in the unincorporated town of Bon Aqua. “I don’t think we ever made more than a hundred dollars a week.”
If you’re into city folklore, you’ll know the reason they never made it — the “Nashville Curse.” Ringenberg’s outfit was originally called Jason and the Nashville Scorchers. Upon the band’s first big record deal with EMI, the label’s marketing team persuaded the band to drop the “Nashville” so they wouldn’t be pigeonholed as a country act. Not only did the Scorchers never make it big, no rock band from Nashville would have a platinum album for more than two decades.
Ringenberg says he does regret the name change. “You know, that was something we regretted all the way through,” he says. “Looking back, you’re changing your name because the record companies suggested it. I mean, that’s ridiculous. I wish we hadn’t done it.”
But he offers a more practical reason why the band never broke through. “At the time, we thought we were going to be the next Rolling Stones. It just wasn’t the right time for us. The Georgia Satellites had ‘Keep Your Hands to Yourself’ a couple years after us, and then the rockabilly thing took off. So I sometimes think we just missed our window. But looking back, I also think we were just too odd and strange and different for that particular time and place.”
Ringenberg grew up on a farm in Illinois. He enrolled at Southern Illinois University to study history, but dropped out in 1981 to pursue his music career. After considering moves to London, New York and Los Angeles, he ultimately chose to relocate to Nashville.
“I was into Dylan at the time, who had recorded here,” he says. “And guys like Bobby Bare, Roy Orbison, John Prine. Nashville just seemed like the right fit.”
Despite the city’s pop-culture moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s — Dylan recording Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Nashville Skyline (1969) in town, the nationally broadcast Johnny Cash Show, the 1975 Robert Altman movie — Ringenberg found the city a little sleepy.
“The ’70s was a really exciting time here,” Ringenberg says. “But by the early ’80s it was dead, man. It was really dead. There were some sort of holdovers from the outlaw-country people, but there was almost no original rock ’n’ roll happening. It was so dead in that field. And that’s what I stepped into.”
Ringenberg formed the band a few months later. They quickly made a name for themselves in town by belting out fast-paced punk covers of popular country songs. “I was also really into first-wave punk back then,” he says. “And we were having some success with that.” The band put out its first EP in 1982, Reckless Country Soul, which earned them more acclaim as well as shows opening for R.E.M. It also got them the contract with EMI.
The band’s first big label release, an EP called Fervor, received critical acclaim. That was due in large part to their frenzied cover of Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” Ringenberg says he had to trick his band into playing it. “I was the only one in the band who really liked Dylan,” he says. “Warner didn’t like him at all. The other guys hadn’t really listened to him. I knew Warner’s guitar and Perry’s drums would be perfect for that melody. But I also knew they’d never play it if I told them it was a Dylan song. So I told them I wrote it. And it was instant. They just kicked right into it, and it blew up. I don’t even know when they figured out it wasn’t an original song.”
Ringenberg and Hodges were the band’s primary creative forces, each of them pushing the Scorchers in opposing directions. Hodges was an AC/DC fan, and moved the band toward an ’80s metal sound. Ringenberg nudged them toward cow punk and rockabilly. At their best — their covers of “Sweet Marie” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” and originals like “White Lies,” “Broken Whiskey Glass,” “Blanket of Sorrow” and “Hot Nights in Georgia” — the two brought out the best in each other, and created something truly unique for its time. They made punk with twang — and a touch of literacy. (A UPI article from 1985 notes that Hodges and Ringenberg were both news junkies, and often watched The MacNeil/Lehrer Report together while on the road.)
“There was an interesting competitive edge between me and Warner, you know, whose vision was going to be predominant,” Ringenberg says. “And it wasn’t a negative thing. It was just kind of who we were. We both had strong creative visions. And it worked well for us.”
The New York Times wrote in 1984 that Ringenberg’s lyrics offered “intelligent new twists on time-honored country subjects,” and found the live set the band played at Irving Plaza “gleefully, explosively danceable.”
But Jason and the Scorchers’ continued critical success was never matched with commercial success. After a few more albums, the Scorchers disbanded in 1990 when Baggs was diagnosed with diabetes and could no longer tour. They toured again with him in the mid-’90s when his health improved, and then a couple more times without him as his health declined again.
Baggs died in 2012 due to complications from the disease. “So much of the focus was on me and Warner, but without Jeff and Perry, there would have never been a Jason and the Scorchers,” Ringenberg says. “Perry was possibly the most broadly talented musician in the band. He was a great singer. A great songwriter who could play guitar better than me. He had great arrangement ideas. He had this great spark and sparkle to whatever he played and whatever he did. We played with some really talented drummers since he got sick. But you can’t replace Perry Baggs.”
In 1997, Ringenberg married his second wife Suzy, at the time a manager at rock club 12th & Porter. The two eventually bought the farm in Bon Aqua where they live now. Five years later, Ringenberg created Farmer Jason — his second act.
“We had two young kids at the time, and they would listen to the same songs over and over again, all day,” Ringenberg says. “It was just fascinating to me, you know? How a 3-year-old can hear the same song all day. And I thought, ‘I’d like to do this! I’d like to have kids listen to me all day.’ ”
Ringenberg created the persona Farmer Jason and began writing songs for kids about animals, farming and nature. The act blew up. Within a few years, Ringenberg was playing 300 shows per year and producing an Emmy-winning children’s show on PBS.
“I was around 40 or so when Farmer Jason started. It was so cool to be that age, with my experience, doing a brand-new character. It wasn’t like doing a solo record or a new band. This was a brand-new thing. It was so fascinating to learn how to do that.”
Soon, the founder of the most underrated rock band ever to hail from Nashville was selling out theaters, including one on Broadway, singing about a moose on the run, a punk rock skunk, and a tractor that goes “chug, chug, chug.”
“Every single show I did for the first seven or eight years as Farmer Jason, I learned something,” Ringenberg says. “It was always such a cool experience to figure out how to entertain children. At a rock ’n’ roll show, you can take a minute to tune your guitar or check your set list. When you’re playing for kids, I go back to the little harmonica table and get a drink of water or tune my guitar, they’re just going to walk away! They’ll immediately forget why they’re there and just quit. So I learned that you have to be on every single second when you’re in front of kids. Every second!”
Ringenberg does fewer shows as Farmer Jason these days. He had drifted from music altogether until, out of the blue, he was offered an artist-in-residence position with the Sequoia National Forest just a few years ago. Ringenberg stayed in a cabin with no electricity or running water, hiked and produced Stand Tall, his most recent album.
Today the Nashville Curse is long gone. Franklin natives Paramore went platinum more than a decade ago, and artists including Jack White, Jason Isbell, Kings of Leon and The Black Keys set up shop here many years ago. Rockabilly, cow punk and alt-country are far from fringe, and many of the artists dominant in those genres claim the Scorchers as an influence. In 2008, the band was presented with a Lifetime Achievement in Performance Award by the Americana Music Association. And the group is recognized in a recent exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame called Guitars, Cadillacs: Country's New Wave.
Not quite The Rolling Stones — but not a bad legacy for a farm kid from Illinois.
*Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly noted that the Scorchers had been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
